Francine Prose (born April 1, 1947, Brooklyn, New York) is an American writer. Since March 2007 she has been the president of PEN American Center. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991.
She sat on the board of judges for the PEN/Newman's Own Award. Her novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on college campuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award.
She is a Visiting Professor of Literature at Bard College. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. Another, The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007.
Prose received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988.
Famous quotes containing the words francine and/or prose:
“Francine Evans: That seat’s taken.
Jimmy Doyle: I know it’s taken. But I’m gonna sit here and I’m gonna figure out another angle.”
—Earl MacRauch, U.S. screenwriter, Mardik Martin, and Martin Scorsese. Francine Evans (Liza Minnelli)
“Despots play their part in the works of thinkers. Fettered words are terrible words. The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people. Something emerges from that enforced silence, a mysterious fullness which filters through and becomes steely in the thought. Repression in history leads to conciseness in the historian, and the rocklike hardness of much celebrated prose is due to the tempering of the tyrant.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)