Gerry Howard, who worked with Ms. Kiernan on her McCarthy biography when he was at Norton, will edit the book, which is tentatively titled The Two Mrs. Lowells. The book will be published through the Nan A. Talese imprint of Knopf Doubleday; the deal was brokered by the Wylie Agency. 

Hardwick, the literary critic, novelist, and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, was married to Lowell from 1949 until 1970, at which point Lowell met Blackwood—a novelist in her own right—while on a visiting professorship at Oxford. Lowell and Blackwood were married in 1972 and broke up in 1977, when Lowell resolved to reconcile with Hardwick only to die of a heart attack while in a taxi cab on his way to her apartment on the Upper West Side. 

“These are amazingly magnetic characters,” Mr. Howard said. “There’s this kind of haute ruined glamour to their lives that was very attractive, in a scary way.” He added: “It’s pretty yeasty stuff! Very Vanity Fair-ish. And Fran is the woman to bring back the goods.” 

According to Mr. Howard, Ms. Kiernan, formerly a fiction editor at The New Yorker, has already completed some of her research, having discussed Hardwick, Blackwood, and Lowell with a number of people who knew them during the course of her research for the McCarthy book. 

“She knows her away around literary New York like nobody’s business,” Mr. Howard said. 

Blackwood died of cancer in 1996 at the age of 64, and was the subject of a 2001 biography written by Nancy Schoenberger and published by De Capo Press. Hardwick died in 2006 at 91. 

So it’s not quite surprising that an Oklahoma-born energy executive named Charles Price III has paid $3,375,000 for the late novelist, essayist and critic Elizabeth Hardwick’s apartment at 15 West 67th Street. She was living in the eight-room duplex with Robert Lowell when they co-founded The New York Review of Books in 1963, and kept the co-op until her death in late 2007 at age 91.

But Mr. Price turns out to be one of the few Oklahoma-born energy executives who’s been reading The New York Review of Books since adolescence. “It used to come to our house wrapped in paper like pornography,” he said, from Dallas, in a soft drawl. “I still read it.”

Does he nod along to, say, Bill McKibben on environmentalism? “I’m sort of a libertarian, I guess. It’s more of a pure liberal sort of rag—but I was just reading a Julian Barnes article on George Orwell. I like stuff like that.” Considering that he’ll be sleeping in Lowell’s old bedroom, does he like his poetry? “You know, yes I do. I do. If I compare it to somebody like Mark Strand, it’s a little intellectual, but that’s O.K.”

Even though Mr. Price recently sold his family’s gas pipeline company, H. C. Price, he and his wife won’t be retiring full time to New York. They plan on spending just three months of the year in the apartment, but won’t rent it out while they’re away: “Not at all. We don’t share well. And you know the problems with that.”

He said they might eventually decide to stay here permanently. “I don’t know. I’m an Okie, so we just put a mattress on the car top and move out.”

The three-bedroom co-op has a double-height living room with a massive wood-burning fireplace and two walls of laddered floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. “The apartment in other senses isn’t grand,” he said, “but that creates a very sympathetic environment for friends.” Still, one or both of those laddered walls will be replaced. “We may dedicate other space in the house to bookshelves, and hang paintings or something in the space,” he offered. “We have a big Lucian Freud, for example. It’s one of the Leigh Bowery paintings; it’s a frontal nude.”

Even if he likes Freud’s famous portraits of Bowery, the gender-bent performance artist, can any Southern energy executive be a good fit in an important critic’s Upper West Side apartment? “Sort of like the Japanese buying Rockefeller Center,” Mr. Price offered. “And what happened to that deal?”

mabelson@observer.com

It’s a morbid question, to be sure, but one that inevitably comes up when discussing the publication—which has no heir apparent among its staff of editors and assistants. Mr. Silvers seems to like it that way; on Monday, he pointedly refused to answer questions about who might succeed him as editor when he can no longer do the job. “It’s not a question that’s posing itself,” he said.

Still, it is a time of change at The Review—even if Mr. Silvers remains at the helm for eternity.

This March, the paper will relocate its headquarters to a converted factory in the West Village after more than 40 years spent in the heart of midtown. According to Mr. Silvers, The Review’s current home on the fifth floor of 1755 Broadway—where it has been for the past ten years—is being taken over by Universal Music, which occupies a large portion of the rest of the building and holds an option on the fifth floor that they intend to exercise once The Review’s lease runs out early next year.

(“It’s very funny to see Bob in an elevator with hip-hop stars [like Lil Wayne and 50 Cent] studded with a million diamonds. I will miss that,” says Review publicity manager Jenie Hederman.)

The move will mark the second time in The Review’s history that it has had to change homes: Originally, its offices were in the Fisk Building at 250 West 57th Street, around the corner from where they are now.

The Review’s new space, on the third floor of 435 Hudson Street, is much larger than its current quarters, according to Mr. Silvers. “It’s a large, very airy space with very big windows,” he said. “We’ll be able to spread out our books and have big tables for different categories of books.”

