American Fictions

Elizabeth Hardwick has been known as one of the great critics of the last 50 years on par with someone like Edmund Wilson. The New Yorker’s James Woods listed her as an influence. So I recently read a collection of her work called American Fictions. It had some very intriguing essays on writers from a broad spectrum of America’s literary canon: early masters like Melville, Wharton and James-lesser know feminist stars like Margaret Fuller, Djuna Barnes, Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Plath, and Mary McCarthy-not to mention many of my favorites that span the years before contemporary writers and these include O’Neil, Fitzgerald, Nabakov and the a fore mentioned Wilson. Some of the more recent and contemporary stars included Roth, Mailer, Cheever, Capote, Updike, and Didion. She has inspired me to go back and read the early stories and novels of Richard Ford as well. I also enjoyed her essay “Seduction and Betrayal” which discusses these elements in great works of literature.