The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
  • Published: 15 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681371542
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $65.00

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

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The first-ever collection of essays from Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades.

The first-ever collection of essays from across Elizabeth Hardwick's illustrious writing career, including works not seen in print for decades.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2017

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form, criticism worthy of the literature in question. In the essays collected here she covers civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, describes places where she lived and locations she visited, and writes about the foundations of American literature—Melville, James, Wharton—and the changes in American fiction, though her reading is wide and international. She contemplates writers’ lives—women writers, rebels, Americans abroad—and the literary afterlife of biographies, letters, and diaries. Selected and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, the Collected Essays gathers more than fifty essays for a fifty-year retrospective of Hardwick’s work from 1953 to 2003. “For Hardwick,” writes Pinckney, “the poetry and novels of America hold the nation’s history.” Here is an exhilarating chronicle of that history.
  • Published: 15 October 2017
  • ISBN: 9781681371542
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 640
  • RRP: $65.00
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The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
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Praise for The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

"Articulate, witty, very clever, freewheeling, [Hardwick] became a master of the slashing critical style of the politicized literary intellectuals...She was one of our more cutting minds, and she made us aware of our faults as well as our virtues." --William Phillips

For American Fictions:

"Just as Edwin Denby, Clement Greenberg, and Pauline Kael transformed the nature of criticism in the fields of dance, art, and film, respectively, Hardwick has redefined the possibilities of the literary essay." --The New Yorker

"Among twentieth-century literary essayists, only Virginia Woolf has created comparable likenessess." --Joyce Carol Oates

"Elizabeth Hardwick is our most original, brilliant, and amusing critic. Many of these essays are already classics for their insight and style." --Diane Johnson

"Literature, history, social criticism, and an original and cryptically brilliant intelligence meet in this engrossing--and permanent--collection." --Cynthia Ozick

"Hardwick has a gift for soming up with descriptions for thoughtfully selected, so exactly right, that they strike the reader as inevitable." --Anne Tyler