NOVELIST, ESSAYIST, CRITIC PRITCHETT, AT 96.

Byline: Associated Press 

V.S. Pritchett, a master of the English short story and keen observer of humanity who published more than 40 books of short stories, novels, essays, literary criticism and autobiographies, has died. He was 96.

Pritchett, who suffered a stroke in January, died Thursday at Whittington Hospital, said his son, Oliver Pritchett.

Novelist Elizabeth Bowen called Pritchett the ``most important English practitioner'' of the short story and The Times of London said of his travel writing: ``Everywhere he slips unobtrusively into the life of the country and lets it speak for itself.''

``I have generally liked all the people I have met in every country. I did not say what I thought. I did not reproach or criticize them - I listened,'' Pritchett said in an interview with the Associated Press before his 90th birthday.

Knighted in 1975 for services to literature, Pritchett was noted for his brilliant portraits of people in his stories and journalism.

``I made a point of believing what I heard even though it was fantasy, because it is part of a man's nature to have fantasies,'' he told the AP. ``It has been said that too many of my characters are eccentric but they are not really. They are people who are just speaking to themselves.''

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Ipswich, eastern England, on Dec. 16, 1900.

He called the first volume of his autobiography ``A Cab at the Door,'' recalling his father's penchant for frequent moves to elude his creditors. ``It gave me a lifelong love of travel,'' he said.

He credited his mother with giving him an eye for detail. Though not well educated, ``she was a tremendous talker and could set a scene.''

He left school at 15, had his early essays rejected, moved to Paris at 20 to work in the glue trade and was first published in London magazines with his account of an 80-mile walk from Paris to Orleans.

Going to live in France was the ``beginning of a passion . . . for identifying myself with people who were not my own and whose lives were governed by ideas alien to mine,'' he said.

Reporting from Ireland and Spain for the Christian Science Monitor gave him his first regular income as a writer and he then settled on a literary life in London.

From 1926 he was a contributor to the left-wing weekly New Statesman, and became a director of it in 1946.

``I reviewed a book of his essays about 20 years ago. I said I thought it would be very nice for literature if he lived forever,'' Gore Vidal, one of America's leading men of letters, said in a telephone interview from his home in Italy.

``I never said that about any other writer. He was the best critic in the English language.''

Pritchett, who never learned how to drive, made long walks in Spain, Ireland and North America between the two world wars.

``I didn't want to see the big cities and normal life,'' he said. ``I wanted to see abnormal life. I had heard about the poor whites in Tennessee so I went to see them in the Appalachians on the border with North Carolina.''

Walking along the Spanish-Portuguese border he found even poorer people who had no beds at all. ``They would say, `Have you brought your sack?' and they would fill it with straw,'' he recalled.

Pritchett's books included a biography of the Russian writer Anton Chekhov and ``Chekhovian'' was a term critics often applied to his own stories.

``He had the gift which only the greatest critics had; he read with understanding and described what he had read. You would have thought that would be easy, but most critics don't know how to do it,'' said Vidal.

His much-admired travel book, ``Dublin: A Portrait,'' appeared in 1967, the acclaimed ``On the Edge of the Cliff'' book of short stories was published in 1979, and he edited the ``Oxford Book of Short Stories'' in 1981.

Pritchett is survived by his wife and their son and daughter. A private funeral was planned.

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Photo: V.S. Pritchett

Practitioner of the short story