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Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938 in Milan, Italy) is an American journalist and writer. After attending Bryn Mawr, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later enrolled in Yale Law School. In 1968-69, she was chief film critic for the New York Times. Her film reviews were reprinted in her book "A Year in the Dark." 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 1987, she received an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University. Adler also turned to fiction. In 1974, her short story "Brownstone" won First Prize in the O. Henry Awards. Her novel Speedboat won the Ernest Hemingway Award for Best First Novel of 1976. Her next novel Pitch Dark (1983) was a highly regarded, and also best-selling, sequel. "Nobody writes better prose than Renata Adler's," John Leonard wrote in Vanity Fair. Adler's 1986 book Reckless Disregard: Westmoreland v. CBS et al., Sharon v. Time , an account of two libel trials and the First Amendment, was also praised: "This book should be under the Christmas tree of every lawyer and journalist," wrote William B. Shannon in The Washington Post; Edwin M. Yoder, also in The Washington Post, wrote, "Reckless Disregard is the best book about American journalism of our time." Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker (1999) occasioned, among journalists who had long felt themselves under attack by Adler, [ citation needed ] a kind of herd instinct of unprecedented outrage—11 negative pieces in various sections of The New York Times alone. [ citation needed ] The episode has already entered the lore of extreme pack journalism when its vanity is touched. [ citation needed ] In 2001, Adler published Canaries in the Mineshaft: Essays on Politics and the Media, a collection of pieces from The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper's, The New Republic, The Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair, and The New York Review of Books. Some of these, on the National Guard, Biafra, Pauline Kael, soap operas, the impeachment inquiries (of both Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton), and the press, had received awards. [ citation needed ] In 1987, Adler was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her "Letter from Selma" has been published in the Library of America volume of 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. Adler currently teaches at Boston University as a Visiting Professor of Journalism. Spy magazine once called her one of the "10 Most Litigious New Yorkers." Her son Stephen (born 1986) currently attends Boston University.
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