Francine Prose

Francine Prose studied at Radcliffe College, Harvard University and Brooklyn Friends School. The recorded working language is English. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Employment is recorded with Bard College. Work by Francine Prose is recorded in the collections of Anne Frank House. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize, PEN Translation Prize and Edward Lewis Wallant Award.

• Name — Francine Prose • Born — 1947 • Birthplace — New York City, U.S. • Occupation — Writer • Education — Radcliffe College • Genre — Novels, short stories, nonfiction

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. • Illustration — Prose at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival 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.

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.

• 1973: Judah the Pious, Atheneum (Macmillan reissue 1986) • 1974: The Glorious Ones, Atheneum (Harper Perennial reissue 2007) • 1977: Marie Laveau, Berkley Publishing Corp. • 1978: Animal Magnetism, G.P. Putnam's Sons. • 1981: Household Saints, St. Martin's Press • 1983: Hungry Hearts, Pantheon • 1986: Bigfoot Dreams, Pantheon • 1992: Primitive People, Farrar, Straus & Giroux • 1995: Hunters and Gatherers, Farrar, Straus & Giroux • 2000: Blue Angel, Harper Perennial • 2003: After, HarperCollins • 2005: A Changed Man, HarperCollins – winner of the 2006 Dayton Literary Peace Prize for fiction • 2007: Bullyville, HarperTeen • 2008: Goldengrove, HarperCollins • 2009: Touch, HarperTeen • 2011: My New American Life, Harper • 2012: The Turning, HarperTeen • 2014: Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932, Harper • 2016: Mister Monkey, Harper, • 2021: The Vixen, Harper • 2026: ‘’Five Weeks in the Country, ‘’ Harper

• 2002: The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women and the Artists They Inspired, HarperCollins • 2003: Gluttony, Oxford University Press – second in a series about the seven deadly sins • 2003: Sicilian Odyssey, National Geographic • 2005: Caravaggio: Painter of Miracles, Eminent Lives • 2006: Reading Like a Writer, HarperCollins • 2008: The Photographs of Marion Post Wolcott. Washington, DC: Library of Congress • 2009: Anne Frank: The Book, the Life, the Afterlife, HarperCollins • 2015: Peggy Guggenheim – The Shock of the Modern, Yale University Press • 2020: Titian's Pietro Aretino (with Xavier F. Salomon), The Frick Collection • 2022: Cleopatra: Her History, Her Myth, Yale University Press

• March 13, 2005: "'The Glass Castle': Outrageous Misfortune": The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls • May 22, 2005: "'Oh the Glory of It All': Poor Little Rich Boy": Oh the Glory of It All, by Sean Wilsey • June 12, 2005: "'Marriage, a History': Lithuanians and Letts Do It", Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, Or How Love Conquered Marriage, by Stephanie Coontz • December 4, 2005: "Slayer of Taboos", The New York Times: D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, by John Worthen • April 2, 2006: "Science Fiction", The New York Times: The Book About Blanche and Marie, by Per Olov Enquist • July 9, 2006: "The Folklore of Exile", The New York Times: Last Evenings on Earth, by Roberto Bolaño • December 2008: "More is More: Roberto Bolaño's Magnum Opus", Harper's Magazine: 2666, by Roberto Bolaño • December/January 2010: "Altar Ego", Bookforum: Ayn Rand and the World She Made, by Anne C. Heller • |Year — Review article — Work(s) reviewed • 2005 • 2010 — * *

• 1988: Women and Children First, Pantheon • 1997: Guided Tours of Hell, Metropolitan • 1998: The Peaceable Kingdom, Farrar Straus & Giroux