The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick

Aside from a few novels (most notably Sleepless Nights) and a short and apparently wonderful biography of Melville, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote essays, many of them published in the New York Review of Books, of which she was a founder. You can tell from just a sampling that, as Darryl Pinckney writes in his introduction, "Every assignment got Elizabeth Hardwick full sail, all mind and style." As someone with a PhD in English, I'd say you could get half a PhD in English just from reading these essays (and perhaps some of the books she writes about). And if you picked up any of her brilliant, sharp, thoughtful, funny style along the way, you'd have something more valuable than a PhD.