Come Back in September
A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan
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- 25,00 kr
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- 25,00 kr
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2023
A Times Best Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year
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.
At the start of the 1970s, Darryl Pinckney arrived in New York City and at Columbia University and enrolled in Elizabeth Hardwick's writing class at Barnard. After he graduated, he was welcomed into her home as a friend and mentee, and he became close with Hardwick and her best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books, Barbara Epstein. Pinckney found himself at the heart of the New York literary world. He was surrounded by the great writers of the time, like Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy, as well as the overlapping cultural revolutions and communities that swept New York: the New Wave in film, rock, and writing; the art of Felice Rosser, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin; the influence of feminism on American culture and literature; the black arts movement confronted by black feminism; and New Negro veterans experiencing the return of their youth as history. Pinckney filtered the avant-garde life he was exposed to downtown and the radical intellectual tradition of The Review through the moral values he inherited and adapted from abolitionist and Reconstruction black culture.
In Come Back in September, Pinckney recalls his introduction to New York and the writing life. The critic and novelist intimately captures this revolutionary, brilliant, and troubled period in American letters. Elizabeth Hardwick was not only the link to the intellectual heart of New York, but also a source of continual support and inspiration-the way she worked, her artistry, and 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 young man, as a New Yorker, and as one of the essential intellectuals of our time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sparkling memoir, novelist and playwright Pinckney (High Cotton) recollects his salad days in the 1970s and '80s in the vibrant circle surrounding the New York Review of Books. The epicenter of the action was the home of the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, his English professor at Columbia and lifelong friend, whose affable presence and acerbic commentary—"You're the worst poet I've ever read," she observed after sampling his verse—pervades the book. Also in his orbit were Review editors Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, essayists Susan Sontag and James Baldwin, and avant-garde documentarian Howard Brookner. Pinckney limns the intellectual ferment in the liberal literary establishment as it opened up to gay, Black men like him, swirling with dinner parties, readings, painful editing sessions, political protests, drugs, B-52s shows, innumerable witticisms, and, increasingly, AIDS deaths. His prose is entertaining, gossipy, and full of vivid thumbnails yet, in its loose-jointed way, deeply serious about literature and craft ("Then Susan was eating an omelette and talking about the fear when you think people will criticize you for writing about something you know nothing about, something she said I said when I was trying to write on Döblin"). The result is a captivating portrait of the writing life in one of its richest settings.
