V. S. Pritchett (1900-1997) was an English short story writer, novelist, literary critic, journalist, travel writer, biographer, and autobiographer. Though not an innovator in terms of style, he was nevertheless an interesting and highly competent...

Literary journalists and reviewers of the past ten to fifteen years have been referring to V. S. Pritchett more and more frequently as "the Grand Old Man of British letters." The highly favorable, prominently placed, and usually lengthy reviews that...

Victor Sawdon (V. S.) Pritchett is an eminent man of letters who has published extensively in different genres; his work includes five novels; numerous volumes of short stories, many of which have been published in prominent journals over the last...

CHEKHOV. A Spirit Set Free, by V. S. Pritchett. Random House. 235 pp. $17.95. The last published story of the late Raymond Carver, written under the sentence of a diagnosis of cancer, concerned the death of Anton Chekhov. The scene in a Black...

LASTING IMPRESSIONS Essays 1961-1987 By V. S. Pritchett Random House, 171 pages, $19.95 On Dec. 16, Sir Victor Sawdon Pritchett celebrated his 90th birthday. The author's note to this invigorating collection describes him as "one of the great men of 20th...

Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born author and critic whose incisive prose and steady spirit helped her well fulfill her dream of becoming a "New York Intellectual," has died at age 91.Hardwick, who lived for decades on Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her sleep Sunday night...

V. S. Pritchett's first volume [of reminiscences] A Cab at the Door, takes its title from the family's habit of moving lodgings after each new failed enterprise: "A cabby and his horse would be coughing together outside the house and the next thing we knew we were driving to an underground station and to a new house in a new part of London, to the smell of new paint, new mice dirts, new cupboards." (p. 263) The rootlessness of the Pritchetts' London life, coupled with a na...

[Any] Pritchett story is all of it alight and busy at once, like a well-going fire. Wasteless and at the same time well fed, it shoots up in flame from its own spark like a poem or a magic trick, self-consuming, with nothing left over. He is one of the great pleasure-givers in our language. Pritchett himself has said that the short story is his greatest love because he finds it challenging. The new collection ["Selected Stories"] makes it clear that neither the love nor the challenge has let h...

V. S. Pritchett is not much given to quarreling with other critics, but at one point in his new collection of essays ["The Myth Makers"] he does allow himself to rebuke a professor who has been going in for some particularly jaw-breaking jargon, subjecting Flaubert to a barrage of "velleities" and "volitations." Literary criticism, he insists, "does not add to its status by opening an intellectual hardware store." Nor, one might add, by dealing in pseu...