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 UC Berkeley, though only Didion finished there). But perhaps none of that’s true; perhaps it’s an accident. Nevertheless, the broader point is worth mentioning: cultures are continually renewed by outsiders, who leverage their estrangement into influence—and then become insiders, in a universe of their own devising.
It’s Fisher who interests me here, because she’s the least known and celebrated of the lot, the only one who, even to date, hasn’t found her proper place. She should have a Library of America volume, if not two or three, but she has none. Her fans, and I’m certainly one, are a devoted lot, but we’re surprisingly small in number. Many others have read a thing or two or heard her name. Many more have not. The subhead in her obituary (she died in 1992) read “Ignored
