Vivian Gornick

In this deeply etched and haunting memoir, Vivian Gornick tells the story of her lifelong battle with her mother for independence. There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond. Born...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, along with her comrade-in-arms, Susan B. Anthony, 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...

In The End of the Novel of Love, an acclaimed and provocative collection of criticism, Gornick applies the same intelligence, honesty, and insight that define her memoirs to an analysis of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century. She examines the work and lives of several authors she admires-including Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, George Meredith, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus-to ultimately posit that love,...

"For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick's essays have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing on writing from the course of her career, this book illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick's work: the painful process of understanding one's self that binds us to the larger world"--

""Many people have described the Famous Writer presiding at his dinner table. . . . He is famous; everybody remembers his remarks. . . . We forget that there were other family members at the table-a quiet person, now muffled by time, shadowy, whose heartpounded with love, perhaps, or rage." So begins The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, an uncommon biography devoted to one of those "lesser lives." As the author points...

An exploration of the artworks of The Frick Collection by a group of contemporary writers, artists and other cultural figures, from George Condo, Lydia Davis and Lena Dunham to Abbi Jacobson and Edmund White. Includes 61 reflections, with the contributors writing about an artwork that has personal significance, sharing how it has moved, challenged, puzzled or inspired them. Each text is accompanied by an illustration of the artwork.