Elizabeth Bishop, 1911-1979. American author
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Finding-Aid for the Bishop Papers [00012]Collection Description
Letter, 1958
1 item
Access: Open
Elizabeth Bishop was born in 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts. When she was very young her father died, her mother was committed to a mental asylum, and she was sent to live with her grandparents in Nova Scotia. She earned a bachelor's degree from Vassar College in 1934. She was independently wealthy, and from 1935 to 1937 she spent time traveling to France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland, and Italy and then settled in Key West, Florida, for four years. Her poetry is filled with descriptions of her travels and the scenery which surrounded her, as with the Florida poems in her first book of verse, North and South, published in 1946. For many years, she lived in Brazil and garnered a reputation for being a “poet’s poet,” dazzling readers and critics alike with a mastery of various forms and techniques. Her reputation was further solidified with the publication of Geography III, in 1976. Elizabeth Bishop was awarded the Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets in 1964 and served as a Chancellor from 1966 until her death in 1979.
This letter from April 8, 1958 is to a Mrs. Chalk, in which
she declines to review Ruth Stephan’s book, Ringing
Mountaineers.