Writer Hardwick Dead at 91

Critic, essayist, novelist co-founded New York Review of Books
By Jonas Oransky,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 4, 2007 5:05 PM CST
Writer Hardwick Dead at 91
Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born author and critic whose incisive prose and steady spirit helped her well fulfill her dream of becoming a "New York Intellectual," has died at age 91. Hardwick, who resided for decades on Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her sleep Sunday Dec. 2, 2007, night at...   (Associated Press)

Elizabeth Hardwick, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, died Sunday at 91, the Times reports. The Kentucky-born Hardwick moved north in 1939—“my aim was to be a New York Jewish intellectual,” she said later—and became a critical giant. "I have always written essays as if they were examples of imaginative writing, as I believe them to be," she wrote.

With Barbara and Jason Epstein, Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell, launched the New York Review in 1963. She became a literary doyenne, writing furiously and serving on innumerable prize committees. At the New York Review, Jason Epstein once said, she was less an editor than "a presiding sensibility whom everyone wished to satisfy." (More Elizabeth Hardwick stories.)

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