Roger Whitney Shattuck (August 20, 1923 in Manhattan, New York – December 8, 2005 in Lincoln, Vermont) was an American writer best known for his books on French literature, art, and music of the twentieth century.
He left Yale to join the Army Air Corps, serving as a cargo pilot in the Pacific theater during the Second World War.
In this capacity he came into contact with luminaries of European culture such as Jean Cocteau, Alice B. Toklas and Georges Braque, and met his future wife Nora White, a dancer with the Ballets Russes.
He was the author of several highly regarded works of literary criticism—Proust's Way, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France - 1885 to World War I, Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography—and served as editor of the restored edition of Helen Keller's memoir The Story of My Life.
"[5] Jacques Derrida's 'Declarations of Independence', an early turn to address questions in legal and political philosophy, was written at Shattuck's suggestion on the bicentenary.