Editing V. S. Pritchett

{{Short description|British writer and critic (1900–1997)}}
{{Infobox writer
| name               = V. S. Pritchett
| honorific_suffix   = {{postnominals|country=GBR|CH|CBE|FRSL}}
| image              = Victor Sawdon Pritchett.jpg
| birth_name         = Victor Sawdon Pritchett
| birth_date         = 16 December 1900
| birth_place        = [[Ipswich]], [[Suffolk]], England
| death_date         = {{death date and age|1997|03|20|1900|12|16|df=y}}
| death_place        = [[London]], England
| occupation         = {{hlist|Writer|[[literary critic]]}}
| years_active       = 1928–1997
| relatives          = [[Matt Pritchett]] (grandson)<br>[[Georgia Pritchett]] (granddaughter)
}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=October 2019}}
{{Use British English|date=December 2012}}

'''Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett''' {{postnominals|country=GBR|CH|CBE|FRSL}} (also known as '''VSP'''; 16 December 1900 – 20 March 1997) was a British writer and [[literary critic]].

Pritchett was known particularly for his short stories, collated in a number of volumes. Among his most noteworthy works of short fiction are “[[The Sailor (short story)|The Sailor]],” “The Saint,” and “The Camberwell Beauty.”<ref>Welty, 1978: On “The Camberwell Beauty”</ref><ref>Stinson, 1992 p. 19, p. 78: Re: “The Sailor” and “The Saint.”</ref>

His non-fiction works include the memoirs ''A Cab at the Door'' (1968) and ''Midnight Oil'' (1971), and many collections of essays on [[Biography in literature|literary biography]] and criticism.<ref>{{Cite encyclopedia| contribution-url = http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/477261/V-S-Pritchett|encyclopedia = Encyclopædia Britannica | type = encyclopædia | contribution = VS Pritchett}}</ref>

==Biography==
Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in [[Suffolk]], the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (''née'' Martin).<ref name="odnb">{{Cite ODNB |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/65704 |title=Pritchett, Sir Victor Sawdon}}</ref> His father, a London businessman, relocated to [[Ipswich]] to establish a newspaper and stationery shop. The business ran into difficulty and his parents were lodging over a toy shop at 41 St Nicholas Street in Ipswich, where Pritchett was born on 16 December 1900. Beatrice had expected a girl, whom she planned to name after [[Victoria of the United Kingdom|Queen Victoria]]. Pritchett disliked his first name, having been nearly mauled by a dog named Victor in his youth,<ref name="odnb"/> hence he always preferred being [[Style (manner of address)|styled]] by his [[initials]] "VSP", despite formally becoming "Sir Victor Pritchett" after being [[knight]]ed.

[[File:Companion of Honour.jpg|thumb|right|115px|'''Insignia of [[Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour]]''']]
His family moved to Ipswich to be near his mother's sister, who had married money and lived in Warrington Road. Within a year Walter was declared bankrupt, the family moved to [[Woodford, London|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 deceitfulness{{Efn | Walter Pritchett habitually pretended to be a member of the [[Athenaeum Club, London|Athenaeum Club]] to obtain credit falsely, for example.{{cn|date=November 2023}}}} 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, but returned to Ipswich in 1910 to live for a year near Cauldwell Hall Road, trying to evade Walter's creditors. At this time Pritchett attended St John's School. Subsequently, the family moved to East Dulwich and he attended [[Alleyn's School]], where he first had the urge to be a writer,<ref name="odnb"/> but when his paternal grandparents came to live with them at age 16, he was forced to leave school to work as a clerk and [[Currier|leather buyer]] in Bermondsey. At the same time, his father enlisted to work in Hampshire at an aircraft factory to help the war effort. After the Great War{{sfn | Pte Walter Pritchett at www.livesofthefirstworldwar.org.}}{{Failed verification|date=February 2022}} Walter turned his hand to [[aerospace engineering|aircraft design]], about which he knew nothing, and his later ventures included art needlework, property speculation and faith healing.

