Fried attended Townsend Harris High School and then the City College of New York.
While a student at CCNY, Fried and his friend Richard F. Shepard formed the Mundial Upheaval Society, which later flourished at Columbia University.
Fried served in the U.S. Army during World War II,[2] after one year of graduate work in anthropology at Columbia.
In the Army, he was sent to Harvard to learn Chinese and he went on to specialize in the anthropology of China, earning his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1951.
His cohort included Elman Service, Eric Wolf, Sidney Mintz and Stanley Diamond.