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Barely two weeks later, in October, Cal wrote to Elizabeth that he felt “torn apart,” but that state was preferable to being obliged to make a decision.14 “After all I have done, can I go back to you and Harriet?” He didn’t think so. He could not “weigh the dear, troubled past . . . in which you sa…

But she did summon energy for entertaining luminaries of the literary world. Recalling a visit to the Lowells, the playwright and poet William Alfred said, “I’d never talked to people who cared that much about words. It was absolutely electric.”15 Edmund Wilson often dropped by when visiting his de…

In December, she received a “first reading agreement” from The New Yorker; the magazine would have first refusal rights for her submissions, which would be paid by the word, plus an extra 25 percent and an annual cost-of-living increase. Money was always on Elizabeth’s mind. Although she regretted …

Joking to the Clarks that she figured The New Yorker had bought her two stories “merely as an income tax deduction,” she was pleased that one was about to be published.108 “A Season’s Romance” is about Adele, an earnest and impecunious art history graduate student who is swept off her feet by Matt,…

Despite the inauspicious street name (Manhattan’s Bowery was a slum district), the apartment offered consolations. It had a private bath, a bonus in those days, and the kitchen—“the center of home life here,” Elizabeth wrote—had a new linoleum floor, a new stove, cabinets, and sink.63 She soon real…