Renata Adler

Renata Adler (born October 19, 1937) is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker for over thirty years and the chief film critic for The New York Times from 1968 to 1969. She has also published several fiction and non-fiction books, and has been awarded the O. Henry Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the PEN/Hemingway Award.

Adler was born in Milan, Italy, to Frederick L. and Erna Adler while they waited for their visas to immigrate to the United States. She has two older brothers. Her family had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and moved to the United States in 1939.

Adler grew up in Danbury, Connecticut and attended Bryn Mawr College, where she studied philosophy under José Ferrater Mora and German literature. She graduated in 1959. She then pursued her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at Paris-Sorbonne University under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss, graduating with a Diplôme d'études supérieures spécialisées (equivalent to a master's degree) in 1961. She also studied comparative literature under I. A. Richards and Roman Jakobson at Harvard University, graduating with a Master of Arts in 1962. She went on to receive a Juris Doctor from Yale Law School in 1979.

In 1962, Adler became a staff writer for The New Yorker, working under William Shawn. Around the same time, she also worked briefly as a book reviewer for Harper's Bazaar under a pseudonym.^[which?] In 1967, she traveled to Vietnam on assignment for McCall's magazine; while traveling abroad, she also covered the Six-Day War for The New Yorker. Adler also reported on the Selma March and the Nigerian Civil War in Biafra. While at The New Yorker, Adler became a mentee and close friend of colleague Hannah Arendt. In 1968, despite not being involved in the film trade, she was hired by Arthur Gelb to succeed Bosley Crowther as film critic for The New York Times, although she retained her office at The New Yorker. Her esoteric, literary reviews were not well received by film studio distributors. She was unhappy with the Times' deadlines and in February 1969, she was replaced by Vincent Canby and returned to The New Yorker, remaining there for another two decades. Her film reviews were collected in the book A Year in the Dark, published in 1969.

Her reporting and essays for The New Yorker on politics, war, and civil rights were reprinted in Toward a Radical Middle. Her introduction to that volume provided an early definition of radical centrism as a political philosophy. Her "Letter from the Palmer House" was included in the collection The Best Magazine Articles of the Seventies.

In the early 1970s, Adler taught theater and film at Hunter College in New York City. In 1973, John Doar, whom Adler had met while covering the Selma March, approached her with an offer to write speeches for Peter Rodino, the chairman of the Nixon impeachment inquiry of the House Judiciary Committee. Adler accepted, and would later publish Pitch Dark (1983), which fictionalized an affair she had with Burke Marshall, a fellow committee member.

In 1980, upon the publication 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-1960s 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. Adler's motivations were considered to be either wanting to "uphold The New Yorker's usually high standards" or stemming from "personal differences with Kael". The piece, which stunned Kael and quickly became infamous in literary circles, was described by Time as "the New York literary Mafia['s] bloodiest case of assault and battery in years." New Yorker editor William Shawn called Adler's attack "unfortunate" and mentioned his admiration for Kael, saying that her "work is its own defense"; David Denby, of New York magazine, wrote that Adler "had an old-fashioned notion of prose". Kael's own response was indifferent: "I'm sorry that Ms. Adler doesn't respond to my writing. What else can I say?"

In 1998, Adler wrote a long essay about the Starr Report (issued by Independent Counsel Ken Starr about his investigation of President Bill Clinton) for Vanity Fair. The Starr Report led to Clinton's impeachment; Adler argued that it contained evidence of Starr's abuse of power in his pursuit of Clinton. She called the Starr Report "an utterly preposterous document: inaccurate, mindless, biased, disorganized, unprofessional, and corrupt. What it is textually is a voluminous work of demented pornography, with many fascinating characters and several largely hidden story lines. What it is politically is an attempt, through its own limitless preoccupation with sexual material, to set aside, even obliterate, the relatively dull requirements of real evidence and constitutional procedure."