Elizabeth Hawes Weinstock

Elizabeth Hawes Weinstock (“Betsy”), a writer known for her style both on and off the page, died Monday, June 29, 2026, at her home in Chilmark. An acclaimed author, journalist, editor, classically trained pianist, professional-grade French cook, avid gardener, landscape designer, interior decorator, tennis player, amateur chainsaw enthusiast, and multiple blue-ribbon winner at the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Fair, she was the mother of three sons — Nicky, Jake and Luke — as well as the wife of Davis for 60 years.

Her unwavering energy, sense of fun, and inherent chicness were present in all she did. She found equal joy in digging through French manuscript archives and Chilmark topsoil.

Born on Oct.10, 1940, in Milwaukee, Wis., to an airline executive father and homemaker mother, Betsy grew up along with her younger brother, Gerry, in Shaker Heights, Ohio. Even as a young Midwestern girl with no connections in the creative arts, she dreamed of a literary life filled with interesting people who would become dear friends. It was the life she lived. 

Betsy attended Mount Holyoke College on a piano scholarship and graduated with high honors in 1962, having written her thesis on “The Notion of Limit in the Work of Albert Camus.” Upon her graduation, she was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to live and teach in Paris, after which she moved to New York City and secured a job at the New Yorker in the typing pool: the only starting place for women interested in being writers or editors for the magazine at the time.

While transcribing the handwritten pieces of the magazine’s writers, Betsy published several poems in the magazine; and when an editorial position opened up months later (a male editor was witnessed urinating in a wastebasket in the office — twice), she was promoted to assistant poetry editor under longtime editor Howard Moss. A further promotion to fiction editor followed; but her own writing ambitions prevailed, and she soon approached the magazine’s legendary editor, William Shawn, with a request to be granted three months off from her editorial work to return to France and enlarge her college thesis (while translating it from the French) into a book. Shawn, intrigued, not only approved but doubled her leave of absence to enable the endeavor.

That work would end up taking 40 years to come to fruition. Soon after returning to New York, Betsy met and married her husband, Davis Weinstock II; had three sons; and transitioned from full-time editing to a life of freelance journalism and writing while raising a family. She published Talk of the Town pieces in the New Yorker and articles in the New York Times Magazine, Vogue, Marie Claire, Elle, Gourmet, Le Monde, and other national and international publications. In 1980, she was asked by the then-budding caterer and entrepreneur Martha Stewart to write a book conveying Martha’s entertaining expertise through Betsy’s prose. That editorial partnership created both the blockbuster cookbook “Entertaining” and its follow-up, “Weddings,” while launching Stewart’s worldwide empire.

Betsy, however, maintained her focus on journalism and literature. In 1993, Knopf published her book “New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869–1930),” a critically acclaimed chronicle of the innovation of the apartment building in Paris in the 1850s and its spread to the U.S. and the world. She then turned back to her lifelong love of Camus and his writings, spending the next 15 years crafting and publishing her book on the French philosopher and author, “Camus: A Romance,” which by then had transformed into both an analysis of Camus and a memoir of her lifelong literary devotion to him.

Betsy and Davis first arrived on the Island as summer renters with two baby boys in 1972; their third son was born on the Island in 1974; and they built their family home in Chilmark 36 years ago. Betsy was an active member of the Island community, serving as a board member at the Chilmark Community Center and as a board member of the Martha’s Vineyard Museum for more than 20 years, and a champion of its expansion into its current site. Her home, too, she built into a multigenerational gathering place for far-flung family, longtime friends, artists, grandchildren, visiting scholars, and local characters alike. While her days were spent earning cuts and bruises from her gardening, she was known to change every night for dinner — even if it were only a switching of shoes or the addition of earrings or a necklace. For Betsy, the details were too delicious not to matter.

In addition to her husband, Davis, and her sons, Nicky, Jake, and Luke, she is survived by her brother, Gerry, and her five grandchildren, James, Derek, Evie, Nate, and Lincoln.

In the last months of her life, she continued to write articles and essays for Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and others, while considering a topic for her next book. She published pieces on the artist Stan Murphy, Red Devon oxen, florist Krishana Collins, and painter and fisherman Kib Bramhall, and was researching articles on the maintenance of the country’s oldest horse carousel and the evolution of the Manuel F. Correllus State Park when she died. The day before, she had played an hour and a half of tennis with her son, and spent the afternoon in her garden. She was 85 years old.