[1] Her subjects have included Friedrich Nietzsche, Katharine Hepburn, Mae West, Orson Welles, the Ballets Russes and the Chrysler Building.

A collection of eleven of Pierpont's New Yorker essays, Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World,[2] was published in 2000.

Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, the book juxtaposes the lives and works of women writers, including Hannah Arendt, Gertrude Stein, Anaïs Nin, Ayn Rand, Margaret Mitchell and Zora Neale Hurston.

[3] Her biography of writer Philip Roth, Roth Unbound: A Writer and His Books, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in October 2013 and has since been translated into several languages.

She graduated from Barnard College in 1979 and holds a Ph.D. in Italian Renaissance art history from New York University.