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A theatrical adaptation by Vivian Gornick in collaboration with The House of Elder Artist. Part of the centennial conference on Hannah Arendt presented by the Institute for the Humanities at NYU and the Hannah Arendt Organization.

Talk back with Vivian Gornick (director) and Elizabeth Young-Bruehl (biographer of Hannah Arendt).

“Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, were two of the most important American intellectuals of their generation. They were politically engaged, socially active, powerful, gossipy women who became increasingly close during the decades after WWII. A parade of writers and editors passes through their letters: W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Saul Bellow, Elizabeth Bishop, the cliques from the Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books, the right-wing rebels of Commentary. The two friends discuss the Cold War, McCarthyism, Vietnam, Kennedy liberalism, the student riots of the ‘60s. When one friend finds herself in hot water, the other flies to her aid. Arendt and McCarthy had no qualms about expressing themselves honestly, even obnoxiously. They were just old enough to rely on letters in a way almost obsolete in the age of the telephone, so plenty of opinions make their way onto these pages.” (Rita Goldberg)

Vivian Gornick began her writing career thirty years ago at The Village Voice where she wrote essays, reviews, and articles, concentrating mainly on the burgeoning feminist movement of which she was an early member. In the years since her pieces have appeared in the Nation, the New York Times Book Review and Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the New Yorker, and the Three penny Review. She has written eight books; among them an acclaimed memoir (Fierce Attachments) and two influential collections of essays (Approaching Eye Level and The End of the Novel of Love). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and one of her books was partially funded by a Ford Foundation grant. She has also taught nonfiction writing for the past fifteen years.

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl published her prize-winning biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World in 1982. Her Anna Freud: A Biography appeared in 1988, and since then she has published Creative Characters, Freud on Women, The Anatomy of Prejudices, Cherishment, and three essay collections. She is a psychoanalyst in Manhattan and on the faculty of the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research.