Vivian Gornick

"A series of essays exploring the different books that shaped Gornick throughout her life"--

"A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same." --

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was one of the most important leaders of the movement to gain American women the vote. But, as Vivian Gornick argues in this passionate, vivid biographical essay, Stanton is also the greatest feminist thinker of the nineteenth century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind large enough to grasp the immensity that women's rights addressed, Stanton developed a devotion to equality uniquely American in character. Her writing...

For general readers, Gornick, a memoirist, essayist, and critic, draws from interviews with about 100 women to describe their experiences as scientists and the contributions they made to biology, chemistry, physics, physiology, experimental psychology, and other sciences, addressing issues of discrimination and stereotypes along the way. Updated to include recent developments, this revised edition has been published on the 25th anniversary of the...

Writer and critic Vivian Gornick's long-unavailable classic exploring how Left politics gave depth and meaning to American life. "Before I knew that I was Jewish or a girl I knew that I was a member of the working class." So begins Vivian Gornick's exploration of how the world of socialists, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now...

This volume is an anthology of articles written by some 30 female scholars and writers. Each woman draws upon mastery of her discipline and on a commitment to eliminating the social and personal costs of sexism; and also the arguments from current social customs and "Nature" that the editors feel lock both men and women into life-denying stereotypes of masculinity and femininity.

Presents the history of women's suffrage in the United States through the dramatic, often turbulent friendship of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan Anthony. Part 1 covers the years from their youth up to the establishment of the National Woman Suffrage Association in 1868. Part 2 spans the period from 1868 to the passage in 1919 of the 19th amendment to the Constitution which gave women the vote.

A collection of the year's best essays, selected by award-winning writer Vivian Gornick.