Bancroft Press in the Media

Stephen Hunter, Post Film Critic, Novelist, and Bancroft Press Author,
Wins 2003 Pulitzer for Criticism 4/7/03
Praised for ‘Authoritative Film Criticism that's Intellectually Rewarding, Pleasure to Read'

Stephen Hunter was born in Kansas City, MO, in 1946, and grew up in the Chicago area. He graduated in the upper three-quarters of his class from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in 1968 and then spent two years in the United States Army.

He joined the Baltimore Sun in 1971 and worked there for 26 years as a copy reader, book review editor, feature writer and, beginning in 1981, as the paper's first full-time critic. He served in that job for 16 years, twice being named a Pulitzer finalist.

In 1997, he joined The Washington Post as film critic. He won the American Society of Newspaper editors award for distinguished writing in criticism in 1998.

As a successful novelist and former book editor, Mr. Hunter has a special understanding for the mechanics of story telling. As a film critic, he established himself in Baltimore and then Washington as an irreverent, fearless, spontaneous, explosively funny voice. And like the great Pauline Kael, he is forever suggesting that art can be a good, lusty, happy thing, that doesn't always have to be an immersion in a new level of human misery. As he often tells his readers, he thinks going to the movies is often a guilty pleasure. Indeed, the words he wrote of Anthony Quinn and Zorba might apply to Mr. Hunter and film criticism: one of those rare, perfect unions of man and part-energetic, unperturbable, loud, attractive, graceful, earthy.

Mr. Hunter has written 11 novels and one book of collected film criticism. The father of two children, he lives in Baltimore.