Try our Advanced SearchShort stories by Elizabeth Hardwick
Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky on July 27, 1916 to a strict and large Protestant family.[2] She was the daughter of Eugene Allen Hardwick, a plumbing and heating contractor, and Mary (née Ramsey) Hardwick.[1] She graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1939. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947.[ In 1959, Hardwick published in Harper's, "The Decline of Book Reviewing," a generally harsh and even scathing critique of book reviews published in American periodicals of the time. She published four books of criticism: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998).[1] In 1961, she edited The Selected Letters of William James.[1] The 1962 New York City newspaper strike helped inspire Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers to found The New York Review of Books, a publication that became as much a habit for many readers as The New York Times Book Review, which Hardwick had eviscerated in her 1959 essay.[2] In the 1970s and early 1980s, Hardwick taught writing seminars at Barnard College and Columbia University's School of the Arts, Writing Division. She gave forthright critiques of student writing and was a mentor to students she considered promising.[4] She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1996.[5] In 2000, she published a short biography, Herman Melville, in Viking Press's Penguin Lives series.[1] In 2008, The Library of America selected Hardwick's account of Caryl Chessman's crimes for inclusion in its two-century retrospective of American True Crime writing. A collection of her short fiction, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, was published posthumously in 2010,[6] as was _The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick_ in 2017
Listing 8 stories.
When a woman returns to her home town in Kentucky after many years, she finds her family nothing like she remembered. Much to her dismay, she also encounters the man who broke her heart so long ago.
The nephew of a deceased housekeeper goes around to different apartments of high society figures in New York City, asking the housekeeper’s past employers if they can spend some money for her funeral arrangements.
Passive and easily satisfied, Roger spends his days managing his secondhand bookstore The Pleiade. He worships modernist classics without fully reading them, he’s gregarious but seldom invited to dinner, and he types novel after novel methodically, but all are rejected. He passes seasons of love and loss in unfailing, impassive routine.
An American couple travel to post-World-War-II Holland and meet a Dutch Holocaust survivor, now a doctor, who married to a French woman. The doctor's life is complicated by numerous affairs which leaves his wife unhappy.
Shy but resolute, Martha Fiske meets the eccentric and detached soldier Tony Jones at a party and an intuitive friendship is born. Martha begins to fall for Tony, but as she yearns for permanence and commitment, he backs away from it.
On the night before her wedding, a woman dreams of the house that she once lived in with her family, but then wakes up and must come to terms with how her life has changed since then.
A lonely elderly woman approaches a nomadic spiritual woman and seeks advice regarding her young maid, from whom the elderly woman feels suddenly distant.
A seasoned painter in New York is confronted with his senility when a fresh, up-and-coming artist attempts to sell one of his pieces to him. Though the older painter isn't interested in his artwork, he is interested in his fresh, youthful wife.