Elizabeth Hardwick is an accomplished essayist, short-story writer, and novelist. She first was published in 1945 with her novel The Ghostly Lover. Since then she has written two more novels and numerous short stories. However, she is known primarily...

Last week, The New York Review of Books, the biweekly chronicle of American intellectual life that will turn 45 next year, lost one of its founding editors when Elizabeth Hardwick passed away at the age of 91. It was a deeply sad moment for The...

Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born author and critic whose incisive prose and steady spirit helped her well fulfill her dream of becoming a "New York Intellectual," has died at age 91.Hardwick, who lived for decades on Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her sleep Sunday night...

Former first lady Lady Bird Johnson outlived her husband, Lyndon, by more than 35 years, expanding on her White House efforts to carve her own legacy as an environmentalist.When she died July 11 at age 94, she left behind countless miles of scenic highways across...

World War II service shaped the lives and careers of authors Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, and in turn their works were profoundly influential in the Vietnam era.Vonnegut turned his ordeal as a POW during the 1945 allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, into his 1969...

"I have always, all of my life, been looking for help from a man," we are told near the beginning of Elizabeth Hardwick's subtle and beautiful new book ["Sleepless Nights"]. "It has come many times and many more it has not. This began early." What follows eludes immediate summary or categorization. "Sleepless Nights" is a novel, but it is a novel in which the subject is memory and in which the "I" whose memories are in question is ...

Sleepless Nights [is] a very beautiful and concise probe of the past told by a woman called Elizabeth. I have almost nothing negative to say about this book: There are a few dead phrases, i.e., "moral unease hurt" and "I stepped into [the rooms] with the feeling of falling into a well of disgrace." Also, the second half of the book is a small letdown—stories of disappointment, despair, and the bittersweet ironies of aging—by comparison to the first half's ext...

[Seduction & Betrayal: Women & Literature] is so original, so sly and strange, but the pleasure is embedded in the style, in the way [Miss Hardwick] flicks the English language about like a whip. One is reluctant to start taking its epigrammatic charm to pieces and asking dull critical questions about its structure and intention. Yet the issues she raises are both complex and momentous. Her subject is not so much the seduction and betrayal of women portrayed in literature …, as seduction and ...