Short answers, pulled from the story.
James George Frazer (the 1st of January 1854 - the 7th of May 1941) was a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist, known primarily for The Golden Bough, a multi-volume study of ancient cults, rites, and myths and their parallels in early Christianity. He was a Classics Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge for most of his life and was knighted in 1914.
The Golden Bough is Frazer's comparative study of mythology, magic, and religion across cultures. The first edition appeared in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, finished in 1915, ran to twelve volumes. Frazer argued that cultures evolve through three stages: magic, religion, and science, and he traced the symbolic cycle of life, death, and rebirth across the myths of many peoples.
Frazer's prime sources of data were ancient histories and questionnaires mailed to missionaries and imperial officials around the globe. Aside from visits to Italy and Greece, he did not widely travel. His colleague Walter Baldwin Spencer, who had studied Aboriginal Australians firsthand, frequently disagreed with Frazer's interpretations of that fieldwork.
The Golden Bough influenced Sigmund Freud, who cited Frazer's Totemism and Exogamy frequently in Totem and Taboo. T. S. Eliot drew on Frazer's framework of the life-death-rebirth cycle in writing The Waste Land, published in 1922. The work's influence also extended to psychologists and psychiatrists beyond academic anthropology.
Critics have pointed to imperialist, anti-Catholic, classist, and racist elements in Frazer's work, including his assumption that Aboriginal Australians and Africans represented fossilised earlier stages of cultural evolution. Historian Timothy Larsen argued Frazer systematically applied Christian terminology to non-Christian cultures not to make them seem familiar, but to make Christianity appear primitive. Edmund Leach also criticized The Golden Bough in the 1980s for its broad comparisons across widely separated cultures.
Elizabeth "Lilly" Grove, whom Frazer married in 1896, served as his manager and publicist, guarding access to his office and arranging translations of his work into French. She largely compiled the 1922 abridged edition of The Golden Bough and adapted his material into a children's book called The Leaves from the Golden Bough. She and Frazer died in Cambridge within a few hours of each other on the 7th of May 1941.