Another Literary Light Turned Off

Critic, essayist and author Elizabeth Hardwick died yesterday. She was 91. From a 1979 interview: "...I call myself a feminist in that I believe there are cultural, social and economic boundaries set for women which are immoral and unnecessary and which should be resisted publicly and privately." Says Joyce Carol Oates: "She was a brilliant essayist, absolutely. She was a kind of genius in that difficult form, in which the personal and the critical, or cultural, were melded together in brilliant prose."