FRADY, Marshall (Bolton) 1940-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born January 11, 1940, in Augusta, GA; died of cancer March 9, 2004, in Greenville, SC. Journalist and author. Frady was a print and television journalist who was known for his political biographies and his commentaries on the social and political evolution of the American South. An alumnus of Furman University, where he earned a B.A. in 1963, he also graduated from the University of Iowa in 1966. Frady began his journalism career at the Atlanta and Los Angeles bureaus of Newsweek magazine. This was followed by a year with the Saturday Evening Post in Atlanta and two years with Harper's. After writing for Life in the early 1970s, Frady moved on to television, working as a writer, correspondent, and host of the program Closeup for the American Broadcasting Corporation. His work on the documentary "Soldiers of the Twilight" for Closeup earned him an Emmy Award in 1982. He would later also earn awards for the documentaries "To Save Our Schools" (1984) and "The Supreme Court of the United States" (1985). Moving on to ABC's Nightline, Frady was a correspondent for that program beginning in 1986, and during the 1990s also worked on television documentaries for public television. Although he would write other biographies, such as Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (1979) and Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (1996), Frady was often best remembered for his first biography, Wallace (1968; revised edition, 1976), the story of Alabama governor and conservative 1968 presidential candidate George Wallace. Originally, Frady had planned to write a southern novel featuring politics, but his time with the governor and those working for him led him to write a nonfiction work that was condemned by Wallace and his supporters as inaccurate and praised by critics as quality journalism; the book was later adapted in 1997 as the miniseries George Wallace. Critics also highly lauded Frady's Southerners: A Journalist's Odyssey (1980), which was nominated for a Pulitzer in 1981. At the time of his death, Frady was working on a biography of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and he had just accepted a position as a lecturer in political science and nonfiction writing and as writer in residence at Furman University.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 10, 2004, Section 3, p. 12.

New York Times, March 11, 2004, p. A27.

Washington Post, March 11, 2004, p. B6.