Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938 in Milan, Italy) is an American journalist and writer. After attending Bryn Mawr, Harvard, and Yale, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. In 1968-69, she was chief film critic for the New York Times.
Having published two collections of essays, Toward a Radical Middle (1970) and A Year in the Dark (1971), Adler turned to reporting on politics, war, and civil rights. Her "Letter from the Palmer House" was included in the Best Magazine Articles of the Seventies. In 1987, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University.
Adler also turned to fiction. In 1974, her short story "Brownstone" won First Prize in the O. Henry Awards. Her novel Speedboat won the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel of 1976. Her next novel Pitch Dark (1983) was a highly regarded, and also best-selling, sequel. "Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler's," John Leonard wrote in Vanity Fair.
Adler's 1986 book Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time, an account of two libel trials and the First Amendment, was also praised: "This book should be under the Christmas tree of every lawyer and journalist," wrote William B. Shannon in The Washington Post; Edwin M. Yoder, also in The Washington Post, wrote, "Reckless Disregard is the best book about American journalism of our time." Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999) occasioned, among journalists who had long felt themselves under attack by Adler, a kind of herd instinct of unprecedented outrage—11 negative pieces in various sections of The New York Times alone. The episode has already entered the lore of extreme pack journalism when its vanity is touched.
In 2001, Adler published Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and the Media, a collection of pieces from The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books. Some of these, on the National Guard, Biafra, Pauline Kael, soap operas, the impeachment inquiries (of both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton), and the press, had received awards and/or become classics from the day of publication.
In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in a forthcoming Library of America volume of American Film Criticism (to be published early 2006).
Adler currently teaches at Boston University, both as a Visiting Professor of Journalism and as a Fellow of the University Professors Program, "an interdisciplinary program for gifted students".[1]
Bibliography
- (1969) A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic, 1968-69, New York: Random House.
- (1970) Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism, New York: Random House.
- (1976) Speedboat, New York: Random House. ISBN 0394488768.
- (1983) Pitch Dark, New York: Knopf. ISBN 0394503740.
- (1986) Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time, New York: Knopf. ISBN 0394527518.
- (1999) Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker, New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684808161.
- (2001) Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and the Media, New York: St. Martin's Press. ISBN 031227520X.
- (2004) Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Decision that Made George W. Bush President, Hoboken, N.J.: Melville House Pub.. ISBN 0974960950.
- Private Capacity. – this book, a study of the Bilderberg Group, was initially scheduled for publication in 2000 but remains unpublished
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