[1] Friedman's Totempole (1965) features an army love affair between its protagonist and a North Korean doctor war prisoner.
Some have identified the Stephen Wolfe persona in this novel as being the first instance of a main character who is both Jewish and gay in American fiction.
A 1945 graduate of the Horace Mann School, and in the same class as his lifelong friend Allard K. Lowenstein, Friedman earned his BFA from the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Friedman also was active off-Broadway as a writer and producer, collaborating with actor Howard Da Silva; author Ben Maddow; and playwright Arnold Perl.
Perl's play "Tevya and his Daughters" (1957) -- co-produced by Friedman and starring Mike Kellin as Sholem Aleichem's dairyman—was the inspiration for "Fiddler on the Roof (1964)."