Born in Kentucky, Elizabeth Hardwick boarded a Greyhound bus for New York City in 1939 and quickly made a name for herself as a formidable member of the intellectual elite. Her eventful life included stretches of dire poverty; lasting friendships with literary luminaries (among them, Mary McCarthy); dustups with authors she eviscerated in the New York Review of Books (of which she was a cofounder); and marriage to the poet Robert Lowell?whom she adored, standing by faithfully through his episodes of bipolar illness. Lowell's decision to publish excerpts from her private letters in The Dolphin greatly distressed Hardwick and ignited a major literary controversy.

Hardwick imbued her essays with a novelistic flair and a wholly original outlook. In A Splendid Intelligence, biographer Cathy Curtis offers an intimate portrait of an exceptional woman who emerged from a long, turbulent marriage with the clarity and wisdom that illuminate her brilliant work.