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Elizabeth wrote to Robert Silvers that she was working every day on her novel, making fixes “that gleam out like flares.”97 Revision was what she liked best about writing: “You’re up against your mind, you’re up against your experience, you’re up against the quality of your insights, you’re up agai…

Elizabeth was the last survivor of her circle of women who were notable twentieth-century cultural critics, including Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag (who had died in 2004), and Hannah Arendt (1975). At her memorial service, Derek Walcott’s remarks—read by Hilton Als—described Elizabeth’s merry side. S…

Elizabeth’s talk on this occasion was about reading and readers—specifically, “the readers a writer has in mind when he writes.”68 Many of her observations are still timely. She distinguished between readers who understood the difference between “the wish to write a book, which every citizen seems …

“Writing a Novel,” the short story Elizabeth published in the New York Review in 1973, opens the same way the novel does: “It is June. This is what I am going to do with my life.” Among the many fascinations of this piece is her notion of “a short-wave autobiography, one that fades in and out, loca…

Turning to the teaching of writing, Elizabeth said that rather than help students revise their work, she preferred “to stimulate a whole questioning of the process, how you go about it, and what’s worth writing, and what’s being written.” She looked for students who read all the time, discussed boo…