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  • The American Scholar

    Her Pages Caught Fire

    Sep 01, 2021 4 minutes
    REVIEW BY ROSANNA WARREN

    A SPLENDID INTELLIGENCE: The Life of Elizabeth Hardwick

    BY CATHY CURTIS

    Norton, 400 pp., $35

    “A SHILLING LIFE WILL give you all the facts,” declared W. H. Auden in his sonnet “Who’s Who.” Cathy Curtis’s costs more than a shilling, but it is rich in facts. In view of her subject’s suspicion of biography as a genre, it must have taken courage for Curtis, who has also published books on artists Grace Hartigan, Nell Blaine, and Elaine de Kooning, to embark on this one. Hardwick, after all, smacked aside Carlos Baker’s biography of Ernest Hemingway, calling it “bad news” and “only an accumulation, a heap.” Of Joan Givner’s account of

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