American Fictions

"Just as Edwin Denby, Clement Greenburg, and Pauline Kael transformed the nature of criticism in the fields of dance, art, and film, respectively, Hardwick has redefined the possibilities of the literary essay."
--The New Yorker

A brilliant tour of a century American writers, from the novels of Melville, Wharton and James to the fictions of Margaret Fuller, Sylvia Plath and Norman Mailer.  Twenty-five years ago, Elizabeth Hardwick's now classic essay "Seduction and Betrayal" helped  pioneer the study of women in fiction, both as writers and as characters.  American Fictions gathers fro the first time Hardwick's portraits of America's greatest writers.  Many of these pieces double as individual reminiscences about close friends, including Mary McCarthy, Katherine Anne Porter and Edmund Wilson.  Hardwick has achieved a permanent place in American letters for her sharp and elegant style.  Her essays are themselves a work of literature.

"Funny, sly, serious and refreshing. . . .Her intelligence, wit and urgency bubble out of every erudite sentence. . . .She is like a brilliant friend."
--The Hartford Courant

"A sophisticated and subtle tour through some of our country's greatest fictional landscapes . . . a deeply thoughtful pleasure."
--San Diego Union Tribune

"Among twentieth-century literary essayists, only Virginia Woolf has created comparable likenesses."
--Joyce Carol Oates

"Elizabeth Hardwick is our most original, brilliant and amusing critic. Many of these essays are already classics for their insight and style."
--Diane Johnson

"Hardwick has a gift for coming up with descriptions so thoughtfully selected, so exactly right, that they strike the reader as inevitable."
--Anne Tyler

"Literature, history, social criticism, and an original and cryptically brilliant intelligence meet in this engrossing--and permanent--collection."
--Cynthia Ozick