Renata Adler

Renata Adler (born October 19, 1937) is an American author, journalist, and film critic. 2Early life Adler was born in Milan, Italy, and grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. (Her parents had fled Nazi Germany in 1933.) After earning a BA (summa cum laude) in Philosophy and German Literature from Bryn Mawr, where she studied under José Ferrater Mora, Adler studied for an MA in comparative literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards and Roman Jakobson, before pursuing her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne, where she gained a D. d'E.S. under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss. She later received her J.D. from Yale Law School, and an honorary doctorate of laws from Georgetown University. 2Career 3Journalism In 1962, Adler became a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker, and in 1968–69, she 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 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 Best Magazine Articles of the Seventie