Collection: Frederic Prokosch

Frederic Prokosch (1908–1989) was born in Madison, Wisconsin, the son of an Austrian philologist and an American concert pianist. After a childhood passed in the university towns of the United States and Germany, he attended Haverford College, the University of Cambridge, and Yale, where he completed a dissertation on Chaucerian Apocrypha. A tennis and squash champion, the youthful Prokosch was said by Harold Acton to have “the dark good looks of an advertiser of razor blades.” Between 1930 and 1934, he sent handmade booklets of his poetry to dozens of writers he admired, including T.S. Eliot, who later published Prokosch’s first novel, The Asiatics (1935). During the Second World War Prokosch was assigned to the American Legation in Stockholm and afterward resided mostly in Europe, first in Italy and later in France, where, in 1972, he retired to a cottage in the town of Grasse, living in almost total seclusion after garnering some unwelcome attention for having forged several valuable “extra copies” of his prewar pamphlets, which had been auctioned off by Sotheby’s. In addition to his imaginative memoir, Voices, he was the author of sixteen novels, four collections of poetry, and translations of Euripides, Louise Labé, and Friedrich Hölderlin.