Short answers, pulled from the story.
Fromm's most popular book was The Art of Loving, an international bestseller first published in 1956. It argued that love is an interpersonal creative capacity rather than an emotion, requiring care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge.
Fromm identified automaton conformity, authoritarianism, and destructiveness as the three mechanisms people use to escape the burden of freedom. Automaton conformity means reshaping oneself to match society's preferred personality; authoritarianism means surrendering one's will to another; destructiveness is the attempt to eliminate others or the world itself.
Fromm received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Heidelberg in 1922. His dissertation was titled Das judische Gesetz, a contribution to the sociology of the Jewish diaspora. He had previously studied jurisprudence at the University of Frankfurt am Main starting in 1918.
Fromm was a democratic socialist who rejected both Western capitalism and Soviet communism as dehumanizing. His 1955 book The Sane Society argued for humanistic and democratic socialism, and he became one of the founders of socialist humanism. He also co-founded SANE and was active in the international peace movement against nuclear weapons.
Fromm read the Adam and Eve narrative as an allegory for human self-awareness rather than as a story of sin. He argued that eating from the Tree of Knowledge represented the moment humans became conscious of themselves as separate from nature, producing existential guilt, shame, and awareness of mortality.
The American Humanist Association named Fromm Humanist of the Year in 1966. He received the Nelly Sachs Prize in 1979, the year before his death.