# Darryl Pinckney on Memoir, Friendship, and Elizabeth Hardwick

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick.md
Podcast: [Private Life: A New York Review Podcast](https://stenobird.com/podcast/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958)
Published: 2026-02-11T20:42:13+00:00
Episode link: https://share.transistor.fm/s/85026953
Audio file: https://media.transistor.fm/85026953/57fdd3d4.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/private-life-a-new-york-review-podcast-7689958/episodes/darryl-pinckney-on-memoir-friendship-and-elizabeth-hardwick
Duration seconds: 3063

## Resource

In the first episode of our podcast Private Life , Darryl Pinckney talks with host Jarrett Earnest about his close friend and former teacher Elizabeth Hardwick. Pinckney discusses her inimitable voice on the page, her love of literature’s most “terrific losers,” and the people in her inner circle, including the Review ’s editor Barbara Epstein, Mary McCarthy, and Susan Sontag, who came to shape Hardwick’s life and art. Pinckney reflects on the painful process of writing memoirs and his education in early 1970s New York City. Darryl Pinckney is the author of two novels as well as the memoir Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan (2022). He met Hardwick while a student in her creative writing seminar at Columbia University, then worked as an assistant at The New York Review of Books before contributing his first article, in 1977, “The Black Upper Class,” a review of Stephen Birmingham’s Certain People: America’s Black Elite . For the Review , as well as Harper’s , Granta , and The New Yorker , he has written extensively about American literature, black American culture, YouTube, James Baldwin, Obama’s presidency, and Elizabeth Hardwick. His essays about Hardwick include “ Master Class ,” about his experience as her student, and “ On Elizabeth Hardwick ,” an expansive consideration of her style. Darryl Pinckney selected the work included in The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick (2010) and The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (2017), for which he wrote the introduction. Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was a writer and Review contributor who wrote some of the most influential criticism of the twentieth century. In 1963 she cofounded The New York Review of Books alongside the editors Robert Silvers and Barbara Epstein,…

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