Harriet Sohmers Zwerling, one of the great women of the Beat Movement, was born in 1929. She was also part of the Bohemian Expatriate scene of the 1950s and lived in Paris.

In 1959 she was back in New York and published stories in New Story and The Bold New Women.

In 1963 she married Louis Zwerling and they had one son, Milo Z.

Harriet taught school for 28 years in New York.

More recently, she published a book, in 2003, titled Notes of a Nude Model and Other Pieces which is a story/beat memoir.

In 2008 she appeared in the documentary Still Doing It, about the sex lives of women over 60.

Here is part of a New Yorker article by Lauren Collins in the March 13, 2006 issue that featured Harriet: “My life’s an open book,” Harriet Sohmers Zwerling declared the other night. She was wearing a maroon bustier and Pharaonic blond bangs, and was leaning on a cane. Zwerling, the writer and grande horizontale, has been a sort of den mother—she would get smashed and have everyone over for lima beans—to five decades of Greenwich Village misfits. Recently, she appeared in a documentary, “Still Doing It,” about sex and older women. “Every time it’s shown, I get e-mail from young guys who want to get it on with me,” she said. “Which is wonderful. I’m seventy-seven fucking years old.” Zwerling was in the gallery at Westbeth, the artists’ complex on Bethune Street, at a party for the opening of an exhibit of photographs, “The Last Bohemians,” and the publication of her friend Edward Field’s new memoir, “The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.”