Frank Burt Freidel Jr. (May 22, 1916 – January 25, 1993)[1][2] was an American historian, the first major biographer of former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and one of the first scholars to work on his papers stored in the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York.

[3] He was raised in Plattsburgh, New York and parts of Southern California as his father struggled to support the family during the Great Depression.

His contemporaries at Wisconsin included Richard N. Current and T. Harry Williams, who later collectively authored with Freidel a U.S. history textbook, A History of the United States, dedicated to Hesseltine.

Freidel's magnum opus was his 5-volume biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: "The Apprenticeship" (1952), "The Ordeal" (1954), "The Triumph" (1956), "F.D.R.

After publishing a one-volume condensed biography Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny in 1990, Freidel died in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1993 of pneumonia and cancer while living in Belmont, Massachusetts, leaving the sixth volume unfinished.