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 and Mary Mccarthy, and Olive Schreiner: Pierpont is clear-eyed in her examination of each member of this varied group, connectng her subjects firmly to the issues of sexual freedom, race, and politics that bound them to their times, even as she exposes the roots of their uniqueness.

"Pierpont['s] graceful essays are at once erudite and personal in their focus." ?The Boston Globe

"One of the most ceaselessly interesting books I've read in some time." ?Lorrie Moore, The New York Review of Books

Claudia Roth Pierpont, a contributor to The New Yorker since 1990, has received a Whiting Writer's Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University. She lives in New York City.