Elizabeth Hardwick corduroy hat

Elizabeth Hardwick (1916–2007) was an American literary critic, novelist, and short story writer.

She was born as the eighth of eleven children in Lexington, Kentucky, to strict Protestant parents. She graduated from the University of Kentucky with a BA in 1938 and with an MA in 1939. She then entered the PhD program at Columbia University, though withdrew from graduate study in 1941 to concentrate on writing. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947.

In 1959, Hardwick published "The Decline of Book Reviewing" in Harper's, a generally harsh and even scathing critique of book reviews published in American periodicals of the time. She published four books of criticism: A View of My Own (1962), Seduction and Betrayal (1974), Bartleby in Manhattan (1983), and Sight-Readings (1998). In 1961, she edited The Selected Letters of William James.

The 1962 New York City newspaper strike helped inspire Hardwick, Robert Lowell, Jason Epstein, Barbara Epstein, and Robert B. Silvers to found The New York Review of Books, a publication that became as much a habit for many readers as The New York Times Book Review, which Hardwick had eviscerated in her 1959 essay.

Hardwick was the author of three novels, which include The Ghostly Lover (1945), The Simple Truth (1955), and Sleepless Nights (1979). In 2000, she published a short biography of Herman Melville for Viking Press's Penguin Lives series.

A collection of her short fiction, The New York Stories of Elizabeth Hardwick, was published posthumously in 2010, as was The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick, in 2017.

The design for this hat is inspired by the distinctive olive-green covers of the Virago Modern Classics Series, in which all three of Hardwick's novels appeared.

• 100% cotton corduroy
• Soft, unstructured crown
• Cotton twill sweatband and taping
• Adjustable buckle
• Blank product sourced from China