The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

July 24, 2017
This fine, revealing career retrospective showcases the late Hardwick, a novelist and cofounder of the New York Review of Books, honing her favorite form, the literary review, to razor-sharp precision. Pinckney, her onetime student, has chosen certain essays, notably reflections on the civil rights era, to illustrate her work as a journalist; other pieces are meditations on place, both close to home (Maine) and far away (Brazil). But the bulk and best of the selections are considerations of literary greats, including Elizabeth Bishop, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, and Edith Wharton. Reading straight through the chronologically ordered collection demonstrates Hardwick’s development as an essayist. The early essays are witty, arch, and detached, attempts by an urban sophisticate at remaining unseduced by cultural trends such as new journalism. As Hardwick matures, her confident declarations begin to ring truer, her impressive grasp of the literary canon seems more thoughtful and less ornamental, and her insights grow in accuracy, humor, and heart. Curiously, while carefully and beautifully crafted, Hardwick’s essays read more like accumulations of beautiful sentences than cohesive wholes, and rarely add up to a lasting impression. Nevertheless, this book contains ample examples of literary criticism that might be imitated or even matched but not surpassed in its style, insight, and genuine love for literature.

August 15, 2017
A career-spanning collection of essays, reviews, criticism, and more from a co-founder of the New York Review of Books.As a novelist and co-founder of the immensely influential (and still-running) NYRB, Elizabeth Hardwick (1916-2007) lived at the center of midcentury public intellectual life in America. (She was even married to poet Robert Lowell.) Throughout her six-decade career, Hardwick was devoted to pursuing literature as a way of life and finding life in literature. A quintessential "writer's writer," her essays are not academic in style, but neither do they pander to broad public interest or themes. Instead, she writes with a clear, concise voice that is simultaneously accessible and erudite. At the heart of Hardwick's oeuvre is a study of literature and writers that includes essays on her contemporaries Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Philip Roth, among others, as well as historical studies of American luminaries Herman Melville, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. Perhaps the most relevant essay among the collection is the opening lamentation "The Decline of Book Reviewing." Written in 1959 for Harper's, the essay criticizes popular book critics and reviews their soft and moderate tone: "Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory." The sentiment captured by the essay could easily be used as a stand-in for the current climate of book culture, which prizes the market and pleasure of reading to such an infantilizing extent that criticism is nearly obsolete. Contextualized with an introduction by longtime NYRB contributor and author Darryl Pinckney (Black Deutschland, 2016, etc.), who was a creative writing student of Hardwick's, the essays collected in this volume represent a vital entry point to American literature and culture. An essential compendium of midcentury American intellectual life, one that reaffirms the personal and cultural importance of literature.

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Starred review from October 15, 2017

Hardwick's (1916-2007) literary reputation as a novelist, short story writer, and essayist, which may have been briefly overshadowed in the last years of her life by the multiple biographies (where she was often alluded to for her marriage to Robert Lowell and her relationships with other writers), should be revisited and reconsidered for her contributions to the world of letters. This collection, edited and with an introduction by her former student Pinckney, is significant. Hardwick, who was a cofounder, editor, and advisor to the New York Review of Books, covered the important events of her time (the civil rights and women's movements, protests against the Vietnam War) with clarity and precision and without sentimentality. Her ear for language and eye for detail, i.e., her novelist's sensibility (she published three), makes her sketches and essays a pleasure to read and savor. Pinckney's introduction offers insights into Hardwick's keen intelligence and quick wit. VERDICT This wonderful volume of essays about place and time is recommended for libraries with large literature and women's studies collections.--Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence

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