000			01966n a2200241 a 4500
001			023502
005			20231009192504.0
008			130709s1998 nyu 000 0deng
010			_a97038412
020			_a9780375501272
050	0	0	_aPS121 _b.H24 1998
082	0	0	_a810.9 HAR
100	1		_aHardwick, Elizabeth
245	1	0	_aSight-readings _b: American fictions _c/ Elizabeth Hardwick.
250			_a1st ed.
260			_aNew York _b: Random House _c, c1998.
300			_a284 p. _c; 22 cm.
520			_aHardwick's latest roundup of literary essays is a gallery of startling portraits. She presents novelist Edith Wharton as a freewheeling social historian who used New York City as a frame of reference in her dissection of American society's heartlessness and predatory sexuality. Peering behind New England protofeminist Margaret Fuller's "dramatic and romantic presentation of herself," Hardwick finds an eccentric full of mannerisms, a "profoundly urban," unlikely convert to Transcendentalism, "which nearly turned her into a fool." Whether she is plumbing Joan Didion's roots in the American West, John Updike's learned obsession with sexuality, Katherine Anne Porter's flagrant fabrications about her past or John Cheever's alcoholism and "gentrification" of his concealed homosexual lusts, the eminent critic and novelist combines passionate engagement with her subjects and a conversational style informed by prodigious scholarship. In her close readings of Henry James, Philip Roth, Djuna Barnes, Vachel Lindsay, Gertrude Stein, and Edgar Lee Masters, Hardwick succeeds in her abiding goal of relating literature to life, making these lapidary essays (most of which appeared in the New York Review of Books) into uncanny reconnoiterings of the American psyche.
650		4	_aAmerican Literature _x-History and criticism
650		0	_aAuthors, American _v--Biography
651			_aUnited States _x-Intellectual life _y-20th century
942			_cMO
999			_c238976 _d238976