Hamilton, Saskia (ed.): The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle

The Dolphin Letters, 1970-1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle edited by Saskia Hamilton Lowell (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paperback) Publication Date: December 1, 2020 Publisher Marketing: The correspondence between one of the most famous couples of twentieth-century literature. The Dolphin Letters offers an unprecedented portrait of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick during the last seven years of Lowell's life (1970 to 1977), a time of personal crisis and creative innovation for both writers. Centered on the letters they exchanged with each other and with other members of their circle--writers, intellectuals, friends, and publishers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Caroline Blackwood, Mary McCarthy, and Adrienne Rich--the book has the narrative sweep of a novel, telling the story of the dramatic breakup of their twenty-one-year marriage and their extraordinary, but late, reconciliation. Lowell's controversial sonnet-sequence The Dolphin (for which he used Hardwic