Kathryn Davis

Frederic Prokosch

Frederic Prokosch was a fantasist. His first novel, The Asiatics, was a stylish account of a man hitchhiking across an Asia that was more dream than reality. Praised by T. S. Eliot, Thomas Mann, and W. B. Yeats, it was a tremendous success, never to be replicated in Prokosch's long career. In the 1940s, he moved to Europe, away from what he called the "middle-class and fancy dullness" of midcentury American letters, writing novels of a highly romantic kind, playing squash and tennis, collecting butterflies, and printing deluxe limited editions of poems he admired.

In 1982, Prokosch returned to the literary limelight with Voices—a self-proclaimed memoir framed by his childhood in Middle America and his old age in the South of France, made of short chapters about his encounters with famous figures, whose every word he seems to recall. Voices, too, is a work of fantasy. But if Prokosch's portraits are not strictly true to life, they come alive as few portraits do. Whether he is playing tennis with Ezra Pound or retrieving Marc Chagall's wallet from the Grand Canal, sharing a beer with Bertolt Brecht or a steam bath with W.H. Auden, Prokosch hypnotizes the reader with his ability to capture these artists' cadences and characters, creating a masterpiece of imaginative memoir.

Voices

Andreacute; Gide praised The Asiatics as "an authentic masterpiece"; Thomas Mann called it "brilliant.

A Novel

The Asiatics

The Seven who Fled

Nine Days to Mukalla

"A novel about solitude, about men wandering in the night of the absurd and feeling the 'nausea' of existence. It is a story of unrequited and tragic love, in which the characters roam from America to Europe and Africa in the years prior to and at the start of World War II ... While existentialist in mood, it is not a gloomy book. Prokosch throws a veil of subtle beauty over everything. It clothes New York, Paris, Venice and Tangiers in mystery, hides their squalor in compassion, assuages the solitude of men."--Jeanne Mercier

Frederic Prokosch

Books

Your next favorite book is out there