Elizabeth Hardwick (writer)


Elizabeth Hardwick was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer.

Early life

Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky on July 27, 1916 to a strict and large Protestant family. She was the daughter of Eugene Allen Hardwick, a plumbing and heating contractor, and Mary Hardwick.
She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1939. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947.

Career

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. She published four books of criticism: A View of My Own, Seduction and Betrayal, Bartleby in Manhattan, and Sight-Readings. In 1961, she edited The Selected Letters of William James.
The 1962 New York City newspaper strike helped inspire Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers to found 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 1970s and early 1980s, 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.
She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. In 2000, she published a short biography, Herman Melville, in Viking Press's Penguin Lives series.
In 2008, The Library of America selected Hardwick's account of Caryl Chessman's crimes for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime writing. A collection of her short fiction, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, was published in 2010, as was The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick in 2017.

Personal life

From July 28, 1949 until their eventual divorce in 1972, she was married to Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning poet from the prominent Boston Brahmin family. Their daughter is Harriet Lowell.
She died in a Manhattan hospital on December 2, 2007.

Published works

She was the author of three novels: