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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…

In the same “Fiction Chronicle,” Elizabeth also delivered a harsh verdict on a story collection by the “mercilessly pretentious” Anaïs Nin. While granting her “a fierce foolishness that is not without beauty as an act,” Elizabeth snatched away this grudging praise by adding, “it is too bad her perf…

During these years Elizabeth had a string of lovers in New York—two affairs resulted in abortions, one of which she alluded to in Sleepless Nights61—but none were serious enough for her to contemplate marriage, and some of the men were already married. (The “Alex” of the novel is likely a composite…