Come Back in September: A Literary Education on West Sixty-Seventh Street, Manhattan by Darryl Pinckney

Sometime in 1975, the writer Darryl Pinckney, then a senior at Columbia, was hanging out in the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment on the Upper West Side. Pinckney had applied to Hardwick’s creative-writing class at Barnard the year before, and soon became a fixture in the apartment she shared with her teenage daughter, Harriet.

That evening, he was pretending to watch a Rolling Stones concert on TV with Harriet, while eavesdropping on Hardwick’s conversations with the other guests, among them Barbara Epstein, one of the founding co-editors of The New York Review of Books, and Susan Sontag, “the writer mocked as the most intelligent woman in America.”