Bernard Harper Friedman (July 27, 1926 – January 4, 2011), better known by his initials, "B. H.," or known as Bob to his friends[1] was an American author and art critic who wrote biographies of Jackson Pollock and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a number of novels that combined his experiences in the worlds of art and business, and an autobiographical account of his use of psychedelic drugs with Timothy Leary.
[1] After publishing his first novel — Circles (1962), a story based on life in the art world in New York City and The Hamptons — he left the real estate business to focus on his writing.
He wrote the introduction to the exhibition of Lee Krasner in 1958 at the Martha Jackson Gallery exhibition: "In looking at these paintings (the earth series), listening to them, feeling them, I know that this work - Lee Krasner's most mature and personal, as well as most joyous and positive, to date - was done entirely in the last year and a half, a period of profound sorrow for the artist.
"[2] Jackson Pollock: Energy Made Visible (1972) is considered to be the first biography of the artist; reviewing it for The New York Times, Hilton Kramer called it "a book that everyone interested in the social history of modern art will want to read.
"[1][3] Frustrated by perceived snubs from the major book-publishing firms, Friedman joined other authors, such as Mark Jay Mirsky and Ronald Sukenick, to form the Fiction Collective in 1974, a not-for-profit publishing group whose goals were to "make serious novels and story collections available in simultaneous hard and quality paper editions" and to "keep them in print permanently.