NEW YORK– Betty Prashker, a pioneering editor of the 20th century who was one of the first women with the power to acquire books, publishing such classics as Kate Millett’s ‘Sexual Politics’ and Susan Faludi’s ‘Backlash’ and helping to oversee the careers of Jean Auel , Dominick Dunne and Erik Larson, among others, died on July 30 at the age of 99.
Prashker died at a family home in Alford, Massachusetts, according to her daughter, Lucy Prashker, who did not give a specific cause of death. Prashker held several leadership positions at Crown and Doubleday, both now divisions of Penguin Random House.
“Without Betty, there would have been no Crown Publishing as we know it,” Tina Constable, executive vice president and publisher and former Crown publisher of Penguin Random House, said in a statement Friday. “I am just one of many colleagues who have benefited immensely from her experience, and her staunch championing of progress and higher wages for women in publishing.”
Born Betty Arnoff in New York City and a graduate of Vassar College, Prashker was a longtime bookworm, storyteller and tennis player whose life and career mirrored those of many women after World War II. She started as a reader-receptionist at Doubleday in 1945, married labor lawyer Herbert Prashker in 1950 (they divorced in 1974) and left the next decade to raise their three children. With the help of the emerging feminist movement of the 1960s, she returned to work and became a co-publisher. She was initially rejected by Doubleday in the early 1960s, but a few years later she was unexpectedly asked to lunch by editor Ken McCormick.
“Doubleday doesn’t have enough women in top positions,” Prashker recalled telling her, as quoted in Al Silverman’s “The Time of Their Lives,” a publishing history. “And if we want to continue doing business with the government, we have to do something in the form of positive discrimination and we have to have more women in our group.”
In the 1940s, Prashker had failed to convince Doubleday to hire a promising young writer she had met at a party in Greenwich Village, James Baldwin. Now her judgment was welcomed. In the late 1960s, she heard that a graduate student at Columbia University was writing a dissertation on the way women are depicted in Western literature. Prashker enrolled the student Millett and published what became “Sexual Politics,” a cornerstone of second-wave feminism that Prashker would call an “educational experience for a dilettante like me.”
Over the next few decades, she would publish hundreds of books, including such hits as Larson’s “The Devil in the White City,” Auel’s “The Clan of the Cave Bear” series and Dunne’s “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles’. In the early 1990s, when she was editor-in-chief at Crown, she bought a book about the anti-feminist wave of the previous decade that several other publishers had rejected, Faludi’s “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women.”
“My determined and dedicated agent tried everything, including pitching the book as ‘a female ‘In Search of Excellence” (then a long-running bestseller) – both of us praying no one would ask what that meant,” Faludi wrote. medium.com in 2014. “The only person who ended up being interested was Betty Prashker, editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers and, not coincidentally, a feminist pioneer.”
Not long after releasing “Backlash,” Prashker signed an author whose first book had sold poorly and who was looking for a new publisher: Erik Larson had worked on a US gun investigation, “Lethal Passage,” which Crown published in 1994.
“I first met Betty in her office and after a while she started standing up and said, ‘I have another meeting right now,’ and I thought, ‘That’s it for me,’” Larson told Friday The Associated Press during a telephone interview. ‘But it turned out that the meeting was for me. She leads me into a conference room and there were all these people ready to work on the book – marketing, editing, publicity, the whole deal was a great experience.”
Prashker remained an executive at Crown until the late 1990s, when she stepped back to become editor-in-chief and continued to work with Larson, among others.
She not only made history in the publishing world. In the 1970s, she noticed that many of her colleagues were taking authors to the all-male Century Club, an elite gathering space in downtown Manhattan founded in the 19th century by James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, among others. Despite being sponsored by, among others, William F. Buckley, she was initially rejected because, she was told, the club “exists for the pleasure and enjoyment of the gentlemen who are members thereof” and that her request was “questionable”. ”
But the Century Club was later found to have violated local anti-discrimination laws and reversed its position in the mid-1980s. Prashker didn’t bother to reapply.
“It was Groucho Marx’s idea,” she explained for an oral history project at Random House, referring to Groucho’s famous joke that he wouldn’t want to join a club he was a member of. “The most important thing to do was segregate the place.”
