This Companion provides a comprehensive survey of women writers across four centuries of American history. There are biographical entries on poets, novelists, and playwrights, such as Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, Kate Chopin, Maya Angelou, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tama Janowitz, as well as writers who have made contributions in other fields, such as Betty Friedan, Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B Anthony. Written by a team of experts, the Companion includes Susan Faludi writing on backlash, Jane Gallop on Lacanian psychoanalysis, and Trudier Harris on Toni Morrison. Personal, cultural, and historical issues, such as AIDS, racism, sexual harassment, and the Civil War, are examined alongside accounts of women publishing and contemporary literary theory, such as black feminism, lesbian literary theory, and deconstruction.