Playing Smart: New York Women Writers and Modern Magazine Culture

(Rutgers University Press) In the 1920s and ’30s, women writers such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Mary McCarthy, and others filled the pages of magazines like Vanity Fair and the New Yorker with their wicked wit. Keyser details how these women saw New York as a city of opportunity, where they could attain professional status, claim independence, and emerge from traditional female roles. In this homage to their literary genius, Keyser also explores how the growth of the magazine industry affected women’s relationships to their bodies and their minds. Keyser is an assistant professor of English at the University of South Carolina.