Voting Station

V.S. Pritchett

Please vote to return to collections.

Author

The Resume

    (December 16, 1900-March 20, 1997)
    Born in Ipswich, England, United Kingdom
    Birth name was Victor Sawdon Pritchett
    Literary critic for ‘New Statesman’ (1926-65)
    Short story collections include ‘The Spanish Virgin and Other Short Stories’ (1932), ‘You Make Your Own Life’ (1938), ‘Collected Stories’ (1956), ‘When My Girl Comes Home’ (1961), ‘The Camberwell Beauty’ (1971) and ‘A Careless Widow’ (1989)
    Travel books include ‘Marching Spain’ (1928), ‘London Pereived’ (1962), ‘New York Proclaimed’ (1965) and ‘At Home and Abroad’ (1989)
    Wrote the memoirs ‘A Cab at the Door’ (1968) and ‘Midnight Oil’ (1971)
    Essay collections include ‘In My Good Books’ (1942), ‘The Living Novel’ (1946), ‘Books in General’ (1953), ‘The Myth Makers’ (1979) and ‘A Man of Letters’ (1985)
    Knighted for services to literature (1975)
    Named a Companion of Honour (1993)

Why he might be annoying:

    He hated his first name and asked friends to address him as ‘VSP.’
    In his early 20s, he lived in Paris, where he ‘lived an abysmal bohemian life and wrote a terribly pretentious and mannered prose.’
    He said of his first marriage, which ended in divorce, ‘I had known only sexual misery and frustration.’
    He originally wanted to be a poet, but admitted ‘I was no good.’

Why he might not be annoying:

    His second marriage lasted 60 years until his death.
    He was fluent in Spanish, French and German.
    Eudora Welty called him ‘one of the great pleasure-givers in our language.’
    Literary critic Irving Howe said of him, ‘No one alive writes a better English sentence.’

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 3 Votes: 33.33% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 6 Votes: 66.67% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 19 Votes: 15.79% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2017, Out of 10 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2016, Out of 7 Votes: 42.86% Annoying
    In 2015, Out of 11 Votes: 36.36% Annoying