The Essential Pritchett

'There is more in this book that you will find in a shelf of books of this or any other year... A joy' - Daily TelegraphV. S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was one of the most subtle, potent and best-loved of modern British writers, an unparalleled story-teller and biographer and essayist of unique humour and insight. This volume contains an engrossing and lively collection of his autobiographical, travel and critical writings and a selection of the humorous and poignant short stories for which he is most remembered. It includes extracts from A Cab at the Door and Midnight Oil, as well as literary criticism on a range of writers from George Eliot and Balzac to Chekov and Turgenev.Edited by his son, Oliver, The Essential Pritchett is a tribute to a lifetime of writing.

“A magnificent volume in celebration of this perceptive, witty, wise and endlessly knowledgeable man who should find a place in every library”

Literary Review
A treasure trove of a volume...Essential reading Time Out
The greatest English short-story writer of the twentieth century Scotsman
Travel writer, biographer, novelist, essayist... Pritchett looks protean, but really his genius is indivisible. He is a teller of stories -- Martin Amis

Sir Victor Pritchett was born above a toyshop in Ipswich, Suffolk in 1900. In the 1920s he became a journalist, first during the Irish Civil War and later in Spain. His first book, Marching Spain, was published in 1928. From that time on, although he held several academic posts, he was first and foremost a writer, achieving fame for his short stories and wide admiration for his journalism and his criticism, particularly his weekly column "Books in General" for the New Statesman in the 1950s. He became President of the Society of Authors, was a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Academy of Arts and Sciences, and also President of the International P. E. N. He became C. B. E in 1968, and was knighted in 1975, and was made Companion of Honour in 1993. He died in London, in March 1997. Jeremy Treglown's new biography of V. S. Pritchett is also published in August by Chatto & Windus.

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