 >>Of
the Modern Library's top 100 novels of the twentieth
century, only nine were written by women, and only two
made the top 50: Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse
and Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
No book by a woman of color is on the list.
>>In 1852, Fanny Fern became the first female
columnist in the U.S., and in 1855 the highest paid
newspaper writer.
 >>Jacquelyn
Mitchard's The Deep End of the Ocean, the first
book featured on Oprah's Book Club list in 1996, had
an initial print run of 100,000 copies. After Oprah,
it sold 1 million.
>>Author of the prize-winning novel The God
of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has denounced an
environmentally destructive plan to build dams along
India's Narmada River. Now, dam supporters who used
to call Roy the "pride of India" are burning copies
of her novel.
>>Since
1901, 9 out of 93 Nobel prizes in literature have been
awarded to women.
>>Beatrix
Potter, author of the children's series Peter Rabbit,
was also a botanist, landscape artist, farmer, and conservationist,
and amassed some  270
detailed watercolor paintings of fungi. She was also
one of the first to establish that lichens are not single
plants, but coexisting forms of fungus and algae.
>>When
Barbara Kingsolver suffered from insomnia after becoming
pregnant in 1986, her doctor prescribed scrubbing the
bathroom tiles with a toothbrush. Instead, Kingsolver
sat in a closet and began to write The Bean Trees.
>>Above
her desk, Alice Walker keeps a simple reminder: "I work
for the ancestors."
Compiled
by Kristin Bakke and Laurel Rayburn major sources: Britannica.com,
Democracy Now!, Friends of River Narmada, Kingsolver.com,
The Modern Library, The Nobel Foundation
|
