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by Betty Fussell (Author)
Betty Fussell is an inspiring badass. She's not just the award-winning author of numerous books ranging from biography and memoir to cookbooks and food history; not just a winner of the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award who was inducted into their "Who's Who of American Food and Beverage" in 2009; and not just an extraordinary person whose fifty years' worth of essays on food, travel, and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Times, Saveur, and Vogue.
This is a woman who at eighty-two years old (and despite being half-blind) went deer hunting for the very first time in the Montana foothills with her son, Sam (as described in her 2010 essay for the New York Times Magazine.) She got her deer.
This is a woman who declared in a 2005 essay for Vogue that she had to teach herself Latin and German from scratch (on top of teaching herself how to cook) as a young twenty-one year old bride, because "housewifery wasn't enough."
Indeed, for Fussell one subject is never enough. Counterpoint is thrilled to be publishing this selected anthology of her diverse essays.
Author Biography
Born in Southern California in 1927, Betty Fussell grew up in Riverside, took her BA at Pomona College, married her college sweetheart Paul Fussell, took an MA at Radcliffe College while he finished his PhD at Harvard University. After teaching English at Connecticut College and Douglass College, she finished her PhD at Rutgers University and taught there before moving to New York City, where she taught literature and film at the New School for Social Research and writing at Columbia University. In the 1980s she left teaching to write full time.
Her most recent, and eleventh, book is Raising Steaks: The Life & Times of American Beef (2008). In this she takes up the historical epic she began in The Story of Corn (1992), which won the IACP's Jane Grigson Award for Scholarship. In between she wrote a food memoir, My Kitchen Wars (1999), which was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. In 2007 she won a James Beard Foundation Award for Journalism for "American Prime" in Saveur's Steak Issue of July. She was recently celebrated, along with other winners of the Silver Spoon Award, by Food Arts Magazine, for which she has long been a contributing authority.
