Of course, many of the great American prose writers of the 20th century were women, especially when it came to essays and criticism: Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, M.F.K. Fisher. What strikes me as more surprising, or at least more notable, is that the last four all came from California, far removed from the magazine culture where they made their names.
Why this should be the case I can’t say, not least because the figures I mention vary widely in substance and style, method and consequence. I could make some kind of argument about independent and self-reliant pioneer spirits, about the death and rebirth of the New World on the beaches of the Pacific coast, about first-rate public universities (Kael, Sontag, and Didion went to…
