The stories of 10 outstanding intellectual women of the 20th century. Brilliant, exceptional, prickly, brazen—these women have been called many things for their ability to strike with words and thoughts. The world would be a completely different place without Dorothy Parker's caustic reflections on the absurdity of life, without Rebecca West's ability to recount half the world's history in a single travel journal, without Hannah Arendt's ideas on totalitarianism, without Susan Sontag's reflections on photography, without Nora Ephron's skepticism of feminism, without Janet Malcolm's pronouncements on the traps and perks of psychoanalysis and journalism. And the biographies of these intellectuals are even more striking when you remember that they achieved success precisely in the 20th century, when women for the first time in history began to speak out loud and discovered they had something to say.