When Andrea Dworkin speaks, her voice quivers with the fervor of reckoning. “Women,” she says, a hand clutched to her chest, “want to have an interior life. Women want to be able to know what introspection is. Women want to have a self that’s real, not one that’s torn into little pieces and thrown out with the garbage. Women refuse self-annihilation.”

At an address sponsored in part by the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library, Dworkin, easily the most vociferous and controversial feminist author and thinker in America today, outlined why the work of the women’s movement is still unfinished.

Of the abuses leveled against women, Dworkin says she has endured nearly all of them: rape, prostitution, battery. Now 55, she has recently published her thirteenth book, a memoir that describes how she went from being jailed for protesting the Vietnam War to launching a crusade against pornography. It is the latter that earned Dworkin and her collaborator, legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon, the most infamy: The civil ordinances in which they defined pornography as an actionable violation of women’s civil rights passed in some cities but were subsequently shot down on First Amendment grounds.

The Schlesinger Library’s recent acquisition of Dworkin’s papers was unusual since that library, which customarily receives donations of manuscripts, paid an undisclosed fee for the artifacts. “Radcliffe wanted my papers before they merged with Harvard,” Dworkin told the Boston Globe. “It was like their last bad act...to show Harvard what they thought of Harvard.”

On campus for the speech and book signing, she was less pointed, though no less fiery. “The library may be the quietest place that women ever go, but it’s also probably the most important,” Dworkin told the audience. “When I come to a library like the Schlesinger, I think about intellectual independence for women and girls.”

Dworkin’s prose, like her oratory, is ruthless and uncompromising, driven by an incantatory rhythm. Her anger is untempered, measureless and directed equally at every target. But in a culture where feminists are frequently apologetic in their haste not to offend or be branded man-haters, Dworkin’s defiant stance, however divisive, is nothing if not courageous.

THC: I know you often only get asked about politics. But in this memoir, you talk a little bit about the art of writing as you practice it. What writers have inspired you?

AD: I mentioned a lot of writers in the book, that I read when I was younger, from James Baldwin to Jean Genet. They all had an influence on me; I think Lorca had the biggest influence. Dostoyevsky had a tremendous influence on me. When I was growing up, we didn’t read female writers, they weren’t in print, including Virginia Woolf, including anyone that you might take for granted and read today. We didn’t have them to read. I think the only woman writer that I read in high school was George Eliot, and it was her worst book, Silas Marner. So I didn’t really get to read George Eliot until I was much older and the women’s movement had started.

THC: What about process? What do you do when you sit down to write?

AD: I write regularly. I write at night, I write every night. I consider reading part of my work. I think that what’s most important is not to be afraid of writing, not to be afraid of the text, but to be willing to get involved with language. And in that way, you don’t have writer’s block, you don’t become frightened of writing, you just move forward in a kind of slow, purposeful way. And that’s the way I like to write.

THC: You wrote in your book that you’ve always measured your writing against the admonition: Never Whore. Can you describe whoring when it comes to writing?

AD: When it comes to writing? Writing for money. Writing for the admiration of other people. Writing because you want something other than to write. Writing especially because you want a book that tells a lot. Or you want a make a lot of money. I think I mentioned money. I think that covers it for me.