Elizabeth Hardwick, a Kentucky-born author and critic who helped found the New York Review of Books, has died. She was 91.

Hardwick, who lived for decades on Manhattan's Upper West Side, died in her sleep Sunday night at Roosevelt Hospital, according to Catherine Tice, associate publisher of the New York Review of Books. She had been hospitalized with a minor infection.

Elizabeth Hardwick helped found the New York Review of Books and was an incisive critic of American literature. She died Sunday night.
(Associated Press)

The New York Review of Books was conceived during a newspaper strike in New York City, when Hardwick and then-husband Robert Lowell were lamenting the poor state of literary criticism with friends Jason and Barbara Epstein.

The NYRB began in 1963 with the declaration that no time would be wasted on books "trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or call attention to a fraud."

The Epsteins provided financing and Hardwick wrote for the review.

Hardwick had started out as a fiction writer, beginning with her 1945 novel The Ghostly Lover, but received her greatest acclaim as a critic.

"She was a brilliant essayist, absolutely," said author and friend Joyce Carol Oates on Tuesday.

"She was a kind of genius in that difficult form, in which the personal and the critical, or cultural, were melded together in brilliant prose."

Seduction and Betrayal, her 1974 analysis of literary heroines such as Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter, set a new tone for studies of women in fiction.

Hardwick was born in Lexington, Ky., in 1916, one of 11 children.

She majored in English at the University of Kentucky, but her ambition was to be "a New York Jewish intellectual," she once said.

"I say Jewish because of their tradition of rational skepticism … the questioning of the arrangements of society, sometimes called radicalism."

She moved north in 1939 to get a doctorate at Columbia University and after her first novel was asked to write for the Partisan Review.

She married Lowell, one of the U.S.'s most celebrated poets, in 1949 and became part of a promiscuous, hard-drinking circle of intellectuals that included Edmund Wilson, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy and Philip Rahv.

Lowell wrote about their strained marriage in The Dolphin and For Lizzie and Harriet.

He was famous for his infidelities and manic depression, endlessly leaving Hardwick and then changing his mind. They divorced in 1972.

Hardwick referred to their time together in the novel Sleepless Nights and later described him as "the most extraordinary person I have ever known, like no one else — unplaceable, unaccountable."

Hardwick wrote about her intellectual circle in the short story The Classless Society and the novel Sleepless Nights.

She also penned a short biography of Herman Melville and a compilation of her criticism, American Fictions, was released in 1999.

Hardwick had one child, Harriet Winslow Lowell.

With files from the Associated Press