The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick [Paperback]

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

ANew York TimesNotable 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.PROVISIONAL TOC

The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
Selected and edited by Darryl Pinckney
 
1. The Decline of Book Reviewing
2. Anderson, Millay, and Crane in Their Letters
3. William James: An American Hero
4. Mary McCarthy
5. The Neglected Novels of Christina Stead
6. Memoirs, Conversations and Diaries
7. George Eliot’s Husband
8. Loveless Love: Graham Greene
9. America and Dylan Thomas
10. The Subjection of Women
11.  Simone Weill
12. Uncollected Stories of Faulkner
13. Meeting VS Naipaul
14. Ring Lardner
15. Robert Frost in His Letters
16. Domestic Manners
17. Thomas Mann at 100
18. Wives and Mistresses
19. Nabokov: Master Class
20. Bartleby inl3µ