Prose

Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not well-known as her poetry, but she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer, too, as the publication of her letters has shown. Her stories often border on memoir, and vice versa. From her college days, she could find the most astonishing yet thoroughly apt metaphors to illuminate her ideas. This volume—edited by the poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and Bishop scholar Lloyd Schwartz—includes virtually all her published shorter prose pieces and a number of prose works not published until after her death. Included here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and—for the first time—the original draft of Brazil, the Life World Library volume she repudiated in its published version, as well as the relevant correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson while the latter was writing the first book-length critical study of Bishop's work.

About the Author(s)

By Elizabeth Bishop and Lloyd Schwartz

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911 and graduated from Vassar College in 1934. She traveled widely as an adult, living in Paris, Mexico, New York, Florida, and, for more than a decade, Brazil, before returning to the United States. Her work was immensely prized for its distinctive clarity, precision, and depth, and she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, among others. Over time she has come to be acknowledged as one of America's essential poets. She died in Boston in 1979.