Renata Adler life and biography

Renata Adleris an American author, journalist and film critic.

In 1968-69, Adler served as chief film critic for the New York Times. Her film reviews were collected in her book "A Year in the Dark." She then rejoined the staff of The New Yorker, where she remained for four decades. Her reporting and essays for The New Yorker on politics, war, and civil rights were reprinted in "Toward a Radical Middle."

Her "Letter from the Palmer House" was included in the Best Magazine Articles of the Seventies.

In 1980, upon the release of her New Yorker colleague Pauline Kael's collection When the Lights Go Down, she published an 8,000-word review in The New York Review of Books that dismissed the book as "jarringly, piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless," arguing that Kael's post-sixties work contained "nothing certainly of intelligence or sensibility," and faulting her "quirks [and] mannerisms," including Kael's repeated use of the "bullying" imperative and rhetorical question. The piece, which stunned Kael and quickly became infamous in literary circles, was described by Time magazine as "the New York literary Mafia['s] bloodiest case of assault and battery in years."

Author of books:

Toward a Radical Middle: Fourteen Pieces of Reporting and Criticism (1969, essays)
A Year in the Dark: Journal of a Film Critic 1968-69 (1970, essays)
Speedboat (1976, novel)
Pitch Dark (1983, novel)
Reckless Disregard (1986, nonfiction)
Politics and Media: Essays (1988, essays)
Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker (1999)
Private Capacity (2000)
Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and Media (2001, essays)
Irreparable Harm: The U.S. Supreme Court and the Decision that Made George W. Bush President (2004)

Renata's Honors:

In 1968, Adler's essay "Letter from the Palmer House," which appeared in The New Yorker, was included in The Best magazine Articles of 1967. In 1975, Adler's short story "Brownstone," received First Prize in the O.Henry Awards Best Short Stories of 1974. The same story was selected for the O.Henry Collection Best Short Stories of the Seventies. Adler's novel "Speedboat" received the Ernest Hemingway prize as the best first novel of 1976. In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. That same year, she received an honorary doctorate from the Georgetown University School of Law. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of Best Civil Rights Reporting. An essay from her tenure as film critic of The New York Times is included in the Library of America volume of American Film Criticism. In 2004, she served as a Media Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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