Come Back in September

A Captivating Memoir of Friendship, Mentorship, and the New York Literary World of the 1970s

Critic and writer Darryl Pinckney recalls his friendship and apprenticeship with Elizabeth Hardwick and Barbara Epstein and the introduction they offered him to the New York literary world.

Arriving at Columbia University in the early 1970s, Pinckney had the opportunity to enroll in Hardwick''s creative writing class at Barnard, an experience that would change his life. After the semester''s end, he continued to visit her, forming close bonds with both Hardwick and Epstein, her best friend, neighbor, and fellow founder of The New York Review of Books.

Through these connections, Pinckney found himself drawn into a New York literary world where he encountered fascinating contributors to the Review, including Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy. Yet the intellectual and artistic freedom he observed on West Sixty-seventh Street sometimes conflicted with the demands of his politically minded family and their sense of the unavoidable lessons of black history. Simultaneously, through his peers and former classmates like Felice Rosser, Jim Jarmusch, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Lucy Sante, Howard Brookner, and Nan Goldin, Pinckney witnessed the emergence of the New Wave scene in the East Village, experiencing avant-garde life and the sexual freedom brought by gay liberation.

In Come Back in September, through his memories of the city and of Hardwick, we see the emergence and evolution of Pinckney himself as a writer during a time of hope and discovery.