Acclaimed Author Elizabeth Weinstock Dies at 85

Former New Yorker staff writer and acclaimed author Elizabeth Hawes Weinstock died at her Chilmark home Monday. She was 85. 

First responders were called to the home on Black Point Road around 2:20 p.m. after someone at the property had found Ms. Weinstock in her swimming pool, according to officials. 

Known as Betsy to her friends, Ms. Weinstock was pronounced dead at the scene, sending a shock through her family and Island friends. 

Chilmark police Chief Sean Slavin said the death does not appear suspicious and investigators are determining if it was a drowning or related to a medical event. 

Ms. Weinstock worked in journalism, and also wrote biographies and creative fiction under her maiden name Elizabeth Hawes. She and her husband Davis Weinstock purchased a home in Chilmark in 1990 but she had been coming to the Vineyard for years before. 

Ms. Weinstock’s resume boasted some of the country’s biggest publications. In addition to her time as a staffer at the New Yorker, she has also contributed to the New York Times Magazine and Vogue. 

Here on the Island, she wrote for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and particpated in the Islanders Write program. She also served on the boards of Martha’s Vineyard Museum and the Chilmark Community Center.

Ms. Weinstock grew up in the Midwest and arrived in New York after attending college at Mount Holyoke and teaching in France. Longtime friend and fellow journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault recalled their time working at the New Yorker, starting as secretaries at the national weekly magazine in the early 1960s. Both harbored dreams of getting their bylines in its storied pages, Ms Hunter-Gault said. 

Famous writers of the day would pass by their door to see editor William Shawn, which was an inspiration to both women. 

“We always wanted to be writers,” Ms. Hunter-Gault said Wednesday, after the news of Ms. Weinstock’s death. “Her vision was always to do something with her talent.”

At the New Yorker, Ms. Weinstock contributed to the Talk of the Town column and other pieces. In her writing, she was drawn to arts and culture writing and gradually worked her way into longer narratives and biographies. 

Ms. Weinstock went on to write two books: New York, New York: How the Apartment Transformed the Life of the City, and Camus, a Romance. 

The first followed the transformation of New York City from a place of private brownstones to a metropolis. The second chronicled the life of the pioneering French-Algerian author Albert Camus alongside Ms. Weinstock’s own experience following in his footsteps.

Both drew praise from critics upon their release.

“She has channeled her ardor into a rich hybrid of biography, literary criticism, intellectual history and memoir,” the Washington Post wrote in 2009 review of the Camus book.

Ms. Hunter-Gault said she remained close with Ms. Weinstock over the decades since they worked together, especially when they both ended up on the Vineyard. She described her friend as warm and brilliant; a confident writer who was talented but always humble. 

In a 2016 essay for the Martha’s Vineyard Magazine, Ms. Weinstock wrote about her connection to the Vineyard.

“Long before the prospect of having a permanent place on the Vineyard had ever occurred to us, we had our summer rentals, stretching over almost twenty years,” Ms. Weinstock wrote. “There were cottages, camps, and barns, an elderly Cape we began to think of as our own, a rambling Victorian that we knew would never be ours — seven houses in all, scattered about the hills of Chilmark where we had first landed, utterly by chance, and from which we have never had reason to stray.”

Ms. Weinstock continued to write into her 80s. Her writing in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine spanned features on the Red Devon ox at Brookside Farm in Chilmark, profiles on artists and dives into history.

“She had something really special,” Ms. Hunter-Gault said. “That’s the best way I can say it.” 

This article appears in July 3, 2026.