Betty Prashker, publisher of the feminist classics ‘Sexual Politics’ and ‘Backlash,’ dies at age 99

Back in the 1940s, Prashker had failed to convince Doubleday to take on a promising young writer she had met at a Greenwich Village party, James Baldwin. Now, her judgment was welcomed. In the late 1960s, she learned of a Columbia University graduate student writing a Ph.D dissertation on how women were depicted in Western literature. Prashker signed up the student, Millett, and published what became “Sexual Politics,” a cornerstone of second-wave feminism that Prashker would call an “educational experience for a dilettante like me.”

Over the following decades she would publish hundreds of books, including such hits as Larson’s “The Devil in the White City,” Auel’s “The Clan of the Cave Bear” series and Dunne’s “The Two Mrs. Grenvilles.” In the early 1990s, when she was editor-in-chief at Crown, she acquired a book on the anti-feminist wave of the previous decade that several other publishers had rejected, Faludi’s “Backlash: The Undeclared War Against Women.”

“My determined and devoted agent tried everything, including pitching the book as ‘a female “In Search of Excellence”’ (a long-running bestseller then) — with both of us praying no one would ask what that meant,” Faludi wrote on medium.com in 2014. ”In the end, the one person who was interested was Betty Prashker, editor-in-chief at Crown Publishers and, not coincidentally, a feminist pioneer.”

Not long after releasing “Backlash,” Prashker signed up an author whose first book had sold poorly and who was seeking a new publisher: Erik Larson had been working on an exploration of guns in the U.S., “Lethal Passage,” which Crown published in 1994.

“I first met with Betty in her office and after a while she started to get up and said ‘I have another meeting now,’ and I thought, ‘That’s it for me,’ ” Larson told The Associated Press during a telephone interview Friday. “But it turned out the meeting was for me. She leads me into a conference room and there all these people primed to work on the book — marketing, editorial, publicity, the whole deal. It was a terrific experience.”