Claudia Roth Pierpont is a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has written about the arts for more than twenty years. The subjects of her articles have ranged from James Baldwin to Katharine Hepburn, from Machiavelli to Mae West. A collection of Pierpont’s essays on women writers, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World, was published in 2000 and was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award. Her 2013 book, Roth Unbound, is the first full-length critical study of writer Philip Roth. Her most recent collection of essasys is American Rhapsody (2016). Pierpont has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers of the New York Public Library. She has a PhD in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University. She lives in New York City.
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Passionate MindsWomen Rewriting the WorldFrom"The Strong Woman: Mae West"
Because there were no available roles for a woman who drove men wild and enjoyed them in bed by the dozen and gave as good as she got and didn’t want to marry and never suffered for any of it, Mae West had to become a writer before she could be a movie star. She began her literary career with a sketch for a vaudeville act in 1913, when she was twenty and her fame still rested largely on her ability to perform a well-advertised “muscle dance in a sitting position.” By the time her first successful theatrical opus, entitled Sex, got her arrested in New York, in 1927, she’d been honing her playwriting skill alongside her nonpareil shimmy and cooch for over a decade.
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Passionate MindsWomen Rewriting the WorldFrom"A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston"
Hurston was at the height of her powers when, in 1937, she first fell seriously out of step with the times. She had written a love story—“Their Eyes Were Watching God”—and become a counterrevolutionary. Against the tide of racial anger, she wrote about sex and talk and work and music and life’s unpoisoned pleasures, suggesting that these things existed even for people of color, even in America; and she was judged superficial—by implication, merely feminine. In Wright’s account, her novel contained “no theme, no message, no thought.” By depicting a Southern small-town world in which blacks kept mostly to themselves, enjoyed their own rich cultural traditions, and were able to assume responsibility for their own lives, Hurston appeared a blithely reassuring supporter of the status quo.
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Passionate MindsWomen Rewriting the WorldFrom"Twilight of the Goddess: Ayn Rand"
At a Fountainhead anniversary banquet held by the Ayn Rand Institute, nearly two hundred people paid a hundred and twenty-five dollars each to listen to excerpts from Rand’s private letters, and to watch each other bid more than five thousand dollars for her blue-green metal ashtray and matching lighter (the last-minute addition of two cigarettes marked with a dollar sign, a famous Rand prop, doubtless drove up the price) and twenty-five thousand dollars for the manuscript of her last speech, made in 1981 to the National Committee for Monetary Reform, for which Rand herself had been paid in gold. Throughout the festivities, responsively conservative business executives, teachers, secretaries, lawyers, and a scattering of college students who’d been barely old enough to read at the time of Rand’s death discussed the principles of heroic individualism by which she had taught them all to live.
Passionate Minds:Women Rewriting the World
“In chronicling and examining Roth’s fictional oeuvre Pierpont brilliantly captures much of Roth’s life in her words . . . Pierpont brings admiration and affection to her assessment, while never relinquishing critical integrity.” —Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe [on Roth Unbound]
“A scintillating collection of brief lives of women writers, a book that sparkles with intelligence, wit and human interest . . . Pierpont's adroit melding of biography and criticism makes most of today's literary scholarship seem lame and ponderous.” —The New York Times Book Review [on Passionate Minds]
“Claudia Roth Pierpont's book, a collection of articles previously published in The New Yorker, deals unapologetically with the ways in which class, age, race, and sexual orientation affect the style and content of women's writing. And her subjects are impressive, not least for their diversity . . . ” —Arturo Sacchetti, The Boston Book Review [on Passionate Minds]
Selected Works
