With a masterful ability to connect their social contexts to well-chosen and telling details of their personal lives, Claudia Roth Pierpont gives us portraits of twelve amazingly diverse and influential literary women of the twentieth century, women who remade themselves and the world through their art.
Gertrude Stein, Mae West, Margaret Mitchell, Eudora Welty, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, Anais Nin, Zora Neale Hurston, Marina Tsvetaeva, Hannah Arendt...

Longtime fans of Rich's writing will welcome this engaging and thoughtful biography of her life. There is also a wonderful section that includes many of Rich's essays and stories — which were published in magazines but never appeared in book form — as well as excerpts from her journal and letters.

"One of Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles for 2009" Phillip Lopate is the author of many books, including the essay collections Getting Personal (Basic), Against Joie de Vivre (Simon & Schuster), Portrait of My Body (Doubleday), and Bachelorhood (Little, Brown), as well as the anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay (Doubleday). Among his other books is Waterfront: A Walk around Manhattan (Crown). He teaches writing at Columbia University, and...

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that...

In a compelling approach structured as theme and variations, the author offers insightful profiles of a number of accomplished women born in Americas Gilded Age who lost and found themselves in books, and worked out a new life purpose around them. Some women, like Edith and Alice Hamilton, M. Carey Thomas, and Jane Addams, grew up in households filled with books, while less privileged women found alternative routes to expressive literacy. Jewish...

In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers—Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber—whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s.
Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, traces the intersections of their lives, and describes...

Sovereignty. Sugar. Revolution. These are the three axes this book uses to link the works of contemporary women artists from Haiti-a country excluded in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean literary studies-the Dominican Republic, and Cuba. In From Sugar to Revolution: Women's Visions of Haiti, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, Myriam Chancy aims to show that Haiti's exclusion is grounded in its historical role as a site of ontological defiance....

Despised by the intellectual establishment, Ayn Rand continues to attract many thousands of devoted followers. Her "Objectivist" movement preaches an uncompromising hard line on politics, art, sex, and psychological health. Though much has been written about Rand, The Ayn Rand Cult is the first book to explain the true origin of her ideas and to show how they were shaped into a new, atheistic religion. Jeff Walker shatters many myths about Rand, exposing...

A "valuable and intriguing" study of the lives and works of literary women who shaped expatriate Paris (NPR). Focusing on some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the early twentieth century, from Anais Nin to Alice B. Toklas and beyond, this book shines new light on how gender was experienced and expressed during an important moment in modern literary history. "Shari Benstock...