Here is a gold mine of information about women's writing, women's history, and women's concerns - 771 entries, ranging from short biographies to extensive essays. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States provides a comprehensive, authoritative, and highly informative survey of women writers and their work as it also illuminates the issues that fired their imaginations.

The volume boasts contributions by many of today's well-known cultural and literary critics, including Susan Faludi writing on backlash, Deborah Tannen on communication between the sexes, Jane Gallop on Lacanian psychoanalysis, Sidonie Smith on autobiography, Trudier Harris on passing, Nancy Armstrong on daughters, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis on poetry.

There are over four hundred biographical profiles of not only important poets, novelists, and playwrights (including such contemporary figures as Wendy Wasserstein, Louise Erdrich, Anne Tyler, Amy Tan, Alice Walker, Annie Dillard, Joyce Carol Oates, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, and Tama Janowitz), but also of women writers who have made important contributions in other fields - Margaret Mead, Betty Friedan, Rachel Carson, and Susan B. Anthony. Perhaps most important, there is extensive coverage of the many personal, cultural, and historical issues that have been explored by, and have influenced the lives and productivity of, women writers: race and racism, violence and sexual harassment, health, AIDS, the Civil War, the women's movement, and much more.

There is also coverage of the publishing world (women's bookstores and presses), the art and practice of writing, and contemporary literary criticism (including deconstruction, black feminism, and lesbian literary theory).