This Day in Literary History (V.S. Pritchett, Wildly Versatile British Man of Letters, Born)

Dec. 16, 1900--Victor Sawdon Pritchett—or, as readers came to know him across multiple genres across the 20th century, V.S. Pritchett—was born in a lower-middle-class household in Ipswich, Suffolk, England.

Though Great Britain has had at least several examples of the term applied to Pritchett, “man of letters” (see: Samuel Johnson, G.K. Chesterton, Matthew Arnold) I’m not sure there are (outside of, say, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling) many Americans who fit the bill.

Perhaps, reflected Ronald Gottesman in a June 1987 review of Pritchett’s essays in The Los Angeles Times, “These men of letters--all of them fictionists or poets as well as critics—were independent, flexible, liberal, morally serious in the practice of discrimination and judgment—the chief marks of criticism before Literary Theory banished authors, vaporized texts, and called readership into doubt.

Over 75 of his 97 years, Pritchett’s output was enormous: five novels, two memoirs; approximately 100 short stories; travel books; major studies on several European writers; and thousands book reviews. Writing as much as he did in any one of these genres would have challenged other authors; producing all of it combined was mind-boggling.

And that’s just what he published: there were also thousands of letters sent to lucky recipients.

Though the author attributed the impetus for all this activity to a spendthrift father who endangered the family’s financial security, his anxiety about not having enough funds lasted well into adulthood, according to biographer Jeremy Treglown. “Even in his most celebrated years,” observed British literary critic Frank Kermode in a February 2005 article for The New Republic, “he could not live by his books alone, and remained dependent on journalism.”

In Brian John Spencer’s “The New Irishman” blog, I was especially interested to discover one of Pritchett’s formative journalistic experiences: covering the Irish War of Independence for the Christian Science Monitor and how the writers in Dublin’s literary circle at the time influenced his own short-story writing.