She Was Not a Food Writer

Of course, many of the great American prose writers of the 20th century were women, especially when it came to essays and criticism: Elizabeth Hardwick, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Pauline Kael, M.F.K. Fisher. What strikes me as more surprising, or at least more notable, is that the last four all came from California, far removed from the magazine culture where they made their names.