num_pages: 384
description: A deeply researched and uncommonly engrossing book profiling ten trailblazing literary women including Dorothy Parker and Joan Didion ( Paris Review ).In Sharp  Michelle Dean explores the lives of ten women of vastly different backgrounds and points of view who all made a significant contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of America. These womenDorothy Parker Rebecca West Hannah Arendt Mary McCarthy Susan Sontag Pauline Kael Joan Didion Nora Ephron Renata Adler and Janet Malcolmare united by what Dean calls sharpness the ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit.Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of twentieth-century New York where gossip-filled parties gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan Review or the New York Review of Books . It is also a passionate portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their writing despite the extreme condescension of the male-dominated cultural establishment.Mixing biography literary criticism and cultural history Sharp is a celebration of this group of extraordinary women an engaging introduction to their works and a testament to how anyone who feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer and perhaps change the world.
language: English
title: Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion
publisher: Grove Press