20th century literature
A01=Elizabeth Hardwick
A01=Robert Lowell
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
american literature
american poetry
american poets
author biographies
Author_Elizabeth Hardwick
Author_Robert Lowell
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=BJ
Category=DND
collection of letters
confessional poetry
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_non-fiction
Language_English
letters
literary biography
literary correspondence
literary criticism
literary essays
literary nonfiction
marriage life
PA=Not available (reason unspecified)
poet couples
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
softlaunch
women authors
women writers
Product details
- ISBN 9780374539153
- Weight: 792g
- Dimensions: 150 x 227mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jan 2021
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell’s life, a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Lowell’s controversial sonnet sequence, The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwick’s letters as a source), and Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights were written during this period. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle - writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich - the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation. Lowell and Hardwick are acutely intelligent observers of marriages, children, and friends, and of the feelings that their personal crises gave rise to.
The Dolphin Letters, masterfully edited by Saskia Hamilton, is a debate about the limits of art - what occasions a work of art, what moral and artistic license artists have to make use of their lives as material, what formal innovations such debates give rise to. The crisis of Lowell’s The Dolphin was profoundly affecting to everyone surrounding him, and Bishop’s warning to Lowell - “art just isn’t worth that much” - haunts.
Elizabeth Hardwick (1915-2007) was a literary critic, a novelist, and one of the founders of The New York Review of Books. She is the author of Sleepless Nights and two other novels, a biography of Herman Melville, and four collections of essays, including Seduction and Betrayal: Essays on Women in Literature.
Robert Lowell (1917-1977) was the renowned and controversial author of many books of poetry, including Day by Day (FSG, 1977), For the Union Dead (FSG, 1964), and Life Studies (FSG, 1959).
Saskia Hamilton is the author of three books of poetry, including Corridor, named one of the best poetry books of 2014 by The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review. She is the editor of The Letters of Robert Lowell and coeditor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. She teaches at Barnard College.
