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.
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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.
Over the following 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 acquired a book on the anti-feminist wave of the previous decade that several other publishers had rejected, Faludi's “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women.
“I first 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 telephone interview Friday. “But it turned out the meeting was for me. She leads me into a conference room and there all these people primed to work on the book — marketing, editorial, publicity, the whole deal. It was a terrific experience.
Kate Millett Susan Faludi Erik Larson Entertainment
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Betty Prashker, publisher of the feminist classics 'Sexual Politics' and 'Backlash,' dies at age 99Betty 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.
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Betty Prashker, publisher of the feminist classics 'Sexual Politics' and 'Backlash,' dies at age 99Betty 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.
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