Ghost Writer Leaves with Pen in Hand

Elizabeth Hardwick helped found the New York Review of Books in 1963. She died at age 91 this past weekend.

Although she started out as a fiction writer, Hardwick received her greatest acclaim as a critic. Joyce Carol Oates likened her essays — long, playful, meditative, deeply informed — to those of Virginia Woolf. "Seduction and Betrayal," an analysis of such literary heroines as Hester Prynne of "The Scarlet Letter," became required reading for studies of women in fiction.

"She was a brilliant essayist, absolutely," Oates told The Associated Press on Tuesday. "She was a kind of genius in that difficult form, in which the personal and the critical, or cultural, were melded together in brilliant prose."

Hardwick's first novel was "The Ghostly Lover," which came out in 1945. We can't help but wonder if this is the end of the road for Hardwick's career, or just the beginning.

[AP]
[Forbes]