Vivian Gornick

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time...

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...

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....

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the principal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter...

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...

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-Reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life....

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 19th century. Endowed with a philosophical cast of mind...

Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the...

"Gornick's portraits demonstrate the driving force behind science." (The Philadelphia Inquirer) "Women in science stir the contemporary imagination. In their hyphenated identity is captured the pain and excitement of a culture struggling to mature." (The Washington Post) In this revised...