Hardwick, Elizabeth 1916-2007 (Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick, Xavier Prynne)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born July 27, 1916, in Lexington, KY; died December 2, 2007, in New York, NY. Magazine publisher, literary critic, novelist, and essayist. Hardwick was one of those rare individuals who decide when they are young exactly what they want to be when they grow up—and succeed beyond expectations. A product of the genteel American South, Hardwick reportedly wanted to become known as a New York City intellectual. She intended to become a professor of English literature, but abandoned the spoken word for the written word when she realized that academia was not yet (in 1940) a promising milieu for an intellectual woman who wanted to be taken seriously. Though she eventually taught at Barnard College for about twenty-five years, it is her literary work that defines her place in the world of letters. Hardwick began her writing career with short stories and two generally well-received novels, but it was her literary essays that sealed her reputation as a writer, especially her literary and social criticism. Hardwick's work was highly regarded for its intellectual perception and the precision of her narrative; it was said that her writing set a high standard for literary criticism as an art and separated it firmly from routine journalism. In 1966 she became the first woman to receive the coveted George Jean Nathan Award for dramatic criticism from Cornell University. She also sat as a judge for other literary awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Awards, and the awards of the National Book Critics Circle. Hardwick's essays were collected in several volumes, including A View of My Own: Essays in Literature and Society (1962), Seduction and Betrayal: Women in Literature (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays (1983), and Sight Readings: Essays on Writers, Biographies about Them, and Public Happenings Here and There (1998). Hardwick lived for a while in the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village, where she met and later married the brilliant but seriously troubled poet Robert Lowell. In the 1960s, with Lowell and another married couple, she launched the New York Review of Books in response to a long newspaper strike that had deprived her (and many others) of the New York Times Book Review. She contributed often to the journal, including one parody under the pseudonym Xavier Prynne, and served as an advisory editor for many years, receiving the Iva Sandrof Award for Lifetime Achievement in Publishing from the National Book Critics Circle in 1995. It is said that Hardwick revealed much of her own life story in the novel Sleepless Nights (1979), which follows its protagonist Elizabeth from the comforting, youthful amusements of Kentucky society to the excitement and vitality of New York City.