Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including
feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.[1]
Early life and education
Solnit was born in 1961[2] in
Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a
Jewish father and
Irish Catholic mother.[3] In 1966, her family moved to
Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated," she has said of her childhood.[4] She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the
General Educational Development tests. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17, she went to study in
Paris. She returned to California to finish her college education at
San Francisco State University.[5] She then received a master's degree in
journalism from the
University of California, Berkeley in 1984[6] and has been an independent writer since 1988.[7]
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including The Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She was also a regular contributor to the political blog
TomDispatch and is (as of 2018) a regular contributor to
LitHub.[10][11]
Solnit is the author of seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. Her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay called "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government" published by Harper’s magazine the day that
Hurricane Katrina hit the
Gulf coast. It was partially inspired by the
1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as "a remarkable occasion...a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down". In a conversation with filmmaker
Astra Taylor for BOMB magazine, Solnit summarized the radical theme of A Paradise Built in Hell: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority."[8]
In 2014,
Haymarket Books published Men Explain Things to Me, a collection of short essays on feminism, including one on the phenomenon of "
mansplaining." Men Explain Things to Me has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Slovak, Dutch, and Turkish.[12] Solnit has been credited with paving the way for the coining of the word "mansplaining,"[13][14] which has been used to refer to instances in which men "explain" things generally to women in a condescending or patronizing way, but Solnit did not use the term in her original essay.[15] Solnit's book included illustrations from visual and performance artist
Ana Teresa Fernández.[16]
In 2019, Solnit rewrote a new version of
Cinderella, also for Haymarket Books, called Cinderella Liberator.[17] In this feminist revision, Solnit reclaims Ella from the cinders and gives both the prince ("Prince Nevermind" in her version) and Ella new futures that involve thinking for themselves, acting out free will, starting businesses, and becoming friends, rather than dependent lovers. As Syreeta McFadden argued for NBC News, Cinderella has long been retold, changing with the times.[18] Solnit's book uses
Arthur Rackham’s original silhouetted drawings of Cinderella.[19]
New York Times book critic
Dwight Garner called Solnit "the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn't produce often enough. ... Solnit's writing, at its worst, can be dithering and self-serious,
Joan Didion without the concision and laser-guided wit. At her best, however [...] she has a rare gift: the ability to turn the act of cognition, of arriving at a coherent point of view, into compelling moral drama."[25]
—"In the Shadow of Silicon Valley", London Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 3 (8 February 2024), pp. 7–11. "The
Big Four railroad barons... made outrageous fortunes building the western half of the [US] transcontinental railroad....
Leland Stanford [p. 7] founded
Stanford University in 1885... 35 miles south of [San Francisco], and... from Stanford's loins...
Silicon Valley sprang." (p. 8.) "[T]he sheer wealth generated by Silicon Valley has given its... billionaires the belief that they are above... the law. Most of them made their fortunes in
finance or
technology; those fortunes and the accompanying
hubris and
seclusion convinced them they were magnificent at everything and anything, including remaking society according to their lights.... If you equate your
wealth with
virtue, you tend to equate
poverty with
vice, and the enemies of the
homeless routinely portray them as criminals..." (p. 10.) "When the tech executive
Bob Lee... was found fatally stabbed on [a San Francisco] street on... 4 April 2023, many claimed... his murderer was part of a
crime wave by an out-of-control
underclass.... But it turned out that the man charged... was a fellow tech entrepreneur who had been with Lee that evening." (p. 9.) "You can't really be in favour of both
democracy and
billionaires, because democracy requires
equal opportunity in order [p. 10] to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little
accountability." (p. 11.)