Born in North London on 18 July 1928, and educated at a provincial grammar school, John Fraser entered Balliol College, Oxford, in 1948 as an Exhibitioner (junior scholar)and read English.
[1] In 1953 he moved to the States, taking the Barzun-Trilling and doing a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, with a dissertation on George Sturt, rural labouring life, and the rhetoric of sociological presentation, plus a minor in Philosophy, including classes from Wilfred Sellars and Alan Donagan.
In 1961, he and the Minnesota artist Carol Hoorn Fraser moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he taught at Dalhousie University, retiring in 1993 as George Munro Professor of English.
A reviewer of his Violence in the Arts (1973) spoke of Fraser’s "extremely agile and incessantly active mind which illuminates almost every subject it touches.
"[2] Another called his magnum opus, America and the Patterns of Chivalry (1983), "a brilliant and utterly absorbing work" and said that "There are not many learned books which have the unputdownable quality of a thriller; this is one of them.