ARTHUR FROMMER (1929-2024)
Arthur Bernard Frommer was born in Lynchburg, VA, to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. His family moved to Brooklyn when he was 14, and worked as an office boy at Newsweek while attending Erasmus Hall High School, where he edited the school paper. He received a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1950 from New York University. Three years later, he graduated from Yale Law School, where he had been an editor on the law review. After a stint in the Army, he joined the Manhattan office of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison in 1956.
In one landmark case, he helped successfully halt a ban on shipping D.H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover through the U.S. mail after the postmaster general deemed it smut and obscenity. He could have had a good career in law, but a side project he started while with the Army was starting to take too much of his time.
While stationed in Berlin, he noted that too many of his fellow GIs weren't bothering to travel or even see the sights. They felt it was too expensive for their limited finances. He begged to differ, and spend his weekends traveling and seeing all that he could. In 1955, he self-published the results of his jaunts. The G.I.’s Guide to Travelling in Europe sold out almost immediately and, two years later, Frommer revised the book for the general public and renamed it Europe on 5 Dollars a Day.
He made the leap of faith into travel writing, and left the legal profession in the early 1960s to focus full time on updates to the guide to Europe and on the creation of books on travel to Mexico, Japan, Israel, Ireland, Greece and the Caribbean. At the end of the decade, the Frommer series had become the best-selling line of travel guides ever published.
An army of freelancers wrote his other guides, but Frommer remained the author for newer editions of his maiden book. He personally visited every hotel and restaurant mentioned in his book, resulting in works that were accessible, conversational and always unapologetic.
In 1977, he sold his series to Simon & Schuster but continued to contribute to the texts. His belief that travel was about “self-education” and not mere sightseeing — “We go to Paris; we look at the Eiffel Tower, and we think we’ve traveled” — led to “Arthur Frommer’s New World of Travel,” his series on unconventional tourism. In 2012, he got the series back and printed dozens of new editions under the name Frommer Media.
He never really cared much for the "minimalist" approach used by many who carried his books while backpacking across Europe. “They were traveling cheaply, but passing their days senselessly,” he told the Seattle Times. “That’s not the travel I wanted to support.”
Asked in the early 1980s about the places he loved, he listed The Mauritshuis in The Hague, “one of the great and most unjustly neglected museums”; Cairo, “beyond which a great many other things are insignificant”; Rio de Janeiro, “a vestige of sybaritic life that no longer exists in the world”; and an off-off Broadway play, where “in the ugliest areas … the sheerest beauty is being created by young people producing not for commercial reasons, but to achieve art.”
In 2009, the Los Angeles Times asked him if he ever splurged on a five-star hotel. "I once stayed at a super-deluxe place in South Beach, Miami, with Philippe Starck decor and $400 rooms,” he said. “It was so cold I felt like I was living in a refrigerator, and there were no decent lights. I cringe whenever I hear the words ‘boutique hotel.’ Any Courtyard by Marriott is better.”
Frommer in 2015: