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Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-seventh Street, Manhattan
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About This Book
Critic and writer Darryl Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York literary world. Darryl Pinckney arrived at Columbia University in New York City in the early 1970s and had the opportunity to enroll in Elizabeth Hardwick's creative writing class at Barnard. It changed his life. When the semester was over, he continued to visit her, and he became close to both Hardwick and Barbara Epstein, Hardwick's best friend and neighbor and a fellow founder of The New York Review of Books. Pinckney was drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered some of the fascinating contributors to the Review, among them Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom that Pinckney observed on West Sixty-seventh Street could conflict with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history. Pinckney's education in Hardwick's orbit took place in the context of the cultural movements then sweeping New York. In addition, through his peers and former classmates--such as Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin--Pinckney witnessed the coming together of the New Wave scene in the East Village. He experienced the avant-garde life at the same time as he was discovering the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation. It was his time for hope. In Come Back in September, Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and to the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth Hardwick was not only his link to the intellectual heart of New York but also a source of continuous support and of inspiration--in the way she worked, her artistry, the beauty of her voice. Through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney himself as a writer.
Reviews
"The recounted gossip here can be a bit much, yet as the years advance and these luminaries suffer the ravages of age, Pinckney's affectionate reminiscences capture their lasting brilliance."
"I read and reread this book joyfully, catching many of Pinckney's references, looking up others and letting the rest wash over me like lyrics from a half-forgotten song."
"Pinckney transforms mentor into muse."
"He takes us deep into a world in which there's no such thing as 'too literary.'"
"Because Pinckney, now in his late 60s, kept detailed journals in his younger days, he has been able to re-create conversations with 'Lizzie,' as she was known to intimates, while also providing incisive vignettes of the Review's co-editors ..."
"Pinckney's portrait is exhaustive and exhausting."
"His memoir is both stunningly well written and stuffed with dishy gossip ..."
"By giving us this attentive portrait of a great teacher alongside an account of his formation, Darryl Pinckney finds a way of capturing an age and an approach that feel both vital and distant."
"But this is still a wise, rueful reflection on a lost milieu but an ever more present and essential writer."
"Ultimately, this is not only a book about the drama of these deep, lifelong relationships."
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