NEW YORK — Betty Prashker, a pioneering 20th-century publisher who, as one of the first women with the power to acquire books, published classics such as Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” and Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” and helped 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 his daughter, Lucy Prashker, who did not cite any specific cause of death. At various times, Prashker held executive roles at Crown and Doubleday, both now divisions of Penguin Random House.
“Without Betty, there would be no Crown Publishing as we know it,” Tina Constable, executive vice president and publisher of Penguin Random House and former Crown editor, said in a statement Friday. her experience and for her unwavering advocacy for advancement and higher wages for women in publishing.”
Born Betty Arnoff in New York City and a graduate of Vassar College, Prashker was an avid reader, storyteller and longtime 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 over 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 an associate editor. She was initially rejected by Doubleday in the early 1960s, but a few years later she was unexpectedly invited to lunch by editor-in-chief Ken McCormick.
“Doubleday doesn’t have enough women in senior roles,” Prashker recalled him 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 towards affirmative action and have more women in our group.”
In the 1940s, Prashker was unable to convince Doubleday to hire a promising young writer he met at a party in Greenwich Village, James Baldwin. Now, his judgment was welcomed. In the late 1960s, she learned of a Columbia University graduate student who was writing a doctoral dissertation on how women were portrayed in Western literature. Prashker enrolled 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.”
In the following decades, she published hundreds of books, including hits such as Larson’s “The Devil in the White City,” Auel’s “The Cave Bear Clan” series, and “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles” by Dunne. In the early 1990s, when she was editor-in-chief at Crown, she acquired 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 ‘one woman’s Pursuit of Excellence’ (a long-running bestseller at the time) — with both of us praying that no one would ask what that meant.” ,” wrote Faludi on Medium.com in 2014. “In the end, the only person interested was Betty Prashker, editor-in-chief of Crown Publishers and, not coincidentally, a feminist pioneer.”
Shortly after releasing “Backlash,” Prashker hired an author whose first book sold poorly and who was looking for a new publisher: Erik Larson was working on a U.S. weapons exploration, “Lethal Passage,” which Crown published in 1994.
“I met with Betty in her office and after a while she started to get up and said ‘I have another meeting now,’ and I thought, ‘That’s it for me,’” Larson told The Associated Press during a phone interview on Friday. “But I discovered the meeting was for me. She took me to a conference room and there all these people were prepared to work on the book – marketing, editorial, publicity, the whole business.
Prashker remained an executive at Crown until the late 1990s, when she stepped back and became editor-at-large, continuing to work with Larson, among others.
She didn’t just make 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 meeting space in midtown Manhattan founded in the 19th century by James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, among others. Despite being sponsored by William F. Buckley, among others, she was initially rejected because, she was told, the club “exists for the pleasure and enjoyment of the gentlemen who constitute its members” and that her request was “debatable.” ”
But the Century Club was later found to be in violation of local anti-discrimination law and reversed its position in the mid-1980s. Prashker didn’t bother to reapply.
“It was Groucho Marx’s idea,” she would explain for an oral history project at Random House, referring to Groucho’s famous joke that he wouldn’t want to join a club that had him as a member. “The important thing to do was to desegregate the place.”
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