弗朗辛·普罗斯

Francine Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and critic. She is writer-in-residence at Bard College and is a former president of PEN American Center.

Life and career

Francine Prose was born in Brooklyn, New York City, United States, in 1947. She is the daughter of Philip Prose, a professor of pathology, and Jessie Rubin, a dermatologist. Francine Prose graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She married cartoonist Larry Gonick on December 29 1967 and had separated from him by 1974. She is married to her second husband, Howie Michaels, a sculptor.

Her first novel, Judah the Pious, received the Jewish Council Book Award in 1973. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991. Prose's second novel, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.

In March 2007, Prose was chosen to succeed American writer Ron Chernow to serve a one-year term as president of PEN American Center, a New York City-based society of writers, editors and translators that works to advance literature, defend free expression, and foster international literary fellowship. In March 2008, Prose ran unopposed for a second one-year term. That same month, London artist Sebastian Horsley had been denied entry into the United States and Prose subsequently invited Horsley to speak at PEN's annual festival of international literature in New York at the end of April 2008. She was succeeded as president of PEN by philosopher and novelist Kwame Anthony Appiah in April 2009.

Prose sat on the board of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own First Amendment Award. Her novel Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on college campuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Nancy Savoca adapted her novel Household Saints into a movie.

Prose received the Rome Prize in 2006.

In 2010, she received the Washington University International Humanities Medal. The medal, awarded biennially and accompanied by a cash prize of $25,000, is given to honor a person whose humanistic endeavors in scholarship, journalism, literature, or the arts have made a difference in the world.

American PEN criticism

In 2015 a terrorist attack at the office of the French humor and satire weekly Charlie Hebdo, intended to punish the journal for publishing cartoons about the prophet Muhammad, killed 17 people, including contributors, staff and security personnel. In solidarity American PEN chose to honor the journal with its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award. Prose, alongside Michael Ondaatje, Teju Cole, Peter Carey, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, withdrew from the group's annual awards gala and signed a letter dissociating themselves from the award, stating that although the murders were "sickening and tragic", they did not believe that Charlie Hebdo's work deserved an award. The letter was soon co-signed by more than 140 other PEN members. Prose published an article in The Guardian justifying her position, stating that: "the narrative of the Charlie Hebdo murders—white Europeans killed in their offices by Muslim extremists—is one that feeds neatly into the cultural prejudices that have allowed our government to make so many disastrous mistakes in the Middle East." Prose was criticized for her views by Katha Pollitt, Alex Massie, Michael C. Moynihan, Nick Cohen and others, most notably by Salman Rushdie, who in a letter to PEN described Prose and the five other authors who withdrew as fellow travellers of "fanatical Islam, which is highly organised, well funded, and which seeks to terrify us all, Muslims as well as non-Muslims, into a cowed silence".

The New Yorker controversy

On January 7, 2018, in a Facebook post, Prose accused the author Sadia Shepard of plagiarizing Mavis Gallant's short story "The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street", which had appeared in The New Yorker on December 14, 1963. Shepard's story had been published online by The New Yorker and was scheduled for release in the January 8, 2018 issue. Though Shepard's story reimagines the original in a new context, with added detail and altered character dynamics, Prose contended that the similarities between the two stories constituted theft, writing in her original post that the story is a "scene by scene, plot-turn by plot-turn, gesture by gesture, line-of-dialogue by line-of-dialogue copy—the only major difference being that the main characters are Pakistanis in Connecticut during the Trump era instead of Canadians in post-WWII Geneva." In a letter to The New Yorker, Prose maintained her original stance, asking, "Is it really acceptable to change the names and the identities of fictional characters and then claim the story as one's own original work? Why, then, do we bother with copyrights?" Responding to Prose's accusation, Shepard acknowledged her debt to Gallant but maintained that her use of Gallant's story of expatriates in postwar Europe to explore the immigrant experience of Pakistani Muslims in contemporary America was justified.

Awards

1974: National Jewish Book Award for Judah the Pious

1998: National Jewish Book Award for You Never Know: A Legend of the Lamed-vavniks. Illustration by Mark Podwal