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V. S. Pritchett

[prich-it]

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett CH CBE (December 16, 1900 - March 20, 1997), was a British writer and critic. He was particularly known for his short stories, collected in a number of volumes. His most famous books are the memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971).

Biography

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Ipswich, Suffolk, the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (née Martin). His father, a London businessman in financial difficulties, had come to Ipswich to start a shop selling newspapers and stationery. The business was struggling and the couple were lodging over a toyshop at 41 St Nicholas Street where Pritchett was born on December 16, 1900. Beatrice had expected a girl, whom she planned to name after the Queen. Pritchett never liked his first name, which is why he always styled himself with his initials; even close friends would call him VSP.

Pritchett's father was a steady Christian Scientist and unsteady in all else. Walter and Beatrice had come to Ipswich to be near her sister who had married money and lived in Warrington Road. Within a year Walter was declared bankrupt, the family moved to Woodford, Essex, then to Derby, and he began selling women's clothing and accessories as a travelling salesman. Pritchett was soon sent with his brother Cyril to live with their paternal grandparents in Sedbergh, where the boys attended their first school. Walter's business failures, his casual attitude to credit, and his easy deceit obliged the family to move frequently. The family was reunited but life was always precarious; they tended to live in London suburbs with members of Beatrice's family. They returned to Ipswich in 1910, living for a year near Cauldwell Hall Road, trying to evade Walter's creditors. At this time Pritchett attended St. John's School. Subsequently Pritchett attended Alleyn's School, Dulwich, and Dulwich College but he stayed nowhere for very long. When his father went to fight in World War I, Pritchett left school. Later in the war Walter turned his hand to aircraft design, of which he knew nothing, and his later ventures included art needlework, property speculation, and faith healing.

Pritchett was a leather buyer from 1916 to 1920, when he moved to Paris, where he worked as a shop assistant. In 1923 he started writing for the Christian Science Monitor, which sent him to Ireland and Spain. From 1926 he wrote reviews for the paper and for the New Statesman, which later appointed him literary editor.

Pritchett's first book described his journey across Spain (Marching Spain 1928) and Clare Drummer (1929) was about his experiences in Ireland. Whilst in Ireland he met his first wife, Evelyn Vigors, but it was not to be a happy marriage.

Pritchett published five novels but he claimed not to enjoy their creation. His reputation was established by a collection of short stories (The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories 1932).

In 1936 he divorced his first wife, and married Dorothy Rudge Roberts; they had two children. The marriage lasted until Pritchett's death, although they both had other relationships. His son is the journalist Oliver Pritchett and his grandson (son of Oliver) is the cartoonist Matt Pritchett.

During World War II Pritchett worked for the BBC and the Ministry of Information whilst continuing to submit a weekly essay to the New Statesman. After the war he wrote widely and he started taking teaching positions at universities in the United States: Princeton (1953), the University of California (1962), Columbia University and Smith College. He was fluent in German, Spanish, and French, and published a biography of Honoré de Balzac in 1973, but he did not need to know the language of his subjects. He wrote successful biographies of Ivan Turgenev (1977) and Anton Chekhov (1988), although he did not know Russian and had never visited the Soviet Union.

Pritchett was knighted in 1975 for his services to literature and became Companion of Honour in 1993. His awards include Heinemann Award (1969), PEN Award (1974), W.H. Smith Literary Award (1990), and Golden Pen Award (1993). He died of a stroke in London on March 20, 1997.

Bibliography

Marching Spain, 1928
Clare Drummer, 1929
The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories, 1930
Shirley Sanz, 1932
Nothing Like Leather, 1935
Dead Man Leading, 1937
This England, 1938 (editor)
You Make Your Own Life, 1938
In My Good Books, 1942
It May Never Happen, 1945
Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, 1945 (editor)
Build the Ships, 1946
The Living Novel, 1946
Why Do I Write?, 1948
Mr. Beluncle, 1951
Books in General, 1953
The Spanish Temper, 1954
Collected Stories, 1956
The Sailor, The Sense of Humour and Other Stories, 1956
When My Girl Comes Home, 1961
London Perceived, 1962
The Key to My Heart, 1963
Foreign Faces, 1964
New York Proclaimed, 1965
The Working Novelist, 1965
The Saint and Other Stories, 1966
Dublin, 1967
A Cab at the Door, 1968
Blind Love, 1969
George Meredith and English Comedy, 1970
Midnight Oil, 1971
Penguin Modern Stories, 1971 (with others)
Balzac, 1973
The Camberwell Beauty, 1974
The Gentle Barbarian: the Life and Work of Turgenev, 1977
Selected Stories, 1978
On the Edge of the Cliff, 1979
Myth Makers, 1979
The Tale Bearers, 1980
The Oxford Book of Short Stories, 1981 (editor)
The Turn of the Years, 1982 (with R. Stone)
Collected Stories, 1982
More Collected Stories, 1983
The Other Side of a Frontier, 1984
A Man of Letters, 1985
Chekhov, 1988
A Careless Widow and Other Stories, 1989
Complete Short Stories, 1990
At Home and Abroad, 1990
Lasting Impressions, 1990
Complete Collected Essays, 1991
The Pritchett Century, 1997

Notes

He habitually pretended to be a member of the Athenaeum Club to obtain credit falsely, for example.

External links

Sources

D. Baldwin, V.S. Pritchett, (1987)
Joseph Epstein, 'The enduring V. S. Pritchett', The New Criterion, (March, 1993)
Robert Fulford, 'V.S. Pritchett', The Globe and Mail, (Toronto, Canada: 2 April 1997)
Steven R. Serafin (ed), Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, vol. 3, (1999)
Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens, World Authors 1900-1950, vol. 3, (1996)
John J. Stinson, V.S. Pritchett: A Study of the Short Fiction,(New York,1992)
Jeremy Treglown, V.S. Pritchett: A Working Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004) ISBN 0-7011-7322-X