David Friend '77
Name: David Friend
Home: New Rochelle, New York
Birth: Chicago
Education: Amherst (BA), summa cum laude
Why Amherst?
Two Chicago friends of my family's recommended that I consider Amherst when looking at schools. One of those two was Scott Turow, then a Harvard Law student, whom I had known while growing up because his mother was best friends with my aunt.
Most influential class and professor?
Armour Craig's British Literature class remains the most formative and memorable of my college career. Craig, class of '38, was a mentor of mine at Amherst, along with novelist Robert Stone, with whom I studied creative writing, and Cullen Murphy, my editor at the Amherst Student. The highlight of Craig's class was when he surprised me and, standing before a large lecture hall in Merrill, handed out to the whole class memographed copies of a term paper I had written with classmate Michael Mendelsohn. We had written an essay on paternity in James Joyce's Ulysses in the style of Finnegans Wake. The title of the paper was something like: A Paterniterating Discoursion and Compadreson of Bloom's Kinchship.
Awards and Prizes?
As a documentary producer, I received an Emmy and a Peabody for the CBS documentary "9/11." As a curator I was named Curator of the Year from the Lucie Awards for the exhibition, "Vanity Fair Portraits." As an editor, I received the Wilbur Award (for coverage of religious tolerance) and, the Olive Branch Award (for coverage of arms control), and World Hunger Year honors (for coverage of the Somali famine). As a web editor, I received the Online Journalism Award for best interactive feature, "20 Years: AIDS and Photography." As a picture editor, I was named best picture editor/magazines in the NPPA/Pictures of the Year contest.