theprosewriter is Peter I. Rose, a sociologist, ethnographer, world traveler and sometime travel journalist who has been studying, teaching, and writing about human encounters and interactions for 65 years. He has long been anchored in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he is Sophia Smith Professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology and Senior Fellow of the Kahn Liberal Arts Institute at Smith College. Over the years he has served as a visiting professor at many universities in this country; a Fulbright professor in the U.K., Japan, Australia, Austria, and The Netherlands; and a research fellow and visiting scholar at many institutions here and abroad, most recently at the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford University.
One of his recent books is also his oldest. The first edition of They and We: Racial and Ethnic Relations in the U.S. and Beyond was published by Random House in 1964. In 2014, Paradigm/Routledge released the 7th—and 50thanniversary—edition. It appeared a few months after Levellers Press published Postmonitions of a Peripatetic Professor. In the pages of that colorful memoir, the author comments on six decades of academic life in the U.S. and abroad, his work as an editor, researcher and consultant, his excursions as a travel writer, and some intimate portraits of those he met along the way. With a Foreword by the author’s former Smith College student, playwright and novelist Andrea Hairston, the narrative is also enriched by occasional extracts from his earlier writings in essays, stories, reviews, poems, and books, including They and We, The Subject is Race, The Ghetto and Beyond, Strangers in Their Midst, Tempest-Tost, Guest Appearances and Other Travels in Time and Space and With Few Reservations.
In 2016 Transaction Publishers reissued—with new prefaces—his two-volume book of controversies, Americans from Africa (Vol. 1: Slavery and Its Aftermath; Vol. II Old Memories, New Moods) first published by Atherton Press in 1970. It now appears under the imprint of Routledge. A year later Routledge published a compilation of Rose’s selective writings in Mainstream and Margins Revisited: Sixty Years of Commentary on Minorities in America.
Working in an entirely different literary genre from anything he had done before, in 2018 Sea House Books published his novella, Max: The Sea-Dog, a modern day Cape Cod saga for children of all ages, with illustrations by the artist, Evanleigh Davis. In 2021, the same publisher released a new story, “I have a friend named Conor.” A third one, Partying Penguins in Patagonia, was published in July, 2023.
On December 31, 2020, Routledge released his newest book, Tropes of Intolerance: Pride, Prejudice, and the Politics of Fear.
