Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art.
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 GED exam. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University when she was 20. She then received a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988. Prior to this she was a museum researcher and art critic. She 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.
Solnit has received many awards for her writing: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship, two NEA Fellowships for Literature, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities.
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, notably at the website Tomdispatch.com. She is the author of twelve books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogues and anthologies.
Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era (City Lights Books, 1990)
Savage Dreams: A Journey Into the Landscape Wars of the American West (Sierra Club Books, 1994)
A Book of Migrations: Some Passages in Ireland (Verso, 1997)
Wanderlust: A History of Walking (Viking, 2000)
Hollow City: Gentrification and the Crisis of American Urbanism (Verso, 2001), co-authored and photographed by Susan Schwartzenberg
As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art (University of Georgia Press, 2001)
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (Viking, 2003), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and of the Mark Lynton History Prize.
Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities (Nation Books, 2004)
A Field Guide to Getting Lost (Penguin, 2005)
Yosemite in Time: Ice Ages, Tree Clocks, Ghost Rivers, with Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe, Trinity University Press 2005
After the Ruins, 1906 and 2006: Rephotographing the San Francisco Earthquake and Fire (University of California Press, 2006) co-authored by Philip L. Fradkin, Mark Klett, and Michael Lundgren
Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (University of California Press, 2007)
News from Nowhere: Iceland's polite dystopia". Harper's Magazine. October 2008.
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (Viking, 2009)