Betty Fussell

Early on in her career, Fussell edited many of her former husband Paul Fussell's works of literary criticism and military history. She became a columnist for Country Journal, a contributing editor to Lear’s, the editor of AIWF publication, Wine, Food & the Arts (1996, 1997), and is a current contributing editor to Food Arts. She briefly held a position as an editorial consultant for Atlantic Monthly Press.

She began teaching classes focusing on food writing and food history beginning in 1993 at Columbia University, the French Culinary Institute, NYU's Food Studies program, and the New School University's Food Studies department.

Betty Fussell won the Julia Child Cookbook Award in 1993 and the James Beard Foundation's Journalism Award. She was inducted into the Beard Foundation's Who's Who in American Food and Beverage in 2009. She won the IACP's Jane Grigson Award for Scholarship in 1993 and the Amelia Award of the Culinary Historians of New York in 2010.

Her essays on literature, theater, movies, comedy, travel, and food have appeared in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Holiday, Travel and Leisure, Connoisseur, Vogue, Savvy, Lear’s, Cosmopolitan, Journal of Gastronomy, Food Arts, Wine and Food, Bon Appetit, Cooking Light, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal, More, Kitchen Gardener, Metropolitan Home, Saveur, Gourmet, Living History, American Horticulturist, Countryside Magazine. Her essay “On Murdering Eels and Laundering Swine” (Antaeus: Not for Bread Alone (Ecco Press: Spring, 1992) is listed in Best American Essays 1992, reprinted in A Literary Feast (Atlantic Monthly Press: 1993) and in Women on Hunting (Ecco Press: 1994).

Betty Fussell's career began with her biography of silent film comedian Mabel Normand. She moved from writing about the history of film to the history of food in both short and long form. She has published countless articles in both popular and academic outlets and authored 12 books. Among her first food-focused books were Masters of American Cookery (Times Books: 1984), Eating In (Antaeus; Ecco Press: 1986), I Hear America Cooking (Viking/Penguin: 1986; paperback Penguin: 1997) and Food in Good Season (Alfred A. Knopf: 1988). She is a noted expert on the history of corn. She has written extensively on the subject and devoted two books to corn: The Story of Corn and Crazy for Corn. In her autobiographical book, Kitchen Wars, she discusses not only cooking and its importance to her life, but details of her personal life as well, including her marriage to Paul Fussell that ended in divorce.

From 1952 to 1978 Fussell taught courses in English Literature, specializing in Shakespeare and the literature of comedy, drama, and film at a variety of colleges and universities, including Connecticut College, Douglass College, Rutgers University, and the New School University.

She earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from Pomona College in 1948, an M.A. from Radcliffe College in 1951 and a Ph.D. in English from Rutgers University in 1974. Her thesis focused on English Tragicomedy in the Renaissance.

Betty Ellen Fussell (née Harper; born July 28, 1927) is an American writer and is the author of 12 books, ranging from biography to cookbooks, food history and memoir. Over the last 50 years, her essays on food, travel and the arts have appeared in scholarly journals, popular magazines and newspapers as varied as The New York Times, The New Yorker, Los Angeles Times, Saveur, Vogue, Food & Wine, Metropolitan Home and Gastronomica. Her memoir, My Kitchen Wars, was performed in Hollywood and New York as a one-woman show by actress Dorothy Lyman. Her most recent book is Eat Live Love Die, and she is now working on How to Cook a Coyote: A Manual of Survival.

Fussell was born in Riverside, California, on July 28, 1927, where she grew up. She married her college sweetheart Paul Fussell in 1949 and had two children, Rosalind and Sam Fussell. In 1981 the couple divorced.