Biography

He joined the faculty of Swarthmore College in 1967. He published more than a dozen books and more than 100 articles on the economics of Eastern Europe, agriculture, income inequality, and other topics.

He grew up in Mansfield, Ohio and graduated from Oberlin College, where he majored in chemistry. He received a master's degree in economics from Yale, then spent time in Europe working on his doctorate. He received his PhD in 1962, shortly after his return from captivity in Berlin.

He was involved in the Cold War prisoner exchange between East and West dramatized in the movie Bridge of Spies (2015). American pilot Francis Gary Powers and convicted Soviet spy Rudolf Ivanovich Abel were exchanged as soon as word came that Pryor had been released from an East German prison several miles away. He was a Yale graduate student in economics who was detained in East Berlin for nearly six months, denounced as a spy by his captors, but never charged with a crime.