The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York Review Books Classics)

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.

• The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York Review Books Classics)
• Sleepless Nights (New York Review Books Classics)
• Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (New York Review Books Classics)
• Essayism: On Form, Feeling, and Nonfiction
• Milkman: A Novel
• Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1768-1800
• The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017
• Difficult Women: A Memoir of Three (New York Review Books Classics)
• Philip Roth: Why Write? (LOA #300): Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013 (Library of America Philip Roth Edition)
• See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary