Betty Prashker, a pioneering editor of the 20th century, who as one of the first women with the power to acquire books published such classics as Kate Millett’s “Sexual Politics” and Susan Faludi’s “Backlash,” died July 30 at age 99. Her daughter, Lucy Prashker, says Prashker died at a family home in Massachusetts.
NEW YORK — Betty Prashker, a pioneering editor of the 20th century who as one of the first women with the power to acquire books published such classics 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 July 30 at age 99.
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 out as a reader-receptionist at Doubleday in 1945, married labor lawyer Herbert Prashker in 1950 and took off 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 publisher.
“My determined and devoted agent tried everything, including pitching the book as ‘a female “In Search of Excellence”’ — with both of us praying no one would ask what that meant,” Faludi wrote on medium.com in 2014. ”In the end, the one person who was interested was Betty Prashker, editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers and, not coincidentally, a feminist pioneer.”
Prashker remained as an executive at Crown until the late 1990s, when she stepped back and became an editor at large, continuing to work with Larson among others.
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