Elizabeth Hardwick Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Elizabeth Hardwick was born on July 27, 1916, in Lexington, Kentucky, and grew up in the American South before making her way to the literary capitals of the Northeast. She studied at the University of Kentucky and then pursued graduate work at Columbia University in New York City. The move to New York, and to the intellectual communities clustered around magazines and universities, set the course of her life: she would become one of the most incisive American critics and essayists of the twentieth century, a writer whose sentences carried both elegance and ethical pressure.

Emergence as Critic and Novelist
Hardwick began publishing fiction and criticism in the 1940s, and her early novels, The Ghostly Lover (1945) and The Simple Truth (1955), established her as a stylist of rare economy and suggestiveness. But it was as a critic and essayist that she became indispensable. Writing for Harper's, Partisan Review, The New York Times Book Review, and later The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, she developed a voice at once urbane and severe, committed to the literary past yet alert to contemporary culture. Her essays anatomized the pressures of American life on writers and the ways literature reflects and resists those pressures. She wrote memorably about figures as various as Henry James, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, and women writers whose lives and reputations had been distorted by mythmaking.

Marriage, New York Circles, and Influences
In 1949 she married the poet Robert Lowell. Their life together, largely in New York, placed her at the heart of postwar literary culture. Lowell's struggles with illness and the strains of fame were part of the shared story, as were the intense conversations and conflicts that shaped their generation. Their daughter, Harriet, was born in 1957. The couple separated and later divorced, but their connection remained a defining feature of her life and of the public's sense of both writers. Hardwick moved among, and often wrote about, peers such as Mary McCarthy and Susan Sontag, and she knew the circles around poets like Elizabeth Bishop; these friendships and debates nourished the high, disputatious standard of criticism she championed. In later years she became a mentor to younger authors, notably Darryl Pinckney, who learned from her exacting editorial eye and often wrote about her example.

The New York Review of Books
Hardwick's celebrated 1959 essay in Harper's, "The Decline of Book Reviewing", was a bracing indictment of blandness and boosterism in the culture of criticism. When a newspaper strike in 1963 interrupted regular book coverage in New York, that essay's argument helped inspire the launch of The New York Review of Books under Barbara Epstein and Robert B. Silvers. Hardwick was instrumental from the outset, a founding presence in practice if not in title: she published many of the magazine's signature essays, modeled its standards of scruple and style, and later served as a contributing editor. Her pieces there, character studies, city portraits, reassessments of canonical authors, are among her most enduring work and helped make the Review the central forum for serious literary debate in the United States.

Major Works and Ideas
Hardwick's criticism collects in several volumes. A View of My Own (1962) set the terms for her blend of literary history and personal intelligence. Seduction and Betrayal (1974) examined women in literature with a combination of sympathy and severity, reading figures from Ibsen's heroines to Sylvia Plath against the constraints of inheritance and reputation. Bartleby in Manhattan (1983) gathered essays that displayed her gift for the miniature cityscape and for finding the moral drama in style. In Herman Melville (2000), she offered a compact, searching life of the author of Moby-Dick, proving that biography could be as much a work of criticism as of narrative.

Her most acclaimed work of fiction, Sleepless Nights (1979), is a slender, luminous book that fuses memory, observation, and invention. Rather than recounting events in a conventional plot, it composes a life out of fragments, hotel rooms, friendships, New York streets, the weather of feeling, showing how recollection and prose style make experience visible. It is often read in tandem with her essays, since both enact the same ideal: that precision of language is a moral act.

Teaching and Mentoring
Hardwick taught for many years at Barnard College and at Columbia University, renowned for seminars that pressed students to hear the rhythm and discipline of a sentence. She emphasized reading as apprenticeship and revision as the heart of writing, and she offered the kind of close attention, tough, generous, lucid, that she believed reviews and essays owed their subjects. Around her apartment and her classrooms clustered a changing circle of younger writers; Darryl Pinckney, among others, later recalled how she treated literary culture as a living conversation to which each generation must contribute with care.

Personal Trials and Public Life
The drama of her marriage to Robert Lowell, including his illnesses and their eventual divorce in 1972, entered her work obliquely, transformed by art rather than reported as confession. After Lowell's death in 1977, Hardwick remained in New York, continuing to write essays that balanced remembrance with reevaluation. She navigated the complexities of public literary life with a mixture of shyness and resolve, loyal to friends such as Mary McCarthy and in dialogue, sometimes adversarial, with strong contemporaries like Susan Sontag. She also observed, with cool candor, the ways reputation can distort a writer's work, an insight she applied equally to male and female authors, and to her own circle when necessary.

Style and Method
Hardwick's prose is notable for its clarity, compression, and tensile music. She favored the telling detail over the sweeping claim, the brief portrait over the system. In criticism she resisted jargon, preferring judgments grounded in close reading and an alertness to historical circumstance. In fiction she distilled character into images and cadences, trusting readers to infer entire lives from finely chosen facts. Throughout, she held to the conviction that criticism is a branch of literature, not a bureaucracy of opinions.

Later Years and Legacy
In her last decades Hardwick continued to publish essays and to see her earlier work reissued and newly appreciated. She remained associated with The New York Review of Books under editors Robert B. Silvers and Barbara Epstein, joining the publication in celebrating and scrutinizing the literature of the past half-century. She died in New York City on December 2, 2007.

Elizabeth Hardwick's legacy rests on the authority of her sentences and the ethical steadiness of her judgments. She helped change American criticism by insisting that it be literary in its own right and honest about the stakes of culture. Around her, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Bishop, Barbara Epstein, Robert B. Silvers, younger writers like Darryl Pinckney, gathers a portrait of the American intellectual life she helped to define: argumentative, exacting, and alive to the pleasures and responsibilities of style.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Elizabeth, under the main topics: Wisdom - Book - Sarcastic - Tough Times - Loneliness.