Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. The highly esteemed author of four books of essays and three novels, Hardwick covered civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, places where she lived, locations she traveled to, theater she had seen, murder trials that gripped her, and sketches for various occasions. However, most of her essays are reflections on literature, American literature in particular, and appeared in The New York Review of Books, of which Hardwick was a co-founder. Hardwick believed the writer had an obligation to honor the author's contract with the reader. Yet the essay was for her imaginative prose. The structure of observations, the line of interpretation - everything depended on language in the end, and the beauty of her writing is one of the chief reasons to read Elizabeth Hardwick, the other being the clarity of her perceptions, her enduring assessments of literature and society. Edited and introduced by Darryl Pinckney, To the Point gathers over fifty essays for a retrospective of this writer of moral courage, as Joan Didion described her. Hardwick's readings define literature itself.