Passionate minds
Subtitle: women rewriting the world
By: [by] Claudia Roth Pierpont.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 2000
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 298
Subjects: American literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; Women and literature -- English-speaking countries -- History -- 20th century; English literature -- Women authors -- History and criticism; American literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; English literature -- 20th century -- History and criticism; Authors, American -- 20th century -- Biography; Authors, English -- 20th century -- Biography; Women authors, American -- Biography; Women authors, English -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Description: "A series of explorations of the biographies and literary achievements of twelve modern women writers, Passionate Minds tells the stories of women who "rewrote" the world that they inherited, shaping beliefs about vital issues ranging from religion to sex to race to politics.".

"Claudia Roth Pierpont organizes these probing portraits into three sections. Broadly speaking, the first deals with issues of sexual freedom, in essays on Olive Schreiner, Gertrude Stein, Anais Nin, and - surprisingly, for those who do not know her as a writer - Mae West. The second section, which examines Margaret Mitchell, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty, deals with issues of race and the American South during a period of wrenching change and retrenchment.

The third focuses on politics, particularly on the experience and historical interpretation of Soviet Communism and Nazi Germany: the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, Ayn Rand, Doris Lessing, and, in a dual essay that is also a moving account of an enduring friendship, Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy.

Throughout, Pierpont anatomizes both the lives and the art of her subjects and suggests their roles in the progress - if it has been progress - that has taken place in the attitudes of women over the course of the century."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes index.