Books like Speedboat

Renata Adler (born October 19, 1938) is an American author, journalist, and film critic. Adler was a staff writer-reporter for The New Yorker, and in 1968–69, she served as chief film critic for The New York Times. She is also a writer of fiction.

Adler was born in Milan, Italy, to Frederick L. and Erna Adler while they were traveling from Germany to the United States. She has two older brothers. Her family had fled Nazi Germany in 1933 and moved to the U.S. in 1939.

She grew up in Danbury, Connecticut. After earning her B.A. (summa cum laude) in philosophy and German literature from Bryn Mawr College, where she studied under José Ferrater Mora, Adler studied for an M.A. in comparative literature at Harvard under I. A. Richards and Roman Jakobson. She then pursued her interest in philosophy, linguistics and structuralism at the Sorbonne under the tutelage of Jean Wahl and Claude Lévi-Strauss, and later received a J.D. from Yale Law School and an honorary doctorate of laws from Georgetown University.