“Willis, who died of lung cancer in 2006 at sixty-four, was one of the great public intellectuals of her generation. Read the latest anthology of her work, The Essential Ellen Willis (2014)—the posthumous anthology that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism this year—and you will see that she was virtually incapable of writing a poor sentence or conceiving an unsurprising insight. Her rigor was unmatched, her fearlessness an inspiration. In every piece, wit lilted like an aria over a basso continuo of moral seriousness.”