has transpired in darkness, secrecy, fleeting contacts and incommunicable delights, any number of strange picaresque escapades and even crimes, and I don't think that any of my 'friends' have even the faintest notion of what I'm really like or have any idea of what my life has really consisted of.
.With all the surface 'respectability,' diplomatic and scholarly and illustrious social contacts, my real life has been subversive, anarchic, vicious, lonely, and capricious.
"[4] The publication of Voices: A Memoir in 1983, advertised as a record of his encounters with some of the century's leading artists and writers, returned Prokosch to the limelight.
Albert Camus said about The Seven Who Fled, "Prokosch has invented what might be called the geographical novel, in which he mingles sensuality with irony, lucidity with mystery.
"[6] The New York Times critic L. H. Titterton wrote about The Asiatics: Writing in The New York Times, Harold Strauss said about The Seven Who Fled (which won the Harper Prize): After the 1930s, popular interest in Prokosch's writing declined, but he continued to write steadily and to solidify his reputation as a writer’s writer with an elite following that included Thomas Mann, André Gide, Sinclair Lewis, Albert Camus, Thornton Wilder, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess, Raymond Queneau, Somerset Maugham, Lawrence Durrell, Gore Vidal, and T.S.
If Prokosch, like Faulkner, had limited his creative energies to one milieu, one region, he would certainly be counted today among the pillars of American literature.”[9] Among the most noteworthy of Prokosch’s latter-day writings are The Idols of the Cave (1946), a sophisticated story about a circle of aesthetes and socialites in New York City through the war years; Nine Days to Mukalla (1953), a dreamlike journey into the Arabian world; A Tale for Midnight (1955), a Gothicized retelling of the Cenci story; The Wreck of the Cassandra (1966), a realistic and poetic story of nine people castaway on a savage island; The Missolonghi Manuscript (1968), a “meditation” on the romantic artist; and America, My Wilderness (1972), an excursion into magical realism.
Prokosch was named a Commander in the Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government in 1984 and awarded the Volterra Prize two years later.