Peter Sherwin Prescott (July 15, 1935 - April 23, 2004)[1] was an American author and book critic.
In the April 10, 1978 issue of Newsweek, he accused John Gardner of plagiarism, citing a previously published article by Sumner J. Ferris.
In 1981 he published The Child Savers, which won the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights 1982 Book award given annually to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes - his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.
"[2] Prescott served on the 1981, 1983, 1987 and 1989 juries for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction at the behest of administrator Robert Christopher, a former Newsweek colleague.
Prescott is referred to in Stephen King's 1987 novel Misery as someone who would probably blast the protagonist, Paul Sheldon's, next novel "in his finest genteel disparaging manner.