New Left Review 75, May-June 2012

perry anderson

RONALD FRASER

1930–2012

Just embarking on a new design and reconception of nlr, in early 1964 I got a letter out of the blue, saying the writer was a friend of André Gorz, and offering help in the production of the journal if it was needed. No further introduction was necessary. We needed every help we could get, and the unknown Ronald Fraser was immediately made unpaid business manager, and in short order became a central member of the editorial team. It was the most unpredictable, and perhaps most decisive, piece of luck the fledging magazine—which had a number of improbable strokes of good fortune—ever received. The newcomer stood apart from the rest of the group bringing it out, in two critical ways. He was older by a decade than the average age of the editorial committee: not in his early twenties, but early thirties, already married with a son; and he had bypassed university, out of which the rest of us had just emerged, for work as a reporter, at Reuters and later the San Francisco Chronicle. These were marked differences, accentuated by the triumphalist jeunisme of the time.

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