Elizabeth Hardwick

Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick (July 27, 1916 – December 2, 2007) was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer.

Early life and education Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born as the eighth of eleven children in Lexington, Kentucky, United States, on July 27, 1916, to strict Protestant parents,

Career In 1959, Hardwick published "The Decline of Book Reviewing" in Harper's Magazine, a generally harsh and even scathing critique of book reviews published in American periodicals of the time. She published four books of criticism: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998).

In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hardwick taught writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of the Arts, Writing Division. She gave forthright critiques of student writing and was a mentor to students she considered promising.

She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996. In 2000, she published a short biography, Herman Melville, in Viking Press's Penguin Lives series. as was The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick in 2017.

In 2021, Cathy Curtis published a biography of Hardwick, A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick.

Personal life From July 28, 1949, until their eventual divorce in 1972, Hardwick was married to Robert Lowell, the Pulitzer Prize‐winning poet from the prominent Boston Brahmin family. Despite the difficulties of their often tumultuous union, Hardwick maintained that Lowell was the best thing that had ever happened to her. Their daughter was Harriet Lowell.

Published works

Fiction

(Posthumous; edited by Darryl Pinckney)

Nonfiction

(Published as part of the Penguin Lives Series) (Posthumous; edited by Darryl Pinckney) (Posthumous; edited by Alex Andriesse)