Combining literary biography with astute reporting and moral insight, David Laskin shows how sex, politics, and art affected relationships among the Partisan Review writers: Mary McCarthy, Edmund Wilson, Philip Rahv, Robert Lowell, Jean Stafford, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hannah Arendt, Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, and Diana Trilling. It is the women who steal the show with their their groundbreaking work, their harrowing experiences of marriage, abuse, and betrayal, their passion for writing and disdain for feminism, their struggles and achievements.

David Laskin is a cultural historian and the author of A Common Life: Four Generations of American Literary Friendship and Influence and Braving the Elements: The Stormy History of American Weather.