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V. S. Pritchett

CH CBE FRSL
V. S. Pritchett; CH CBE FRSL
Born	Victor Sawdon Pritchett; 16 December 1900; Ipswich, Suffolk, England
Died	20 March 1997 (aged 96); London, England
Occupation	Writer; literary critic;
Years active	1928–1997
Relatives	Matt Pritchett (grandson); Georgia Pritchett (granddaughter)

Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett 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,” “The Saint,” and “The Camberwell Beauty.”^[1]^[2]

His non-fiction works include the memoirs A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), and many collections of essays on literary biography and criticism.^[3]

Biography

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Suffolk, the first of four children of Walter Sawdon Pritchett and Beatrice Helena (née Martin).^[4] 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 Queen Victoria. Pritchett disliked his first name, having been nearly mauled by a dog named Victor in his youth,^[4] hence he always preferred being styled by his initials "VSP", despite formally becoming "Sir Victor Pritchett" after being knighted.

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, 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^[a] 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,^[4] 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 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^[5]^{[failed verification]} Walter turned his hand to 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 paper and for the New Statesman, later being appointed its literary editor.^[6]

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.^[4] 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 MBE, and daughter is screenwriter Georgia Pritchett.^[7]

During the Second World War Pritchett worked for the BBC and the 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 (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 Award (1974), the W.H. Smith Literary Award (1990) and the Golden PEN Award (1994).^[8] 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.^[4]

Bibliography

Short stories

The Spanish Virgin and Other Stories, 1932^[9]
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, 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

Novels

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

Non-fiction

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

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".^[10] This prize is awarded annually, with up to £2,000 being given for the best unpublished short story of the year.^[10]

Perhaps his most prominent literary successor is the contemporary American writer Darin Strauss, who has written widely about Pritchett,^[11] and who worked to get Pritchett's 1951 novel Mr Beluncle back into print in America, providing a new introduction.^[12]

References

Explanatory notes

^ Walter Pritchett habitually pretended to be a member of the Athenaeum Club to obtain credit falsely, for example.^{[citation needed]}

Citations

^ Welty, 1978: On “The Camberwell Beauty”
^ Stinson, 1992 p. 19, p. 78: Re: “The Sailor” and “The Saint.”
^ "VS Pritchett". Encyclopædia Britannica (encyclopædia).
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e "Pritchett, Sir Victor Sawdon". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/65704. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
^ Pte Walter Pritchett at www.livesofthefirstworldwar.org.
^ Fulford 1997.
^ Brown, Helen (1 August 2021). "'He pretended to be a robot, then tried to kill me': growing up with cartoonist Matt". The Telegraph. Retrieved 21 October 2022.
^ "Golden Pen Award" (official website). English PEN. Retrieved 3 December 2012.
^ Liukkonen, Petri. "V. S. Pritchett". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 10 February 2015.
^ ^a ^b "V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize", The Royal Society of Literature.
^ Strauss, Darin. "On Lifting: Isaac Babel's My First Fee and V. S. Pritchett's The Diver"
^ "Mr. Beluncle: A Novel" at Amazon.

General sources

Baldwin, D. (1987). VS Pritchett..
Epstein, Joseph (March 1993). "The enduring VS Pritchett". The New Criterion..
Fulford, Robert (2 April 1997). "VS Pritchett". The Globe and Mail. Toronto, CA..
Serafin, Steven R., ed. (1999). Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century. Vol. 3..
Seymour-Smith, Martin; Kimmens, Andrew C (1996). World Authors 1900–1950. Vol. 3..
Stinson, John J. (1992). VS Pritchett: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne Publishers. ISBN 9780805783414..
Treglown, Jeremy (2004). VS Pritchett: A Working Life. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0-7011-7322-X..