And there is another recent, major change at The Review—this one boasts a less rosy cast. David Levine, the 80-year-old artist whose iconic caricatures have filled the pages of the paper since its very first issue, has developed macular degeneration, an eye condition that has severely impaired his ability to draw the kind of piercing, detailed portraits he is known for.

Mr. Levine, who said he has drawn something like 4,000 caricatures for The Review over the course of his life, said he was diagnosed with the condition several months ago, and has not contributed a new drawing to the paper since.

“If I look at somebody’s face, I can’t tell what it really looks like in detail,” he said. “I can see the general layout, the noses and so on, but if you come into a restaurant where I’m sitting and looking towards the door, I can’t tell until the person gets within five feet of me who it is.”

Mr. Levine said there is no cure for the condition—which, according to the National Eye Institute, is a leading cause of blindness among the elderly—but that he has been working with doctors to regain some of his abilities.

“It didn’t stop [Edgar] Degas,” Mr. Levine said, noting that the Impressionist also suffered from the condition. “He went on to change his way of seeing. He just moved into a rhythm of color and bigger generalities in the way he saw things like hands or faces. … I’m open to that. I’m searching.”

One option Mr. Levine has been exploring is switching from pen and ink to pencil, which would allow him to erase things if he doesn’t nail them right away.

“[My drawings] won’t look so different,” he said. “The details will be handled slightly differently.”

In the meantime, The Review has had to turn elsewhere for its illustrations. Although many of Mr. Levine’s old caricatures still show up—his rendering of Philip Roth graced the cover of the Dec. 6 issue, and he had five more drawings inside—Mr. Silvers said he has been publishing work by other artists, such as Pancho and John Springs, as well as using photographs more frequently than he used to.

Still, with nearly a half-decade of re-publishable work for The Review behind Mr. Levine, and Mr. Silvers running the show, the paper will surely look and feel pretty much the same, even as things, inevitably, change.

Associated Press reports:

The English excel at writing brief lives, a pocket-size genre long on style, short on facts. Invented by the second-century Roman historian Suetonius ( Lives of the Caesars ), aped by John Aubrey as an alternative to 17th-century dinner-party gossip, epitomized by Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and David Cecil's Two Quiet Lives (1948), recently perfected by Richard Holmes ( Dr. Johnson & Mr. Savage )–the biographical sketch has fared poorly in America. We like our biographies the same size as our prizefighters, our Westerns, our cars: big and sweeping, like the country itself.

But does anyone really finish them–those meaty, meticulously researched, definitive studies based on thousands of pages of never-before-released documents, hundreds of interviews and complete access to voluminous and revealing papers? The critic and novelist Edmund Wilson summarized what biographers often forget: "It is important in writing a biography to remember that you are telling a story, and the problems of presenting the material are in many ways just the same as those of presenting a subject in fiction." Or, to borrow A&E Biography 's more concise reminder: "Every life has a story."

In the past 18 months, the smart new Penguin Lives series, edited by James Atlas, has succeeded in providing an authoritative short-form alternative to often unreadable 800-plus-page tomes. With six titles appearing each year (few run to more than 160 pages), the series pairs highly esteemed contemporary writers with major figures who have shaped European, Asian and North American culture. Career biographers have no edge here. Of the 10 titles already published, novelists have written six.

The Don King genius of Penguin Lives is in the heavyweight matchups: Garry Wills takes on Saint Augustine, Larry McMurtry faces Crazy Horse, Edmund White versus Marcel Proust. These thrillers, going into eight or nine printings, have drawn a big gate; Saint Augustine and Crazy Horse were best sellers. And if fans quibble with the fight card (I would have liked to see Ian Frazier matched with Crazy Horse; Andrea Barrett with Charles Darwin; and Sidney Blumenthal with Niccolò Machiavelli), we marvel most at the compatibility, the lack of strain, the naturalness of finding Louis Auchincloss coupled with Woodrow Wilson, Mary Gordon yoked to Joan of Arc, Edna O'Brien clapped together with her fellow Irish novelist James Joyce.

Fresh characterization and swift storytelling with no loss of erudition are the series' signatures. Scholarly apparatus encumbers almost none of the compact, handsomely designed volumes. Instead of footnotes, Penguin Lives are salted with the kind of intuitive leaps and historical imagination that work magic in biography. Brevity, meanwhile, has encouraged experimentation. Freed from the wide-ranging duties of the "all-knowing" scholar, Peter Gay can focus on Mozart's revealing confrontations with his father. Excused from cataloguing the vast versatility of Leonardo da Vinci's genius, the Yale physician Sherwin Nuland brings new attention to the master's prescient anatomical observations. Mary Gordon's duties do not include reading all 20,000 books on Joan of Arc in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; she is at liberty to meditate on a young French girl's divinely sent voices.

