It was partially inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as 'a remarkable occasion.a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down'. Her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay called 'The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government' published by Harper’s magazine the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast. Solnit is the author of seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. She was also a regular contributor to the political blog TomDispatch and is (as of 2018) a regular contributor to LitHub. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including The Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She has discussed her interest in climate change and the work of 350.org and the Sierra Club, and in women's rights, especially violence against women. Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era. She then received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988. She returned to California to finish her college education at San Francisco State University. When she was 17, she went to study in Paris. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the General Educational Development tests. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated,' she has said of her childhood. In 1966, her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up.

Solnit was born in 1961 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to a Jewish father and Irish Catholic mother.

She has written on a variety of subjects, including feminism, the environment, politics, place, and art. Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer.

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