GORNICK, VIVIAN

GORNICK, VIVIAN (1935– ), U.S. author. A product of New York City's vibrant, multi-ethnic, and often socialist urban environment, Gornick attended City College and received her master's degree from New York University. A veteran journalist, she has written for the Village Voice, the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, The Nation, Ms magazine, the New York Times Book Review and Sunday Magazine, The Three Penny Review, and The New Yorker. She also taught at the University of Colorado and Pennsylvania State University. Gornick rose to prominence in the early 1970s as one of the most articulate of the feminist writers. Her essay "Woman as Outsider" in Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness (1971), which she edited, paints an unflattering portrait of women's role "in the fierce unjoyousness of Hebraism." Later books explored a variety of subjects, including In Search of Ali Mahmoud: An American Woman in Egypt (1973); The Romance of American Communism (1977); Essays in Feminism (1978); Women in Science: Recovering the Life Within (1983); and the novel/memoir Fierce Attachments (1987). Gornick also wrote Women in Science: 100 Journeys Into the Territory (1990); Approaching Eye Level (1996); The End of the Novel of Love (1997); and The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative (1999). In 1989, she became a tenured professor at the University of Arizona. She was also a literary critic and writer of memoirs. In her research, she explored the interrelationship of feminism, psychoanalysis, and literature. In the early 2000s, in conjunction with a group of New York artists and activists, Gornick helped found THEA, the House of Elder Artists. THEA was planned as a not-for-profit senior residence in Manhattan for men and women in the arts who continue to engage in a working relationship with New York City, thereby enriching its cultural life. The 100-unit apartment building was designed to enable residents to give public readings, performances, and master classes based on the wealth of knowledge and the expertise they had accumulated over a lifetime. (Sylvia Barack Fishman / Ruth Beloff (2nd ed.)