Part of Series
Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected together for the first time. The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays. The Collected Essays proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The essays in The Uncollected Essays, none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick's work, makes it clear that her powers as an essayist extended far beyond literary criticism, as she brings an admirable intensity of attention to host of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, Wagner's Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, of the pleasures of summertime or grits soufflé. In the thirty-five essays Alex Andriesse has gathered here, we see Hardwick's passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.
Author
Elizabeth Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer. Hardwick graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1939. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947. She was the author of three novels: The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979). A collection of her short fiction, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, will be published in 2010. She also published four books of criticism: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998). In 1961 she edited The Selected Letters of William James and in 2000 she published a short biography, Herman Melville, in Viking Press' Penguin Lives series.. In 1959, Hardwick published in Harper's, "The Decline of Book Reviewing," a generally harsh and even scathing critique of book reviews published in American periodicals of the time. The 1962 New York City newspaper strike helped inspire Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers to establish The New York Review of Books, a publication that became as much a habit for many readers as The New York Times Book Review, which Hardwick had eviscerated in her 1959 essay. In the '70s and early '80s, Hardwick taught writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of the Arts, Writing Division. She gave forthright critiques of student writing and was a mentor to students she considered promising. From 1949 to 1972 she was married to the poet Robert Lowell; their daughter is Harriet Lowell. In 2008, The Library of America selected Hardwick's account of the Caryl Chessman murders for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime writing.
