The Odd Woman and the City

New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. First edition of Vivian Gornick’s meditation on being a woman and a writer in New York City, warmly inscribed to fellow feminist critic and New Yorker Kate Millett, author of Sexual Politics (1970). Raised in the Bronx, and based in Manhattan, Gornick describes the city as the source of her own creative and emotional equilibrium: “nothing healed me of a sore and angry heart like a walk through the city. To see in the street the fifty different ways people struggle to remain human -- the variety and inventiveness of survival techniques -- was to feel the pressure relieved, the overflow draining off. I felt in my nerve endings the common refusal to go under. That refusal became company.” Gornick first encountered recipient Kate Millett while covering the women’s liberation movement for the Village Voice in the late 1960s; as editor, she would include Millett’s essay “Woman as Outsider” in her 1971 anthology, Woman in Sexist Society. Provenance: the Estate of Kate Millett. A fine inscribed copy, linking two important second-wave feminists. Single volume, measuring 7.5 x 5 inches: [8], 175, [3]. Original grey paper boards titled in blue, original unclipped color pictorial jacket. Inscribed “For Kate, / love always, / Vivian” on half-title.