Prose

Elizabeth Bishop's prose is not nearly as 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 are often on the borderline of 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. Here are her famous as well as her lesser-known stories, crucial memoirs, literary and travel essays, book reviews, and--for the first time--her original draft ofBrazil, the Time/Life volume she repudiated in its published version, and the complete extant correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson, the author of the first book-length volume devoted to Bishop.

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 immediately 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.