Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007)

Elizabeth Hardwick was born to a large, strict Protestant family in Lexington, Kentucky. She earned a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of Kentucky, graduating in 1939, and moved to New York City. There she studied for a Ph.D. at Columbia University, but dropped out in 1941 to focus on her writing. Her experience as a young Southern woman in Manhattan provided the background for her debut novel, The Ghostly Lover, published in 1945. She published two more novels, including Sleepless Nights (1979), a partly autobiographical work. Hardwick developed an elegant, analytical voice that became her trademark as an essayist and critic for intellectual and literary journals such as Partisan Review. She edited The Selected Letters of William James (1961), published the essay collection A View of My Own (1962), and helped to found The New York Review of Books in 1963. NYRB became the principal outlet for her literary criticism, which later appeared in four volumes including Seduction and Betrayal: Women and Literature (1974) and Sight-Readings (1998). She also wrote a biography of Herman Melville that appeared in 2000. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hardwick taught writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University, becoming a mentor to students. She was married to poet Robert Lowell, with whom she had a daughter, from 1949 until 1972, a relationship The New York Times characterized as "restless and emotionally harrowing."