Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan [Paperback]

Critic and writer Darryl Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York literary world.

Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwicks creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwicks best friend and neighbor and a fellow founder of The New York Review of Books.

Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered some of the fascinating contributors to theReview, among them Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West Sixty-seventh Street could conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history. In addition, through his peers and former classmatessuch as Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan GoldinPinckney witnessed the coming together of the New Wave scene in the East Village. He experienced the avant-garde life at the same time as he was discovering the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation. It was his time for hope.

InCome Back in September, through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney himself as a writer.

WINNER OF THE 2023 JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST

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