Elizabeth Hardwick on Eight Icons of American Letters | Book Marks

Elizabeth Hardwick, who was born 102 years ago last month, was one of the foremost essayists and literary critics of her era, as well as an extremely accomplished novelist and short story writer in her own right. An intellectual powerhouse often credited with expanding the possibilities of the literary essay through her incisive, witty, freewheeling style of writing, Hardwick was fiercely invested in the literary landscape of the time (perhaps most infamously demonstrated by her 1959 Harper's essay, "The Decline of Book Reviewing"-a scathing take-down of the way books were being reviewed in American periodicals). She produced at least one bonafide masterpiece of fiction in her semi-autobiographical novel Sleepless Nights (1979), and was the co-founder of The New York Review of Books, for which she wrote for over forty years.