Vivian Gornick Wiki

Vivian Gornick, who was born on June 14. 1935 in Bronx, New York is an American critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist. She has written about herself in friendship, in marriage, as a daughter, as a woman living alone in New York, as a writer who has difficulty with writing.

There are moments when she ­describes her struggles and her failures in love and works with such calm candor it seems that there is nothing about herself that she is afraid to see.

Her ­memoirs include Fierce Attachments 1987, about her childhood in the Bronx and her lifelong ­antagonism with her ­mother, and Approaching Eye Level (1996), a collection of essays about her life as one loner among many in Manhattan. Of the awards and honors, she has won for her work, the most recent is the selection of her “Letter from Greenwich Village”.

Vivian Gornick Age

Vivian Gornick is an American critic, journalist, essayist, and memoirist. She was born on 14th June 1935 in The Bronx, New York, NY, She is 83 years old as 2018. She received a B.A. from City College in 1957 and an M.A. from New York University in 1960. After working in book publishing, she ­became a ­reporter for the Village Voice in 1969 and was soon assigned to cover the feminist movement, whose insights would strongly influence her work. She began writing criticism, mainly for the Voice and The Nation, when relations between men and women were changing fast, and she registered those ­changes in her own reading.

Vivian Gornick Husband

Her Ukrainian-born parents, whom Gornick describes as “harried, working-class immigrants,” were committed socialists who met and married in New York. Since leaving the Village Voice, she has divided her time between freelance writing and teaching in creative writing programs. She has been married and divorced twice.

Vivian Gornick Books

Most Popular Books

• Fierce Attachments
• The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
• Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales
• Approaching Eye Level
• The romance of American Communism

Vivian Cornick The romance of American Communism

What the author does is to bring alive the many people who sincerely believed that building Communism in America would lead to a better life.

I have known some of these people and was always curious to learn more about who they were, how they came to their actions and what became of them after the collapse of their dream.

Most of them were deeply idealistic on one hand and on the other hand they also could be very difficult to be with. Communism became their religion and they could be quite insistent that it was the only way. This black and white view of life comes through in the book.

The book could very well be describing the lives of religious fanatics and, in a way, they were. Their church was the Communist Party, USA and their holy land was the USSR. Neither could do any wrong.

The Odd Woman and The City

A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same.

Running steadily through the book is her’s an exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has “shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy” she has known.

The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator’s continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street, she makes sense of what she sees.