"Fear... is forward. No one is afraid of yesterday.""Idle people are often bored and bored people, unless they sleep a lot, are cruel. It is not accident that boredom and cruelty are great preoccupations in our time.""In the strange heat all litigation brings to bear on things, the very process of litigation fosters the most profound misunderstandings in the world.""It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own; it simply erases your own experience in history.""No one ever confides a secret to one person only. No one destroys all copies of a document.""Nothing defines the quality of life in a community more clearly than people who regard themselves, or whom the consensus chooses to regard, as mentally unwell."
Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. (Her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933.) After attending Bryn Mawr, The Sorbonne, and Harvard, she became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Georgetown University.
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."
Adler is also a high-regarded fiction writer. 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," critic John Leonard wrote in Vanity Fair.
Non-fiction
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) was decried by many journalists in the New York Times.
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.
In 2008, Adler contributed an essay to the Corcoran Gallery of Art exhibition catalog Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power. Her introduction, a memoir of her close friendship and work with the photographer, includes details of her work as editor of Avedon's 1976 photo-essay for Rolling Stone magazine, "The Family."
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 BestCivil 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.
Adler taught for three years in both the University Professors Honors Program and the Journalism Department of Boston University. Her son Stephen (born 1986) has been a student at Boston University.
