Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit is the author of Hope in the Dark, but she is also one of its main figures. While she spends a large portion of her book telling the untold stories of others, she frequently inserts herself into the narrative and provides a personal look at some of the large abstract concepts she covers. She identifies herself as a middle class white female activist, and she frequently acknowledges this positionality as she attempts to bring lesser known stories of marginal communities into the light. She empathizes with her readers and attempts to provide them with an alternative way to approach activism in the twenty-first century.

One example of Solnit's role in the book is when she closes the original collection with a portrait of San Francisco, her home city. "I go once a week to buy food from farmers and once a week to give...