Professor Emeritus Norman Fruman, a member of the English faculty from 1978 to 1994, died April 19, at the age of 88 in Laguna Beach, California. Fruman was, as he told his friends, "famous and infamous" as the author of Coleridge, The Damaged Archangel (Braziller, 1971), which revealed that the English poet was a serial plagiarist. Fruman's book, described at the time as "relentlessly and devastatingly polemical and one of the most exciting I have read in years," by the New York Times critic, has been the focus of obituaries in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Star Tribune, and the Laguna Beach Patch. Fruman was also a combat platoon leader at the Battle of the Bulge and was afterward a German prisoner of war. He is survived by his wife of 53 years, Doris, three children, and four grandchildren.
