UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Literary Essays and Reviews

Book Jacket: "Shelf Life" by W. H. Pritchard

William H. Pritchard

Engaging commentaries on English and American writers

In this collection of essays and reviews, William H. Pritchard focuses on the work of English and American writers, most of them from the twentieth century. At a time when English studies in the academy seems increasingly impelled by historical and political concerns, Pritchard's aim is to reinstate the aesthetic as the major motive for literary study. Indeed "study" may be the wrong word for it, as the poet Philip Larkin made forcefully evident when he once snapped at an interviewer, "Oh, for Christ's sake one doesn't study poets. You read them and think, that's marvelous, how is it done, could I do it?"

Pritchard is convinced that his job as a critic is to talk back to the imagination he has been engaged by. The four sections of this volume look at writers as diverse as the critic Samuel Johnson, the novelist Raymond Chandler, and the poet James Merrill, and at the abrasive epistolary behavior of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis. Perhaps the book's most original section is its final one, in which Pritchard writes about music-about playing the piano, singing hymns, listening to jazz-and about the teaching life as it appears in literature and in his own classroom. He concludes with appreciative essays on two of his own fondly remembered teachers.

Shelf Life is mannerly and elegant, but venturesome, even bold in its explorations of the artistic performance-of that passionate preference Robert Frost found to be the root of all human expression.

"In Representative Men, Emerson called Shakespeare 'the poet' and Goethe 'the writer.' Well, William Pritchard is 'the reader.' No one alive has a better feel for the twists and turns of a sentence on the page, or the subtle pleasures to be derived therefrom."
Christopher Benfey

Copyright Marietta Pritchard
William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, where he has taught for more than forty years. Among his many books are biographical critical studies of Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, and John Updike.

© Marietta Pritchard

Literary Studies
320 pp.
$40.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-375-1
April 2003

Frost
A Literary Life Reconsidered
Second edition, with a new preface
Named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review
"This deft, concise, readable literary life . . . puts the biographical emphasis where it belongs, on Frost's powerful and tenacious art."-New York Times Book Review
312 pp., 17 illus.
LC 92-36872
$18.95s, ISBN 0-87023-838-8
1993

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Book Jacket: "Talking Back to Emily Dickinson and Other Esays" by W. H. Pritchard

Talking Back to Emily Dickinson, and Other Essays
"Pritchard is one of those rare academics with whom it would be fun to discuss literature off campus. . . . [He] serves up a tempting and palatable blend of the erudite and the informal."-New York Times Book Review
320 pp.
LC 98-10322
$32.50s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-138-4
1998

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	William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English at Amherst College, where he has taught for more than forty years. Among his many books are biographical critical studies of Robert Frost, Randall Jarrell, and John Updike.
© Marietta Pritchard