Frederic Prokosch; Expatriate Author, Poet and Professor

Frederic Prokosch, expatriate author, poet, professor, publisher and cultural attache, died Friday of a heart attack at his home at Plan de Grasse in southern France. He was 81.

His first novel, “The Asiatics,” received critical and popular success when it was first published in 1935. Translated into 17 languages, the novel--a semi-autobiographical account of a young American on an odyssey from Beirut to China--was praised by T.S. Eliot, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann and Albert Camus.

It was re-issued in 1983, when his last book, “Voices,” was published. The memoirs described his encounters with Bertolt Brecht, Gertrude Stein, Thomas Mann, Marc Chagall, Collette, James Joyce and Andre Malraux, among others.

Spread His Energies

Although Prokosch wrote other popular novels and several books of poetry, none received quite the acclaim of his first. Nobel author Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote of Prokosch that he had “not cared to husband his natural resources. . . . If Prokosch, like Faulkner, had limited his creative energies to one milieu, one region, he would certainly be counted today among the pillars of American literature.”

Nevertheless, his 1968 novel, “The Missalonghi Manuscript,” a fictional diary of the last four months of the life of the poet Byron, reawakened interest in his work. A reviewer for Spectator wrote that “Mr. Prokosch’s Byron is self-sufficient, he stands up, he speaks, he acts, he thinks; and he is so imaginatively realized that he has as much right to do so as the real Byron.”

Among his other novels were “The Seven Who Fled,” “Night of the Poor,” “The Skies of Europe,” “The Conspirators,” “Age of Thunder,” “Nine Days to Mukalla,” and “The Seven Sisters.”

Prokosch was born in 1908 in Madison, Wis., where his father was a professor of linguistics and his mother a concert pianist.

He graduated from Haverford College, obtained a Ph.D. from Yale, did post-doctoral studies at King’s College in Cambridge and taught at Yale and New York University in the 1930s, while writing and publishing poetry. He later moved to Europe.

Disliked Literary Trend

In an interview several years ago, Prokosch said he found himself “profoundly out of sympathy with the prevalent flavor of the American literary scene. It is actually trendy, obviously commercial, and intensely publicity-conscious. I look back wistfully at the solitude of Emily Dickinson, of Whitman and Melville, our greatest writers.

“The signs point toward a deepening vulgarization, a widening corruption by the media, by commerce, by vanity, by ostentatiousness. . . . It is difficult, isn’t it, quite honestly, to visualize the arrival of a marvelous poet or a magnificent novelist.”

In addition to his literary talents, Prokosch was an accomplished squash player and was the national champion of France in 1939 and of Sweden in 1944. During World War II, he was the cultural attache in Stockholm for the U.S. Office of War Information.

He is survived by a brother and a sister.