Bartleby in Manhattan and Other Essays

by Elizabeth Hardwick

Collected recent essays by the acclaimed novelist-critic range over a broad spectrum, offering fresh and sharply focused appraisals of life and art

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Elizabeth Hardwick was a formidable American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer who reshaped the landscape of American intellectual life. After earning degrees from the University of Kentucky and pursuing graduate studies at Columbia, she gained notoriety for her 1959 essay "The Decline of Book Reviewing." This scathing critique directly inspired her to co-found The New York Review of Books in 1963. A prolific essayist and novelist, her major works include the novel Sleepless Nights and influential criticism such as Seduction and Betrayal. Hardwick was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and mentored a generation of writers at Barnard and Columbia. Her posthumously published collections continue to cement her legacy as one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant prose stylists.

Reviews

[dead letter office · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book seemed so promising when I happened across it. She writes about Nabokov, Simone Weil, John Reed and Louise Bryant, MLK and the civil right movement, Byron's marriage, the Tolstoy marriage, and Bartleby the Scrivener. It's hard to imagine an intelligent person writing uninteresting essays on these topics, but EH manages to be pretty unremittingly tedious. She's an absolute snob, she's sure she knows more than you do (she probably does), and she's sure that her personal taste (which runs toward the classical, the serious, the literary, and the bleak) is the yardstick against which contemporary culture should be measured. Over and over again, we all come up quite a bit short.

[Susan]

lately I've become a bit too ambitious re: my reading. I check out more books than I can reasonably read/finish before they are due back at the library, even when I renew them once, sometimes twice if the librarians allow me! (the Kensington Library women rock in that respect.)

Ergo, most of the books I mark as 'to be read' are books I checked out, but had to return to the library and concentrate on just one at a time.

[Deborah Schuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

She is an amazing writer who makes me want to read or re-read the books she talks abouts.