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In October 1959 Harper’s published an essay by Elizabeth Hardwick that complained, “Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene.” Robert Silvers later said it inspired The New York Review of Books, which Hardwick helped found in 1963 during a New York newspaper strike, with her husband Robert Lowell, Jason and Barbara Epstein and Silvers himself. Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children, she came to New York to become an intellectual, and wrote reviews, essays and three novels there until her death in 2007. The last novel, Sleepless Nights (1979), Joan Didion called “extraordinary and haunting”. This guide covers her 11 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 11 key books · 1945–2022 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Elizabeth Hardwick published three novels, The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955) and Sleepless Nights (1979), and essay collections including A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974) and Bartleby in Manhattan (1983). Start with Sleepless Nights, a short autobiographical novel; then read The Collected Essays (2017) to see the critic who co-founded The New York Review of Books.
Where to Start with Elizabeth Hardwick
If you want her defining book
→ Sleepless Nights (1979) — a short novel made of memories, portraits and letters.
If you want her criticism in one volume
→ The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017) — essays chosen by her former student Darryl Pinckney.
If you want her on women and literature
→ Seduction and Betrayal (1974) — from the Brontës to Sylvia Plath.
If you want her as a novelist of crime and gossip
→ The Simple Truth (1955) — a murder trial seen from the public gallery.
11 Elizabeth Hardwick Books, in Order
The Ghostly Lover
Her first novel follows Marian Coleman, a lonely young woman from a middle-class Kentucky family, between the South and New York, looking for closeness in her relationships and unable to break through the distance between herself and other people. Diana Trilling compared Hardwick to Eudora Welty and D. H. Lawrence.
The Simple Truth
A sensational murder trial over the death of a college student, Betty Jane Henderson, who died in her boyfriend’s rooming house after hours. The novel is less about the verdict than about the suspicions around the case and the psychology of the onlookers drawn into it.
A View of My Own
Her first essay collection, gathering her criticism on literature and society. It appeared the year before she helped found The New York Review of Books.
Seduction and Betrayal
Essays, most first published in The New York Review of Books, on the Brontë sisters, Ibsen’s women in A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler and Rosmersholm, Zelda Fitzgerald, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Jane Carlyle and Dorothy Wordsworth. The title essay, on seduced and betrayed women in the novel, was given as a talk at Vassar College in 1972.
Sleepless Nights
A woman looks back on her life and assembles a scrapbook of memories, portraits, letters and dreams: a Kentucky childhood, nights in jazz clubs listening to Billie Holiday, Communists and poets, the literary intelligentsia of New York. It is dedicated to her daughter Harriet and to Mary McCarthy. Joan Didion praised it in The New York Times, and it was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.
Bartleby in Manhattan
Essays on social and literary subjects, among them the South during the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and Lee Harvey Oswald and his family. Reviewing it, Anne Tyler quoted Hardwick’s reply to a man who said an integrated crowd made him feel sick: “Pull yourself together.”
Sight-Readings
Essays, mostly from The New York Review of Books, on American writers: Edith Wharton and Henry James in old New York; Gertrude Stein, Margaret Fuller and Djuna Barnes abroad; Philip Roth, John Cheever, John Updike, Richard Ford and Joan Didion; and Elizabeth Bishop and Vachel Lindsay.
Herman Melville
A short life of Melville for the Penguin Lives series, in twelve chapters arranged by theme rather than strict chronology. It covers his money troubles, his family, his friendship with Nathaniel Hawthorne and his homoeroticism, but stays mostly with the books, presenting Melville as a private man who left biographers little to work with.
The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick
Published three years after her death and edited by Darryl Pinckney, this collects her short fiction from the 1940s to the 1990s, the last five stories written between 1980 and 1993. Titles include “The Final Conflict”, “Evenings at Home”, “The Bookseller” and “Back Issues”.
The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
A 640-page selection, arranged chronologically and edited by Darryl Pinckney, her former student. It includes her reflections on the civil rights era, essays on Maine and Brazil, and pieces on Elizabeth Bishop, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov and Edith Wharton.
The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick
A companion to The Collected Essays, edited and introduced by Alex Andriesse: 35 pieces never before gathered in one of her books. Subjects range from New York City, Faye Dunaway and Wagner’s Parsifal to feminism, politics and the places she lived, Kentucky, Maine and New York.
In What Order to Read Elizabeth Hardwick
Nothing in Hardwick continues from one book to the next, so you can read by interest. Publication order does show a shift: two conventional novels in the 1940s and 1950s, then decades of criticism, then Sleepless Nights, which brings the essayist’s voice into fiction.
Most readers come to her through Sleepless Nights and then the posthumous collections from New York Review Books, which gather work that was scattered across magazines. The two early novels are the easiest to leave until last.
A reading path
1. Sleepless Nights (1979)
2. The Collected Essays (2017)
3. Seduction and Betrayal (1974)
4. The New York Stories (2010)
5. Herman Melville (2000)
Everything Else Elizabeth Hardwick Published
Beyond the 11 key books: 2 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Edited and correspondence
2
2 books · 1961–2019
- 1961The Selected Letters of William Jamesedited by Hardwick
- 2019The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979her letters with Robert Lowell, edited by Saskia Hamilton
The years · 1916–2007
Quick facts about Elizabeth Hardwick
- Known for
- Elizabeth Hardwick is known as a critic and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, and for Sleepless Nights (1979), a novel built from memory.
