bell hooks

Since hooks' passing on December 15, social media has flooded with reflections on her public impact as an author and scholar. Here, her friends remember what she was like in private.

A groundbreaking feminist thinker, writer and activist, bell hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms.

The prolific author, poet, cultural critic, feminist and professor, who wrote more than three dozen wide-ranging books, died Wednesday at her home in Berea, Ky.