In 1964, Gloria Steinem, who died on Wednesday at the age of 92, found herself in a taxi sitting between two New York literary lions: Saul Bellow and Gay Talese. As if she were an object, and not a person, she would later recall, Talese leaned across her and said to Bellow: “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.” It was moments like this that made her an activist, but in the seven decades she spent in the city, Steinem never stepped away from what was her truest ambition — to write. Over the course of her career she published 11 books, from the little known “Beach Book” to her 1983 collection of essays, “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions,” to the forthcoming memoir “An Unexpected Life,” which will be released on Sept. 22.

It’s easy to shelve those books alongside celebrity memoirs and missives largely because somewhere between that cab ride and when she helped revive New York magazine and co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971, Steinem did become a celebrity. With her long blond hair and aviator glasses, she was and is the face of modern-day feminism. Is it possible that in that transformation, we stopped reading her closely because we were watching her so closely? “It’s one of the ironies of trying to be a writer and an activist at the same time that just when you feel you have the most to write about, you have the least time in which to write it,” Steinem wrote in 1983, explaining the chasm between her fame and the solitary life writing demands.

As we consider her legacy, it’s revealing to go back to her early work to witness her voice and passions beginning to take shape. Despite the limited opportunities in the 1960s for young female aspiring writers, the period was a productive one for Steinem. I love “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” — a collection of essays written across two decades — because it’s a testament to her early curiosity and hustle.

Having grown up poor in Toledo, Ohio, where she had strong memories of debt collectors coming to her door, Steinem spent her first years in New York taking magazine assignments in order to cover the $62.50 a month she owed in rent for the studio apartment she shared with a roommate. She profiled Dorothy Parker and Paul Newman for Ladies’ Home Journal, John Lennon for Cosmopolitan, Barbara Walters for The New York Times, Lee Radziwill for Mc Call’s. For Glamour she wrote pieces like “Funny Ways to Find a Man on the Beach” and the “Boy-Girl Morals Quiz” — which asked couples to answer such doozies as “A girl of 21 who is about to marry tells her fiancé that she is not a virgin.

The fiancé should: A. Break the engagement. B.

Condemn her for it, but marry her anyway. C. Break the engagement, condemn her or not, depending on the circumstances.

D. Explain that nothing that happened before he met her matters. E.

Consider that it would not have been quite natural for her to be a virgin at 21.” What magazines mostly wanted from “girl reporters” like Steinem were articles about “feminine subjects,” and she obliged. In an April 1964 letter she reported to her editor at Vogue that she had scouted a photograph-worthy “immense bathroom-dressing room with red-and-white floral patterns, gold fixtures, an elegant bidet and a double-tiered hanging closet covered by electrically operated curtains.” But she brought in politics whenever she could, noting in the Paul Newman profile that “His attendance at civil-rights rallies and demonstrations, for instance, occasionally caused his films to be banned in the South, but he couldn’t care less. ‘I’m a citizen as well as an actor,’ he said firmly, ‘and I’m damn well going to do what I want. A man with no enemies is no man.’” Her success with these kinds of pieces earned her the go-ahead to write a major magazine profile of James Baldwin for Vogue in 1964.

In it, Steinem interviews the 39-year-old writer, still reeling from the death of his friend Medgar ...