Women writers: shaping the American literary landscape

Zora Neale Hurston was a writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s who wrote about African American culture of the rural South. Hurston was rediscovered in the 1970s and her work reappraised in
a consideration of sexual and racial issues as a black female writer.

'Sweat' (1926), is the best of her short fiction, a precursor in style and theme to her celebrated 1937 novel, Their Eyes were Watching God.

Mary McCarthy's debut novel, The Company She Keeps (1942) was bold in form and content. Often using material from her own life as fiction, she waded into new areas in women's literary fiction, trying to express something
'essential about the female experience'. Norman Mailer said of the book:
'It was a consummate piece of work. It seemed so finished. And at the same time she was taking this risk. She was revealing herself in ways she never did again. She was letting herself be found out.'

Joan Didion has been writing fiction and nonfiction that dissects and lays bare American life since the 1960s.
“What can people get from seeing themselves as the passive victims of chance? Didion’s heroines get
off the hook of responsibility, and find the ignorance that is bliss. Didion is among the few women writers
who see fragmentation as a force for survival, who applies anarchic, disintegrative themes to the lives of
women.' Josephine Hendin, Vulnerable People: A View of American Fiction since 1945 (Oxford 1979)

Elizabeth Hardwick's Sleepless Nights furthers the exploration of combining autobiography and fiction to find that essential truth, or meditation, about a woman's life.'Sleepless Nights - a novel of mental weather - enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe,semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash.' - Susan Sontag, The New Yorker.