Private Life

In the first episode of our podcast Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick’s life and art. Pinckney reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City.
Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before contributing his first article, in 1977, “The Black Upper Class,” a review of Stephen Birmingham’s Certain People: America’s Black Elite. For the Review, as well as Harper’s, Granta, and The New Yorker, he has written extensively about American literature, black American culture, YouTube, James Baldwin, Obama’s presidency, and Elizabeth Hardwick. His essays about Hardwick include “Master Class,” about his experience as her student, and “On Elizabeth Hardwick,” an expansive consideration of her style. Darryl Pinckney selected the work included in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010) and The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017), for which he wrote the introduction.
Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was a writer and Review contributor who wrote some of the most influential criticism of the twentieth century. In 1963 she cofounded The New York Review of Books alongside the editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as well as Hardwick’s then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. Essays by Hardwick discussed in this episode include “On Sylvia Plath”(published in the August 12, 1971, issue), and “Working Girls: The Brontës” (May 4, 1972). Her collected criticism, published in, among many other magazines, The New York Review, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, has been collected by the NYRB Classics in several volumes, and she also wrote three novels, including Sleepless Nights(1979), a genre-defying book that blends fiction and memoir (reissued by NYRB in 2001), as well as a clutch of short stories, collected in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010).
Read the essays discussed in this episode and many others with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which—in addition to twenty issues a year—provides access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website.

On Sylvia Plath by Elizabeth Hardwick
Melville In Love by Elizabeth Hardwick
Working Girls: The Brontës by Elizabeth Hardwick
Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf by Elizabeth Hardwick
Bartleby and Manhattan by Elizabeth Hardwick

We are thrilled to present Private Life, a new podcast from The New York Review that delves into that creative, exhilarating moment where ideas first appeared on the page. Hosted by Jarrett Earnest, one of the most exciting art critics working today, each episode features an intimate, in-depth conversation with a distinguished writer about their lives, their work, their influences, and the ideas that shape our culture.