American Women Writers examines each writer's biography, her literary and personal influences, and her major works. A further reading section at the end of every profile lists sources for further study on the author or her works. Three subject indexes-one by genre, another by dates of birth, and a third by theme-are included, with a general index. Among the writers profiled are: Mary Rowlandson, whose account of her captivity by Indians displayed the horrors of colonial American wars between colonists and Native Americans and her spiritual journey while in captivity
Harriet A. Jacobs, whose personal slave narrative has become the classic account of the terrors African-American women faced during slavery
Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose book Uncle Tom's Cabin was instrumental in sparking the Civil War
Dorothy Parker, whose sarcastic witticisms, scathing theater reviews, and satirical and melancholic poems and short stories have left an indelible mark on American culture and language
Pearl S. Buck, whose novels of the trials of Chinese peasants earned her the Nobel Prize for literature, making her the first American women ever to receive that award
Maxine Hong Kingston, whose semiautobiographical experimental novels have become classic texts of the Asian-American experience.