The leather work lasted from 1916 until 1920 when Pritchett moved to Paris to work 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 that [[newspaper|paper]] and for the ''[[New Statesman]]'', later being appointed its literary editor.{{Sfn|Fulford|1997}}

Pritchett's first book, ''Marching Spain'' (1928), describes a journey across Spain, and his second book, ''Clare Drummer'' (1929), is about his experiences in Ireland. While there, he met Evelyn Vigors, whom he later married. 

Pritchett published five novels, but he said he did not enjoy writing them. His reputation was established by a collection of short stories, ''The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories'' (1932).

Vigors had an affair in the 1930s, and meanwhile Pritchett fell in love with another woman, Dorothy Rudge Roberts.<ref name="odnb"/> In 1936, he divorced his first wife and married Roberts, with whom he had two children; the marriage survived until Pritchett's death in 1997, although they both had other relationships. Their children include the journalist Oliver Pritchett, whose son is the cartoonist [[Matt Pritchett]] <small>MBE,</small> and daughter is screenwriter [[Georgia Pritchett]].<ref>{{Cite web |last=Brown |first=Helen |date=1 August 2021 |title='He pretended to be a robot, then tried to kill me': growing up with cartoonist Matt |url=https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/what-to-read/pretended-robot-tried-kill-growing-cartoonist-matt/ |access-date=21 October 2022 |website=The Telegraph}}</ref>

During the [[Second World War]] Pritchett worked for the [[BBC]] and the [[Ministry of Information (United Kingdom)|Ministry of Information]] while continuing to write weekly essays for the ''New Statesman''.  After World War II he wrote extensively and embarked on various positions as a [[university lecturer]] in the United States: [[Princeton University|Princeton]] (1953), the [[University of California]] (1962), [[Columbia University]] and [[Smith College]]. Fluent in French, German and Spanish, he published acclaimed biographies of [[Honoré de Balzac]] (1973), [[Ivan Turgenev]] (1977), and [[Anton Chekhov]] (1988).

Pritchett was appointed a [[Knight Bachelor]] in 1975 for "services to literature" and a [[Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour]] in 1993. His other awards included [[FRSL]] (1958), [[CBE]] (1968), the [[Heinemann Award]] (1969), the [[PEN International|PEN Award]] (1974), the [[W.H. Smith Literary Award]] (1990) and the [[Golden PEN Award]] (1994).<ref>{{cite web | url = http://www.englishpen.org/prizes/golden-pen-award-for-a-lifetimes-distinguished-service-to-literature | title = Golden Pen Award | type = official website | publisher =[[English PEN]] |access-date=3 December 2012}}</ref> He was President of [[PEN International]], the worldwide association of writers and the oldest human rights organisation from 1974 until 1976.

Sir V. S. Pritchett died of a stroke in London on 20 March 1997, aged 96.<ref name="odnb" />

==Bibliography==
===Short stories===
{{div col}}
*''[[The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories]]'', 1932<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pritch.htm |title=V. S. Pritchett |website=Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi) |first=Petri |last=Liukkonen |publisher=[[Kuusankoski]] Public Library |location=Finland |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150210175324/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/pritch.htm |archive-date=10 February 2015 |url-status=dead  }}</ref>
*''You Make Your Own Life'', 1938
*''It May Never Happen'', 1945
*''Collected Stories'', 1956
*''The Sailor, The Sense of Humour and Other Stories'', 1956
*''When My Girl Comes Home'', 1961
*''The Saint and Other Stories'', 1966
*''Blind Love'', 1969
*''[[The Camberwell Beauty and Other Stories|The Camberwell Beauty]]'', 1974
*''Selected Stories'', 1978
*''On the Edge of the Cliff'', 1979
*''Collected Stories'', 1982
*''More Collected Stories'', 1983
*''[[A Careless Widow and Other Stories]]'', 1989
*''Complete Short Stories'', 1990
{{end div col}}

