In the following essay, Davenport explores sexuality and gender within the Beat movement. 

On a lovely autumn day in 1987, I walked into the office of an English professor I had taken a course with the year before, one of the most influential and widely quoted literary historians in the country, the first woman to be appointed an editor for either of the major Norton anthologies, in her case The Norton Anthology of American Literature, an Americanist who, despite the title of her contentious essay "The Madwoman and Her Languages: Why I Don't Do Feminist Theory," was at that point doing what she had always been doing: important feminist work. Five years later, much of that work - "The Madwoman" and thirteen of her other most important essays - would be collected and published under the title Feminism and American Literary History.

On that lovely autumn day, there...