Vivian Gornick is an American critic, essayist, and memoirist. For many years she wrote for the Village Voice. She currently teaches writing at The New School

The New School

The New School is a university in New York City, located mostly in Greenwich Village. From its founding in 1919 by progressive New York academics, and for most of its history, the university was known as the New School for Social Research. Between 1997 and 2005 it was known as New School University...

. For the 2007-2008 academic year, she was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

. She caused a controversy when she said that she had invented parts of Fierce Attachments, her largely autobiographical work.

Quotes

"[Y]ou cannot teach people how to write--the gift of dramatic expressiveness, of a natural sense of structure, of making language sink down beneath the surface of description, all that is inborn, cannot be taught--but you can teach people how to read, how to develop judgment about a piece of writing: their own as well as that of others."
From The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001)

"Penetrating the familiar is by no means a given. On the contrary, it is hard, hard work."
From The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001)

"Being a housewife is an illegitimate profession... The choice to serve and be protected and plan towards being a family-maker is a choice that shouldn't be. The heart of radical feminism is to change that."
"The Daily Illini," 25 April 1981

Partial bibliography

• ``Women in Science: Then and Now (2009, The Feminist Press at CUNY)
• The Men in My Life (2008, MIT Press) [National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for criticism]
• The Solitude of Self: Thinking About Elizabeth Cady Stanton (2005, FSG)
• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (2001, FSG)
• The End of the Novel of Love (1997, Beacon Press)
• Approaching Eye Level (1996)
• Fierce Attachments: A Memoir (1987, FSG)
• Women in Science: 100 Journeys into the Territory (1983)
• Essays in Feminism (1978)
• The Romance of American Communism (1977)
• The Ancient Dream " (Sep/Oct 2010, Boston Review)
• In Search of Ali Mahmoud: an American Woman in Egypt (1973, Saturday Review Press)

External links

• Interview with Gornick in the Boston Review
  Boston Review
  Boston Review is a bimonthly American political and literary magazine. The magazine covers, specifically, political debates, literature, and poetry...