In the series' latest pairing, Elizabeth Hardwick, the novelist ( Sleepless Nights ) and critic ( Bartleby in Manhattan ), headlines with Herman Melville. As with Jonathan Spence's Mao Zedong or Mr. Wills' Saint Augustine , you won't find a better written, more finely distilled introduction to a vast and complicated subject.

The Melville industry is scarily bulky. Since the 1920's, when novelists and intellectuals like D.H. Lawrence, Lewis Mumford, E.M. Forster and Carl Van Doren reclaimed Moby-Dick from the depths of obscurity, Melville has become the American Shakespeare. When academics stopped counting in 1980, Melville's life and work had attracted no fewer than 531 doctoral dissertations. In one recent biography, the selected bibliography topped 140 titles, shortened from 400. The most thorough narrative of Melville's life, published in 1996, runs to 883 pages, and it only covers the first 32 years–for the last 40 (almost half of which the author spent as a $4-a-day clerk in the Custom House on the New York waterfront), you'll have to wait for volume two.

The facts of Melville's life make a fascinating yarn. He was born into an old upstate Dutch family that went bankrupt. From age 12 he worked as a clerk to help bring the family out of poverty. Growing rebellious, he ran away to sea. In the Pacific, he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands, where he lived for several weeks among the Typees. The story of his being held "prisoner" by a supposedly cannibalistic tribe turned Typee , as he called his first novel, into a best seller. The book's candid descriptions of naked South Seas women and its atmosphere of "lazy, tropical, amorousness" launched Melville as America's first literary sex symbol and one of the highest-paid authors of the day. Four popular novels, based on Melville's seafaring adventures, appeared in rapid succession: Omoo , Mardi , Redburn and White-Jacket . He was 30 when he sat down to write his masterpiece, Moby-Dick , which was published a year later to mixed reviews. On Nov. 20, 1851, The New York Observer pronounced it a "complete exhibition of the art and mystery of whaleology" and declared that the "peculiar tact of Melville appears on every page." The novel sold 2,300 copies in its first 18 months, then faded quickly. The books that followed–two novels, a collection of short stories, four books of poetry and a novella–never put him back into the winner's circle.

Exasperated by failure, half-mad with the cost of trying to write and lecture his way out of debt, Melville gave up writing, having published 10 works of fiction in 11 years. He sold his beloved farm in the Berkshires, moved his wife, Elizabeth Shaw Melville, and their children back to Manhattan, and slipped into a literary eclipse so total that when he died at age 72 he was remembered in a three-line obituary in The New York Times as "the late Henry Melville."

When we contemplate Melville's life, we are tempted, as Ms. Hardwick notes, to think poor Melville . "There is a forlorn accent shadowing the great energy of his thought and imagination," she writes. "There is a rueful dignity in his life and personal manner, and sometimes a startling abandonment of propriety on the pages." Which to choose, therefore: The life or the work? It's an act of daring to take on either, let alone both, in just 155 pages. Ms. Hardwick chooses the work. Moving from book to book, she patches the minimum of biographical quilting on top of intelligent and brilliantly proportional set pieces on Melville's novels. Attention, English majors: These are the classiest Cliffs Notes you'll ever find on Moby-Dick and Billy Budd .

Ms. Hardwick is a trustworthy, elegant critic with innumerable intellectual gifts and years of experience toiling in the American literary landscape. At the simplest level, her writing is a pleasure to read because of her exquisite fidelity to the spirit of Melville; she writes up to her subject not down to her reader. She never falls into the trap of diminishing the work by unmasking the artist's personal weaknesses and failings.

Sensitive reading is the creative source of her scholarship. She reads with a tender, sympathetic eye, which gives her writing the kind of sightedness one has in dreams: Atmosphere is acutely felt even when the facts are hazy. Ms. Hardwick does not know, for example, why Melville traded his Pittsfield farm for 104 East 26th Street. But she can picture the ramshackle Arrowhead from its owner's window: "Years in the countryside have as many chores as beauties. Outside your window there is the late unmown grass as well as the tall New England trees. There is a miserable little stack of logs waiting to be replenished for the baking oven and the winter bedrooms. A garden is a grave, as Emerson said."

Ms. Hardwick is on the right track–the only track. Outside of his own pages, Melville remains unknowable. His life's record is so much a matter of " seems to be , may have been , and perhaps " that Ms. Hardwick is forced to conclude that Melville "earned the mystery of his inner life." We know that his chronology spans the years when the still-young American imagination could remember its Puritan origins between the great sea and the old forest. As a young man, Melville escaped Protestant America by way of the sea and came back with sunlit tales to tell and sell. In the darker second half of his life he lived like a man struggling to find his way out of a forest. In the end he withdrew, leaving behind a bread-crumb trail of pages.

Long or short, Melville's biography is finally more Jamesian than Melvillian, an inscrutable puzzle in which a man's art flickers candlelight on the sea log of his days, the cabin fever of his nights.