NEW YORK — Betty Prashker, a pioneering 20th-century editor who was 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 launched the careers of Jean Auel, Dominick Dunne and Erik Larson, among others, died July 30 at the age of 99.
Prashker died at a family home in Alford, Massachusetts, according to her daughter Lucy Prashker, who did not give a specific cause of death. At various times, Prashker held executive positions at Crown and Doubleday, both now part of Penguin Random House.
“Without Betty, Crown Publishing as we know it would not have existed,” Tina Constable, executive vice president and publisher at Penguin Random House and former Crown publisher, said in a statement Friday. “I am just one of many colleagues who have benefited greatly from her experience and tireless commitment to the advancement and higher pay of women in publishing.”
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 resembled those of many women after World War II. She started as a reader’s receptionist at Doubleday in 1945, married labor lawyer Herbert Prashker in 1950 (they divorced in 1974), and took the next decade off to raise her three children. With the help of the emerging feminist movement of the 1960s, she returned to work, becoming assistant editor. Doubleday had initially turned her down in the early ’60s, but a few years later, editor-in-chief Ken McCormick unexpectedly invited her to lunch.
“Doubleday doesn’t have enough women in top positions,” Prashker recalled saying, 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’re going to have to do something about positive discrimination and bring more women into our group.”
In the 1940s, Prashker had failed to persuade Doubleday to hire a promising young writer, James Baldwin, whom she had met at a Greenwich Village party. Now her judgment was welcome. In the late ’60s, she learned of a graduate student at Columbia University who was writing a dissertation on the portrayal of women in Western literature. Prashker signed the student, Millett, and published Sexual Politics, a cornerstone of second-wave feminism that Prashker called “an educational experience for an amateur like me.”
In the decades that followed, she published hundreds of books, including success stories such as Larson’s The Devil of Chicago, Auel’s Ayla and the Clan of the Bear, and Dunne’s The Two Mrs. Grenvilles. 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 promoting the book as a ‘female quest for excellence’ (then a long-running bestseller) – and we both prayed that no one would ask what that meant,” Faludi wrote on medium.com in 2014. “In the end, the only person who showed interest was Betty Prashker, editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers and, not coincidentally, a feminist pioneer.”
Not long after the publication of Backlash, Prashker signed an author whose first book had sold poorly and who was looking for a new publisher: Erik Larson had been working on an investigation into guns in the United States, Lethal Passage, which was published by Crown in 1994.
“I met with Betty in her office first and after a while she stood up and said, ‘I have another meeting now,’ and I thought, ‘That’s it for me,'” Larson told The Associated Press in a phone interview on Friday. “But it turned out the meeting was for me. She led me into a conference room and there were all these people ready to work on the book – marketing, editorial, public relations, the whole program. It was a great experience.”
Prashker remained at Crown as an executive until the late 1990s, then resigned and became a freelance editor, continuing to work with Larson, among others.
She made history not only in the publishing world. In the 1970s, she noticed that many of her colleagues were taking authors to the men-only Century Club, an elite hangout in midtown Manhattan founded in the 19th century by James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, among others. Although she was sponsored by William F. Buckley, among others, she was initially turned away because, she was told, the club “exists for the pleasure and enjoyment of the gentlemen who are its members” and her request was “moot.”
However, it later emerged that the Century Club had violated local anti-discrimination law, and in the mid-1980s it reversed its decision. Prashker did not bother to reapply.
“It was Groucho Marx’s idea,” she explained for an oral history project at Random House, referring to Groucho’s famous joke that he wouldn’t join any club he was a member of. “The most important thing was to desegregate.”
