08/17/2024
Betty A. Prashker
1925-2024
[see the New York Times obituary link in the first comment]
When I sit down to do my editing, I hear in my head the wry, wise voice of editor and publisher Betty Prashker. At Crown Publishers, after starting out as an assistant to Barbara Grossman—from whom I learned so much about the practice of being an editor—I went to work directly for Betty, Crown’s editor-in-chief and associate publisher, helping to shepherd her books into publication. Under her tutelage, I worked with Dominick Dunne on “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles,” and with Tama Janowitz on “Slaves of New York”(and I got to join Betty at her famously prominent Four Seasons table when she took Tama to lunch), among many other authors. With her encouragement, I also built my own list and went on to be a senior editor, my office next to hers.
Betty was an excellent mentor to me. I witnessed how offhandedly brilliant she was with her authors, at once encouraging and rigorous, friendly and formidable. I marveled at how she could perceive a book’s big picture, cutting the Gordian knot that had entangled a writer, and thus liberating the crux of the book. She notably did this with Lucian V. Truscott IV, encouraging him to turn his memoir of West Point into the novel Dress Gray. She would see the particulars of a project with equal acuity.
From her work with Kate Millett on “Sexual Politics” to Susan Faludi’s “Backlash,” Betty was engaged with the praxis of feminism—including in the woman-centered fiction she published by such writers as Jean M. Auel, Judith Krantz, and Morgan Llewelyn. She never had an easy path in a profession where men still had most of the muscle. We young editors were in awe of how she’d demanded to be considered for membership at the all-male Century Association, the temple of Manhattan’s power brokers; and how, when the law finally changed so that such clubs had to admit women, she declined to apply. “It was the Groucho Marx idea,” she said. “The important thing to do was to desegregate the place.”
Betty extended these ideas of inclusiveness to me, as a young editor wanting to publish not just “mainstream” fiction and nonfiction but LGBTQ+ books as well. She backed me when I acquired Paul Monette’s novels; Laura Benkov’s “Reinventing the Family: The Emerging Story of Le***an and Gay Parents”; Leonard J. Martelli’s “When Someone You Know Has AIDS: A Practical Guide”; “Poets for Life: 77 Poets Respond to AIDS”; and Frank Browning’s “The Culture of Desire,” among other titles. She gave me space to learn, to make mistakes (and gosh, I made a lot), and to advocate for all my books; and she encouraged my own writing.
So right now Betty is sauntering into my office, her reading glasses dangling in one hand, and I hear her say, in her Vassar lockjaw, “Daaavid,” and I sit up straight, summoned to my work, emboldened and grateful.
![Betty A. Prashker1925-2024[see the New York Times obituary link in the first comment] When I sit down to do my editing, ...](https://img5.medioq.com/803/654/1040893698036547.jpg)
