Books

Come Back in September: Intriguing glimpse into a generation of creative intellects

Novelist Darryl Pinckney recalls his friend and mentor Elizabeth Hardwick and her fraternity in 1970s literary New York

Darryl Pinckney: the novelist draws on his journals to tell the story, but these are not entirely reliable since their edges became singed in a fire

In the autumn of 1973, Darryl Pinckney enrolled in Elizabeth Hardwick’s creative writing class at Barnard College, New York. He was “a black guy from Columbia” who could “rattle off a couple of middle-period Sylvia Plath poems” when asked what he was reading.

Hardwick was an essayist, novelist and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, whose “soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier”. From there would grow an enduring friendship-mentorship, ...