{"id":1660351,"date":"2026-02-11T15:43:44","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T20:43:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/11\/\/"},"modified":"2026-03-11T18:09:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-11T22:09:58","slug":"darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick","status":"publish","type":"daily","link":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/11\/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick\/","title":{"rendered":"Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>In the first episode of our podcast <em>Private Life<\/em>, 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\u2019s most \u201cterrific losers,\u201d and the people in her inner circle, including the <em>Review<\/em>\u2019s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick\u2019s life and art. Pinckney also reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<div><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"180\" frameborder=\"no\" scrolling=\"no\" seamless=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/share.transistor.fm\/e\/85026953?color=990101\"><\/iframe><br><p class=\"color-gray mb-0 text-label font-ivar text-center mt-xs-1 img-caption d-none d-lg-block\">Click the \u201cSubscribe\u201d link in the player above to follow this podcast on your favorite listening platform.<p><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir <em>Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan<\/em>&nbsp;(2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at <em>The New York Review of Books<\/em> before contributing his first article, in 1977, \u201cThe Black Upper Class,\u201d a review of Stephen Birmingham\u2019s <em>Certain People: America\u2019s Black Elite<\/em>. For the <em>Review<\/em>, as well as <em>Harper\u2019s<\/em>, <em>Granta<\/em>, and <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, he has written extensively about American literature, black American culture, YouTube, James Baldwin, Obama\u2019s presidency, and Elizabeth Hardwick. His essays about Hardwick include \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2017\/10\/12\/elizabeth-hardwick-master-class\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Master Class<\/a>,\u201d about his experience as her student, and \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/2010\/05\/13\/elizabeth-hardwick\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">On Elizabeth Hardwick<\/a>,\u201d an expansive consideration of her style. Darryl Pinckney selected the work included in <em>The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick <\/em>(2010) and <em>The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick<\/em> (2017), for which he wrote the introduction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Elizabeth Hardwick (1916\u20132007) was a writer and <em>Review <\/em>contributor who wrote some of the most influential criticism of the twentieth century. In 1963 she cofounded <em>The New York Review of Books<\/em> alongside the editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein, as well as Hardwick\u2019s then husband, the poet Robert Lowell. Essays by Hardwick discussed in this episode include <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/1971\/08\/12\/on-sylvia-plath\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u201cOn Sylvia Plath\u201d<\/a> (published in the August 12, 1971, issue), and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/articles\/1972\/05\/04\/working-girls-the-brontes\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">\u201cWorking Girls: The Bront\u00ebs\u201d<\/a> (May 4, 1972). Her collected criticism, published in, among many other magazines, <em>The New York Review<\/em>, <em>The New Yorker<\/em>, and <em>Harper\u2019s<\/em>, has been collected by the NYRB Classics in several volumes, and she also wrote three novels, including <em>Sleepless Nights<\/em> (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 <em>The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick <\/em>(2010).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the first episode of our podcast\u00a0Private Life, Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":1660367,"template":"","categories":[18760,18757],"tags":[31385],"daily-type":[20612],"coauthors":[1200,20460],"class_list":["post-1660351","daily","type-daily","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biography-memoir","category-literature","tag-private-life","daily-type-conversations","author-roles-by","author-roles-in-conversation-with","author-cap-darryl-pinckney","author-cap-jarrett-earnest"],"acf":[],"parsely":{"version":"1.1.0","canonical_url":"http:\/\/nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/11\/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick\/","smart_links":{"inbound":0,"outbound":0},"traffic_boost_suggestions_count":0,"meta":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","headline":"Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick","url":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/11\/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick\/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/online\/2026\/02\/11\/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick\/"},"thumbnailUrl":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/PL-Episode_1-FeaturedImage.jpg?w=125","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/www.nybooks.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/PL-Episode_1-FeaturedImage.jpg"},"articleSection":"Biography &amp; 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