[8] Solomon mooted the idea that F S Fitzgerald based his book the Great Gatsby on his time with his new wife Zelda in Westport Connecticut rather than Long Island as is commonly accepted.
Stanley Crouch, writing in The All-American Skin Game, comments, "Barbara Probst Solomon's famous essay about the posthumous, high-handed editing down of The Garden of Eden mightily shook Scribner's voodoo Hemingway industry when it was published in a 1987 issue of The New Republic.
But her 1992 novel, Smart Hearts in the City, is a banana peel that can slide us out of our customary disappointment with the short range and the low ambition of contemporary American fiction....The mulatto textures of Katy Becker's world and the many, many ways in which Barbara Probst Solomon has elevated her epic sense of Americana into literature, subtle to raw, is an achievement that should take a lasting place in the writing about the riddle of the human spirit as expressed within the context of this polyglot nation's bittersweet and stinking little secrets."
The film When the War Was Over,[14] her memoir-documentary based on Arriving Where We Started, which premiered in 1999 on PBS and on Canal Plus in Europe, won the Lancelot Law Whyte Award at Boston University for its contribution to modern culture.
In 2002 she started the literary journal The Reading Room: Writing of the Moment,[9] with the founding Board of Larry Rivers, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow and Donald Maggin, and continues to serve as publisher and editor-in-chief.
In 2005 Solomon became the first North American and second woman to receive the Premio Antonio de Sancha awarded annually by the Association of Madrid Editors to a person distinguished for upholding universal cultural and literary values.
Previous recipients include Jack Lang, former French Minister of Culture; Julio María Sanguinetti Coirolo, past President of Uruguay; actress Nuria Espert; Federico Mayor Zaragoza, former director general of UNESCO; and the Prix Goncourt winner Amin Maalouf.
In May 2007, Solomon received the United Nations/Women Together Award, which honors women who "share a dedication to stand out in their individual activities, a commitment to their work, and a devotion to making the world a better place.
In addition to Solomon, the 2007 awardees included artist Louise Bourgeois, Spanish television journalist Rosa Maria Calaf, Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi, Spanish economist Isabel Estape, theatrical and television producer Francine LeFrak, Wangari Maathal, the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize, and Vasundhara Raje, the first woman Chief Minister of the State of Rajasthan.