===Novels===
{{div col}}
*''Clare Drummer'', 1929
*''Shirley Sanz'', 1932
*''Nothing Like Leather'', 1935
*''Dead Man Leading'', 1937
*''Mr Beluncle'', 1951
*''[[The Key to My Heart: A Comedy in Three Parts]]'', 1963
{{end div col}}

===Non-fiction===
{{div col}}
*''Marching Spain'', 1928
*''This England'', 1938 (editor)
*''In My Good Books'', 1942
*''Novels and Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson'', 1945 (editor)
*''Build the Ships'', 1946
*''The Living Novel'', 1946
*''Turnstile One'', 1948 (editor)
*''Why Do I Write?: An Exchange of Views Between Elizabeth Bowen, Graham Greene, and V. S. Pritchett'', 1948
*''Books in General'', 1953
*''The Spanish Temper'', 1954
*''London Perceived'', 1962 (photographs by Evelyn Hofer)
*''Foreign Faces'', 1964
*''New York Proclaimed'', 1965
*''The Working Novelist'', 1965
*''Dublin: A Portrait'', 1967
*''A Cab at the Door'', 1968
*''George Meredith and English Comedy'', 1970
*''Midnight Oil'', 1971
*''Penguin Modern Stories'', 1971 (with others)
*''Balzac'', 1973
*''The Gentle Barbarian: the Life and Work of Turgenev'', 1977
*''The Myth Makers'', 1979
*''The Tale Bearers'', 1980
*''The Oxford Book of Short Stories'', 1981 (editor)
*''The Turn of the Years'', 1982 (with R. Stone)
*''The Other Side of a Frontier'', 1984
*''A Man of Letters'', 1985
*''Chekhov'', 1988
*''At Home and Abroad'', 1990
*''Lasting Impressions'', 1990
*''Complete Collected Essays'', 1991
*''The Pritchett Century'', 1997
{{end div col}}

==Legacy==
The '''V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize''' was founded by the [[Royal Society of Literature]] at the beginning of the new millennium to commemorate the centenary of the birth of "an author widely regarded as the finest English short-story writer of the 20th century, and to preserve a tradition encompassing Pritchett's mastery of narrative".<ref name=RSL>[http://rsliterature.org/award/v-s-pritchett-memorial-prize/ "V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize"], The Royal Society of Literature.</ref> This prize is awarded annually, with up to £2,000 being given for the best unpublished short story of the year.<ref name=RSL />

Perhaps his most prominent literary successor is the contemporary American writer [[Darin Strauss]], who has written widely about Pritchett,<ref name=Strauss>Strauss, Darin. [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/545432/pdf "On Lifting: Isaac Babel's My First Fee and V. S. Pritchett's The Diver"]</ref> and who worked to get Pritchett's 1951 novel ''Mr Beluncle'' back into print in America, providing a new introduction.<ref>[https://www.amazon.com/Mr-Beluncle-Modern-Library-Classics-ebook/dp/B002ZFGJLW/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=darin+strauss+Pritchett&qid=1614445419&sr=8-1 "Mr. Beluncle: A Novel"] at Amazon.</ref>

== See also ==
* [[Honoré de Balzac]]
* [[Royal Society of Literature]]

== References ==
=== Explanatory notes ===
{{Notelist}}

=== Citations ===
{{Reflist |30em}}

== General sources ==
* {{Cite book | first = D. | last = Baldwin | title = VS Pritchett | year = 1987}}.
* {{Cite news | first = Joseph | last = Epstein | title = The enduring VS Pritchett | url = https://www.newcriterion.com/issues/1993/3/the-enduring-vs-pritchett | newspaper = The New Criterion |date=March 1993}}.
* {{Cite news | first = Robert | last = Fulford | title = VS Pritchett | url = http://www.robertfulford.com/Pritch.html | newspaper = The Globe and Mail | place = Toronto, [[Canada|CA]] | date = 2 April 1997}}.
* {{Cite book | editor-first = Steven R. | editor-last = Serafin | title = Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century | volume = 3 | year = 1999}}.
* {{Cite book | first1 = Martin | last1 = Seymour-Smith | author1-link = Martin Seymour-Smith | first2 = Andrew C | last2 = Kimmens | title = World Authors 1900–1950 | volume = 3 | year = 1996}}.
* {{Cite book | first = John J. | last = Stinson | title = VS Pritchett: A Study of the Short Fiction | location = New York | publisher=Twayne Publishers| year = 1992| isbn = 9780805783414 }}.
* {{Cite book | first = Jeremy | last = Treglown | author-link = Jeremy Treglown | title = VS Pritchett: A Working Life | place = London | publisher = Chatto & Windus | year = 2004 | isbn = 0-7011-7322-X}}.

