New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century

Sabrina Fuchs Abrams is Professor of English in the School for Graduate Studies at the State University of New York, Empire State. She is the author of Mary McCarthy: Gender, Politics, and the Postwar Intellectual and editor of Transgressive Humor of American Women Writers and Literature of New York. She is founder and cochair of the Mary McCarthy Society and Associate Editor of Studies in American Humor.

"This book never flattens out its subject to construct a single, monolithic New York or gendered 'type' of wit. All these writers are represented as complex individuals, whose comedy came in many varieties and served diverse functions, reflecting the creators' identities and the concerns of their different communities. Fuchs Abrams's admiration for these women, with their groundbreaking approaches to urban style and humor, is evident throughout. She does a superb job of making readers share it." -Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies and Professor of Humanities, University of Delaware "Fuchs Abrams makes a critical and overdue intervention in comedy studies with this book. Through personal accounts, criticism, biography, and textual analysis, she gives texture to our understanding of these six women, their impetus for writing, and the response in their own time. New York Women of Wit in the Twentieth Century offers us a persuasive argument for how the legacy of these sardonic writers continues to influence satire, and especially satire written by women, today." -Danielle Fuentes Morgan, author of Laughing to Keep from Dying: African American Satire in the Twenty-First Century