Heroines: From Life and Literature

According to a recent survey, Obama has beaten out Jesus as America's most admired person. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the top ten heroes were nearly all men, with Mother Theresa coming in at #10.

According to a recent survey, Obama has beaten out Jesus as America's most admired person. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, the top ten heroes were nearly all men, with Mother Theresa coming in at #10.

The incredibly prolific (bitch has written over 70 books!) literary badass Joyce Carol Oates has been nominated for not one, but two National Book Critics Circle awards. Oates was nominated in fiction for The Gravedigger's Daughter, and in autobiography for The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates. Other female nominees for…
Most psuedo-intellectual college age girls who fancy themselves writers will, at some point, worship at the altar of Didion (or maybe that was just me and all my poseur friends!). [No, it wasn't just you. -Ed.] Anyway, in today's Washington Post, resident book critic Jonathan Yardley discusses his "on-and-off love…
Writer Diane Middlebrook, author of the seminal Anne Sexton biography, has died at the age of 68. Middlebrook was born in Idaho and published her first poem at the age of eight. She got her Ph.D. in literature at Yale and taught at Stanford for 35 years. In addition to the Sexton bio, Middlebrook wrote well-received…
Elizabeth Hardwick, the literary critic, novelist and co-founder of the New York Review of Books passed away on Sunday at the age of 91. She hung out with Billie Holiday in the 40s and lived the NYC Bohemian life, as Hardwick described it, full of "love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor." Hardwick is also known…