Peter S. Prescott

Peter Sherwin Prescott ( born July 15, 1935 in New York; † April 23, 2004 ) was an American literary critic. From 1971 to 1991 he was chief critic of Newsweek.

Life and work

He was the son of literary critic Orville Prescott, the longtime chief of reviewers of the New York Times, and his wife Lilias Ward -Smith Prescott. After visiting the elite boarding school Choate, he studied at Harvard and at the Sorbonne. He then worked from 1958 to 1967 as a lecturer from the publisher EP Dutton. His career as a literary critic, he started at the age of 14 years, when the New York Times printed his review of a nonfiction book about baseball.

In 1964 he published regularly reviews for the Women ' Wear Daily, changed in 1968 at the invitation of William Atwood to look and finally in 1971 to Newsweek, where he was the leading literary critic until his retirement in 1991. In addition to his literary critical works he published autobiographical books about his time in Choate (A World of Our Own, 1970) and Harvard (A Darkening Green, 1974) and a documentary about the American youth prisons ( The Child Savers, 1981).

In 1978 he was awarded the George Polk Award for literary criticism.

Works (selection)

• A World of Our Own: Notes on Life and Learning in a Boys' Preparatory School. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1970.
• Soundings: Encounters with Contemporary Books. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1972.
• A Darkening Green: Notes from the Silent Generation. Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1974.
• The Child Savers: Juvenile Justice Observed. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1981.
• Never in Doubt: Critical Essays on American Books, 1972-1985. New York, Arbor House in 1985.
• Encounters with American Culture. 2 vols. Transaction Publishers, Brunswick, NJ, 2006.