==External links==
{{wikiquote}}
* {{cite journal| url= http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2263/the-art-of-fiction-no-122-v-s-pritchett | journal = The Paris Review| volume = Winter 1990| issue = 117| title = The Art of Fiction No. 122: V.S. Pritchett|date=Winter 1990 | first1 = Shusha | last1 = Guppy |author-link=Shusha Guppy| author2 = Anthony Weller}}
* {{cite news| url=https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2008/feb/22/vspritchett| title= A brief survey of the short story: VS Pritchett| work=The Guardian | location=London| first= Chris| last= Power| date= 22 February 2008}}
* {{Citation | last = Pritchett | first = Victor Sawdon | author-link = V. S. Pritchett | url = http://narrativemagazine.com/issues/spring-2005/blind-love | title = Blind Love | type = short story | newspaper = [[Narrative Magazine]] |date=Spring 2005}}.
* {{Citation | url = http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/collections/manuscripts | first = Victor Sawdon | last = Pritchett | format = Manuscripts Collection | title = The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center | publisher = University of Texas }}.
* {{cite news | url = https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/v-s-pritchett-a-working-life-by-jeremy-treglown-754670.html| title=''V S Pritchett: A working life'' by Jeremy Treglown| work= The Independent | date =10 October 2004| location= London}}{{dead link|date=January 2025|bot=medic}}{{cbignore|bot=medic}}
* {{Citation | url = http://pen-international.org/ | title = PEN International}}.
* [http://rsliterature.org/award/v-s-pritchett-memorial-prize/ ''VS Pritchett Memorial Prize'' (RSL) – past recipients]
* [http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp08981/sir-victor-sawdon-vs-pritchett ''Sir V.S. Pritchett'' at www.npg.org.uk]
* [http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1963/12/12/fanny/ Hans Koning's take on a review written by V.S. Pritchett (1968)]
* [https://rose.library.emory.edu/ Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library], Emory University: [http://pid.emory.edu/ark:/25593/8zshn V.S. Pritchett collection, 1979-1982]

{{s-start}}
{{s-npo}}
{{succession box |before=[[Heinrich Böll]]| title=International President<br> of [[PEN International]] | after =[[Mario Vargas Llosa]]|years=1974–1976}}
{{s-end}}
{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Pritchett, V. S.}}
[[Category:1900 births]]
[[Category:1997 deaths]]
[[Category:20th-century English memoirists]]
[[Category:20th-century English novelists]]
[[Category:20th-century British short story writers]]
[[Category:20th-century English male writers]]
[[Category:20th-century British essayists]]
[[Category:Writers from Ipswich]]
[[Category:People educated at Alleyn's School]]
[[Category:People educated at Dulwich College]]
[[Category:English short story writers]]
[[Category:English biographers]]
[[Category:Knights Bachelor]]
[[Category:Members of the Order of the Companions of Honour]]
[[Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire]]
[[Category:English male short story writers]]
[[Category:English male novelists]]
[[Category:Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature]]
[[Category:English male non-fiction writers]]
[[Category:Presidents of the Society of Authors]]
[[Category:Presidents of the English Centre of PEN]]
[[Category:English literary critics]]
[[Category:British lecturers]]
[[Category:The Christian Science Monitor people]]
[[Category:New Statesman people]] 
[[Category:20th-century British educators]] 
[[Category:20th-century British journalists]]