Gordon Fraser

Gordon Fraser (1911–1981) was a British publisher and literary editor. He was educated at Cambridge. A student of F.R. Leavis, he founded, while still an undergraduate, The Minority Press which published chiefly essays of Leavis and works of other Cambridge students from 1930 to 1933. The role of Fraser and The Minority Press in British literary criticism has been described by Ian Duncan MacKillop He founded a greeting card company bearing his name, the Gordon Fraser Gallery, which was located on Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, London. He married Nancy Katharine Jones in 1936 and had two children. During the Second World War he served as an intelligence officer in north Africa and worked with the partisan underground in Yugoslavia. He was Head of Radio for UNESCO from 1948 to 1954. He resigned to return to the Gordon Fraser Gallery, and later founded two other publishing houses, The Fraser Press and Gordon Fraser that specialized in off-beat topics. Fraser was killed in an automobile accident in June 1981. He was a polyglot and knew both Marx and the Presbyterian Bible "par coeur".