Uncollected Essays

Essays on music, art, pop culture, literature, and politics by the renowned essayist and observer of contemporary life, now collected together for the first time.

The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick is a companion collection to The Collected Essays. The Collected Essays proved a revelation of what, for many, had been an open secret: that Elizabeth Hardwick was one of the great American literary critics, and an extraordinary stylist in her own right. The essays in The Uncollected Essays, none previously featured in volumes of Hardwick's work, makes it clear that her powers as an essayist extended far beyond literary criticism, as she brings an admirable intensity of attention to host of subjects, from New York City to Faye Dunaway, Wagner's Parsifal to Leonardo da Vinci's inventions, of the pleasures of summertime or grits soufflé. In the thirty-five essays Alex Andriesse has gathered here, we see Hardwick's passion for people and places, her politics, her thoughts on feminism, and her ability, especially from the 1970s on, to write well about seemingly anything.