- 1916
- Born in Lexington, Kentucky
- 1963
- Co-founds The New York Review of Books
- 1979
- Sleepless Nights
- 2007
- Dies in New York, aged 91
- Born
- 27 July 1916, Lexington, Kentucky; the eighth of eleven children
- Died
- 2 December 2007, Manhattan, New York, aged 91
- Education
- University of Kentucky (BA 1938, MA 1939); left a Columbia PhD in 1941 to write
- Married
- The poet Robert Lowell, 1949; divorced 1972; one daughter, Harriet
- Founded
- The New York Review of Books, 1963, with Lowell, Jason and Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers
- Honours
- First woman to win the George Jean Nathan Award for drama criticism; Gold Medal for criticism, American Academy of Arts and Letters (1993)
The red mark is 1979: Sleepless Nights, the novel most readers know her by.
How Elizabeth Hardwick Writes: The Critic’s Sentence
Hardwick made her name as a reviewer, and her criticism is built sentence by sentence rather than around a thesis. Even Seduction and Betrayal, her book about women and literature, has no single argument; it moves from the Brontës to Ibsen to Zelda Fitzgerald and lets each portrait make its own case.
Her 1959 essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing” set out the standard: she objected to reviews that praised everything, and the New York Review’s first editorial promised not to waste space on trivial books except to puncture an inflated reputation. Her own essays follow that rule, on Wharton and James, on Didion and Roth, on Martin Luther King Jr. and the Oswald family.
In Sleepless Nights she turns the same method on her own life. The novel has no conventional plot: it is a sequence of portraits, letters and remembered scenes, from Billie Holiday in a jazz club to the poets and Communists she knew, written in the voice of her essays.
Frequently asked questions about Elizabeth Hardwick’s books
How many books has Elizabeth Hardwick written?
She published eight books in her lifetime: three novels, four essay collections and a short biography of Herman Melville. Three more came after her death in 2007, The New York Stories (2010), The Collected Essays (2017) and The Uncollected Essays (2022), making the 11 key books on this page. She also edited The Selected Letters of William James (1961), and her letters with Robert Lowell appeared as The Dolphin Letters (2019).
What are Elizabeth Hardwick’s books in order?
The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Sleepless Nights (1979), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), Sight-Readings (1998), Herman Melville (2000), The New York Stories (2010), The Collected Essays (2017) and The Uncollected Essays (2022).
Where should I start with Elizabeth Hardwick?
Sleepless Nights (1979), a short novel of about 150 pages made of memories, portraits and letters. If you want her criticism first, start with The Collected Essays (2017).
What is Elizabeth Hardwick’s most famous book?
Sleepless Nights, her third and last novel, which Joan Didion called “extraordinary and haunting” in The New York Times. As a critic she is best known for Seduction and Betrayal (1974) and for co-founding The New York Review of Books.
Is Sleepless Nights a memoir or a novel?
It is published as a novel, but it draws closely on her life: her Kentucky childhood, jazz clubs, Communists and poets, and the literary world of New York. Hardwick began it after her divorce from Robert Lowell and finished it after his death in 1977.
Did Elizabeth Hardwick found The New York Review of Books?
She was one of its founders. The magazine began in 1963, during a New York newspaper strike, after she and Robert Lowell talked with Jason and Barbara Epstein about the state of criticism; Robert Silvers became its editor. Silvers said her 1959 Harper’s essay “The Decline of Book Reviewing” inspired it.
What happened between Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell over The Dolphin?
Lowell left Hardwick for Caroline Blackwood in 1970 and divorced her in 1972. His sonnet sequence The Dolphin (1973) used, and in places altered, her private letters to him. Elizabeth Bishop objected that “art just isn’t worth that much”; the book won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. Hardwick said it had hurt her “as much as anything in my life”. Their correspondence was published as The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979 in 2019.
Was Sleepless Nights nominated for any awards?
Yes. It was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for 1979. It did not win. In 1995 the National Book Critics Circle gave Hardwick its Ivan Sandrof Award for lifetime achievement.
Is Elizabeth Hardwick still alive?
No. She died on 2 December 2007 in a Manhattan hospital, aged 91. She was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on 27 July 1916.
Is there a biography of Elizabeth Hardwick?
Yes: Cathy Curtis, A Splendid Intelligence: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick (W. W. Norton, 2021).
Footnotes
- Elizabeth Hardwick — Wikipedia
- Sleepless Nights (novel) — Wikipedia
- Hardwick, Elizabeth (Bruce) — Encyclopedia.com
- Elizabeth Hardwick, a N.Y. Review founder, 91 — Philadelphia Inquirer, 2007
- The Art of Losing — The New York Review of Books, 2019
- The Decline of Book Reviewing (1959) — Harper’s
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns.”
— Elizabeth Hardwick, “The Decline of Book Reviewing”, Harper’s (1959)
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