Frederic Prokosch

Frederic Prokosch (May 17, 1906 – June 2, 1989) was an American writer, known for his novels, poetry, memoirs and criticism. He was also a distinguished translator. Prokosch was born in Madison, Wisconsin, into an intellectual family that travelled widely. His father, Eduard Prokosch, an Austrian immigrant, was Professor of Germanic Languages at Yale University at the time of his death in 1938, and his sister Gertrude Prokosch Kurath was a dancer and a prominent ethnomusicologist. Prokosch was graduated from Haverford College in 1925 and received a Ph.D. in English in 1932 from Yale University. In his youth, he was an accomplished squash racquets player; he represented the Yale Club in the 1937 New York State squash racquets championship. He won the squash-racquets championship of France in 1938.

During World War II, Prokosch was a cultural attaché at the American Legation in Sweden. He spent most of the remainder of his life in Europe, where he led a peripatetic existence. His interests were sports (tennis and squash), lepidoptery, and the printing of limited editions of poems that he admired.

From early on, Prokosch sought to surround himself with a veil of mystification and cast his life into a hopeless riddle. Approaching his sixtieth year, he boasted that no person had succeeded in knowing him as an integral personality: "I have spent my life alone, utterly alone, and no biography of me could ever more than scratch the surface. All the facts in Who’s Who, or whatever, are so utterly meaningless. My real life (if I ever dared to write it!) has transpired in darkness, secrecy, fleeting contacts and incommunicable delights, any number of strange picaresque escapades and even crimes, and I don't think that any of my 'friends' have even the faintest notion of what I'm really like or have any idea of what my life has really consisted of. . . .With all the surface 'respectability,' diplomatic and scholarly and illustrious social contacts, my real life has been subversive, anarchic, vicious, lonely, and capricious."The publication of Voices: A Memoir in 1983, advertised as a record of his encounters with some of the century's leading artists and writers, returned Prokosch to the limelight. His early novels The Asiatics and The Seven Who Fled were reissued to much public acclaim. In 2010, Voices was shown to be almost wholly fictitious and part of an enormous hoax. Prokosch died in Le Plan-de-Grasse, an area of Grasse, France.