Her most laurelled novels, which make up The Wonderland Quartet, include the National Book Award–winning Them, and charts the decline of working-class America in the 1960s.

to constrain him furder were to unchristen him , to unman him , to throw the mountain of Sinai upon him

Bored with the emptiness of her life, she was said to be increasingly turning to the consolations of “mother's little helper”—new lines of tranquilizing drugs, such as Librium and Miltown, meant to soothe the female anxieties that Betty Friedan decried in her bestselling The Feminine Mystique.

It's just not on. We can't go breaking into another lawyer's office. I mean . . . it's just not something you can do.