1st Printing. Signed. 284 pages. Published in 1998. The author's fourth collection of essays. One of Elizabeth Hardwick's finest achievements. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions, particularly the softcover "original" called "American Fictions". Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. Presents Elizabeth Hardwick's "Sight-Readings: American Fictions". Gathers, in one elegant and generous volume, her magisterial essays on such canonical figures as Margaret Fuller and Gertrude Stein as well as her near-canonical coevals in John Updike, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Richard Ford. "Elizabeth Hardwick stands first among America's most significant literary essayists, and she is surely the most surprising" (Cynthia Ozick). It should be added that very few of America's serious critics have as broad, deep, and rich an erudition on the country's literary heritage as Hardwick did. As such, she was the generalist par excellence, an anomaly in our present time of academic specialists, who know everything about one small thing, and nothing else. Alfred Kazin saw a spiritual, almost mystical grandeur to American literature, which he sought to capture in his procession of books. Elizabeth Hardwick was more interested in - more committed to - the specifics, the minutiae, nuances, modulations, and subtleties that define and set apart the writers she considered. It was hard to expect, for example, that Kazin, a passionate (and truly great) Jewish-American moralist, would have much use for Vladimir Nabokov. Whereas Hardwick once famously described him as a quintessentially American writer. An absolute "must-have" title for Elizabeth Hardwick collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed and inscribed in black ink-pen on the front free endpaper by the author: "To - With the good wishes of Elizabeth Hardwick". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. The recipient, who is named, is an important American public figure, and cannot be named here. This title is a great collection. As far as we know, this is the only such signed and inscribed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. A rare signed copy thus. One of the greatest writers of the 20th century. A fine collectible copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER ELIZABETH HARDWICK TITLES IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0375501274.

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Bibliographic Details

Title: SIGHT-READINGS: AMERICAN FICTIONS - Rare Fine Association Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed And Inscribed by Elizabeth Hardwick - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE
Publisher: New York City, NY: Random House, 1998
Publication Date: 1998
Language: English
ISBN 10: 0375501274
ISBN 13: 9780375501272
Binding: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Edition.
Condition: Fine
Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
Signed: Signed by Author

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Synopsis

An acclaimed American essayist, whose first collection, Seduction and Betrayal, was nominated for the National Book Award, uses her sharp intellect and elegant prose style to consider America's greatest female authors.

About the Author

Elizabeth Hardwick is the author of three collections of essays, Bartleby in Manhattan, A View of My Own, and Seduction and Betrayal, which was nominated for the National Book Award. Her novel Sleepless Nights was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Citation from the National Book Critics Circle and the Gold Medal for Belles-Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.

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