Skip to main content

The Brilliance of Kathy Acker

By April 18, 2019Authors

Kathy Acker (18th April, 1947 – 30th November 1997) was an American experimental novelist, playwright, and sex-positive feminist writer who shook up the world with her street punk view of the world and her radical writings.

Born in New York City in 1947, Karen Lehman as she was born grew up feeling unloved by a hostile mother and unwanted by a father who abandoned her. Records show that Acker was born in 1947, but the Library of Congress has her birth as 1948 and most of the obituaries at the time of her death cited her birth as 1944.

In 1966 she married Robert Acker and from then on became known as Kathy Acker. By the mid 1970s she started to appear in print as part of the burgeoning New York City literary underground, and like many struggling female writers of the time, Acker worked for a few months as a stripper and listening to stories of other young women struggling profoundly changed her understanding of gender

In 1972, Acker published her first book, Politics and while the collection of poems and essays did not garner much critical or public attention, it did establish her reputation within the New York punk scene. In 1973, Acker published her first novel, The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula: Some Lives of Murderesses. A year later she followed that with I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac: Imagining. Her first award came in 1979 when she won the Pushcart Prize for the short story New York City in 1979, but didn’t receive critical attention until she published Great Expectations in 1982, which included a semi-autographical account of her mother’s suicide, and the appropriation of several other texts including an opening, which was a clear rewriting of the Charles Dickens novel of the same name.

In 1996 Kathy Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer and elected to have a double mastectomy, she continued writing and in January 1997 she wrote about her loss of faith in conventional medicine in a Guardian article. A year and a half later on November 30th, 1997 Acker died, aged 50 from complications of cancer. Her posthumous reputation has been strong and Kathy Acker remains celebrated and discussed to this day.



Leave your vote

Add to Collection

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.