Alan Pryce-Jones

Alan Payan Pryce-Jones (born November 18, 1908 in London , † January 22, 2000 in Galvestone , Texas ) (pseudonym: Arthur Pumphrey) was a British literary critic, writer and journalist. Among other things, he was editor of the Times Literary Supplement from 1948 to 1959.

Life and activity

Pryce-Jones was the son of officer Henry Morris Pryce-Jones and his wife Marion Vere Payan, née Dawnay. He attended Eton boarding school and was then educated at Magdalen College, Oxford University.

From 1928 to 1932 Pryce-Jones was an editor at The London Mercury magazine . In addition, he appeared since the early 1930s with various book publications to the public, with a focus on travelogues and fiction.

In the mid-1930s he lived in Austria with his first wife, who was of French-Austrian-Jewish descent, but left the country after its annexation by Nazi Germany in 1938.

Pryce-Jones joined the Liberal Party in 1937 because he agreed with this party's opposition to National Socialist Germany - which it represented at that time as the only major British party with this emphasis - in which he saw a great danger for Europe. In the party he became vice president of the Liberal Association in St. Marylebone. In 1939 he was considered by the party as the party's candidate for the Louth lower house constituency in Lincolnshire. However, due to the outbreak of war in the autumn of the same year, there was no nomination.

During the Second World War, Pryce-Jones was employed with a hussar regiment in France and then as a member of the intelligence service of the British Army at the Bletchley Park decryption center . Most recently he reached the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Due to his connections to the Bohemian industrialist family Petschek, Pryce-Jones was classified by the National Socialist police as an enemy of the state and placed on the special wanted list by the Reich Main Security Office in the spring of 1940 , a list of people who would be killed in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht Special SS commandos following the occupation troops should move into the country, should be located and arrested with special priority.

From 1948 to 1959 Pryce-Jones was the editor of the Times Literary Supplement , the weekly literary supplement to the Times .

In 1960 Pryce-Jones moved to the United States to work as a consultant for the Ford Foundation's Humanities and Arts Program (until 1963). He settled first in New York and then in Newport, Rhode Iceland , down.

In the 1970s and 1970s, Pryce-Jones contributed literary reviews for a variety of newspapers: The Observer (1959-1960), the New York Herald Tribune (1963-1966), The World Journal Tribune (1967-1968) and Newsday (1969-1971 ). He wrote theater reviews for Theater Arts magazine .

In addition to his journalistic work, Pryce-Jones performed numerous honorary functions: From 1950 to 1961 he was director of the Old Vic Trust. from 1956 to 1961 member of the Advisory Board of the Royal College of Music.

family

In 1934 Pryce-Jones married Therese "Poppy" Fould-Springer (1908–1953), a daughter of the banker Eugène Fould-Springer. With her he had a son, David Pryce-Jones.

In his second marriage, Pryce-Jones married Mary Jean Kempner Thorne († 1969) in 1968.

Fonts

• The Spring Journey , 1931.
• People in the South , 1932.
• Beethoven , 1933.
• 27 Poems , 1935.
• Private Opinion , 1936.
• Pink Danube , 1939. (Published under the pseudonym "Arthur Pumphrey".)
• Nelson, to Opera , 1954.
• Vanity Fair, a Musical Play , 1962. (With Robin Miller and Julian Slade.)
• The Bonus of Laughter , 1987.

Web links

• Eric Pace: "Alan Pryce-Jones, 91, Editor and Eminent Man of Letters" (Obituary for Pryce-Jones in the New York Times, February 2, 2000)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Pryce-Jones on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).