Vivian Gornick

“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, communists, and progressives in the 1940s and 1950s created a rich, diverse world where ordinary men and women felt their lives connected to a larger human project. Now...

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics, and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, All That is Given illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what...

Vivian Gornick's relationship with her mother is difficult. At the age of forty-five, she regularly meets her mother for strolls along the streets of Manhattan. Occasionally they'll hit a pleasant stride—fondly recalling a shared nostalgia or chuckling over a mutual disgust—but most often their walks are tinged with contempt, irritation, and rages so white hot her mother will stop strangers...

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 honourable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and...

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays, written with her characteristic clarity of perception and vibrant prose, have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Drawing writing from the course of her career, All That is Given illuminates one of the driving themes behind Gornick’s work: that the painful process of understanding one's self is what...

Vivian Gornick's writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and connect. In these seven seminal essays, Gornick chronicles the New York streets that energise her and looks back on the dangerously charged atmosphere of the Catskills where she waitressed as a student in the late fifties. She...

The acclaimed author of The Odd Woman and the City celebrates the joys of rereading and the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life. A celebration of passionate reading from the acclaimed author and critic. In nine stunning essays, the inimitable Vivian Gornick returns to the books that have shaped her. From a reporter in 1970s New York,...