Between the Flags

B. H. Friedman, a real estate executive who gave up his business career to write well-received novels and art criticism and whose books include an early biography of Jackson Pollock, died at 84. The cause was complications of pneumonia.

From the time he graduated from Cornell in 1948 until the early 1960s, Mr. Friedman was by some standards a case study in postwar American business success. He worked in New York City real estate, mostly for Uris Brothers (later known as the Uris Buildings Corporation), a successful firm run by his uncles, where he rose from assistant residential manager of a single building to vice president and company director.

But he was hardly a conventional businessman. A jazz aficionado, an art collector, an experimenter with drugs (his 2006 memoir, “Tripping,” recounts his mind-bending experiences with the guru of psychedelia Timothy Leary), he was, while going to the office by day, also writing fiction and contributing articles on literature, art, architecture and music to a variety of publications.

“Circles,” his first novel, about “sex, status, and professional aggressiveness in the Abstract Expressionist set in New York and East Hampton,” as The New Yorker described it, was published in early 1962, and the next year he left the real estate business to become a full-time writer.