A Portrait of African American Lives in the Early Twentieth Century

An intimate portrait of women’s lives is depicted in the book My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism (Columbia University Press 2019). Nancy KIPNIS Miller ’57 writes of her close bond with three lauded feminist scholars and literary critics: Carolyn Heilbrun, Diane Middlebrook, and Naomi Schor, and shares the ways in which the group interacted with one another. As they forged new paths into a then male-dominated world, Miller writes that their relationships were given life in the days of second-wave feminism. Through documenting their personal experiences, she shows the strength of friendships in sustaining oneself amidst “aging and loss, ambition and rivalry, and competition and collaboration.”