PRESCOTT, Peter S(herwin) 1935-2004

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 15, 1935, in New York, NY; died of liver disease, complicated by diabetes, April 23, 2004, in New York, NY. Editor and author. Prescott was best known as a book critic for periodicals such as Look and Newsweek. He was a graduate of Harvard University, where he earned a bachelor's in 1957, and also studied at the Sorbonne for a year. From 1958 to 1967, Prescott was senior editor for the publisher E. P. Dutton; he then took up a career as a book editor for various magazines, including Women's Wear Daily and Look. His longest stint was with Newsweek, where he was senior writer from 1978 to 1991. Later in his career, Prescott taught journalism at Columbia University as an adjunct professor from 1979 to 1986. A winner of the George Polk Award for criticism in 1978, he considered himself to be somewhere between a literary critic and a book reviewer, the former having a much more academic bent, while the latter merely discussed the content of the book at hand; Prescott, in comparison, wrote about the content of the book but also tried to analyze more deeply why a literary venture did or did not work. In addition to his criticism, he was also the author of the biographical A World of Our Own: Notes on Life and Learning in a Boys' Preparatory School (1970), the essay collection A Darkening Green: Notes from the Silent Generation (1974), and The Child Savers: Juvenile Justice Observed (1981), which won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, April 26, 2004, p. B11.

New York Times, April 24, 2004, p. A13.

Washington Post, April 26, 2004, p. B7.