Prose: The Centenary Edition

(Paperback)

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A centenary edition of the prose of Elizabeth Bishop, one of the finest American poets of the twentieth century. Although Elizabeth Bishop is perhaps better known as a masterful poet, she was a dazzling and compelling prose writer too, as this centenary edition of her prose demonstrates. From her witty, unforgettable portraits of Marianne Moore and the Sitwells to her engaging childhood recollections of Canada and Massachusetts, her writing reflects a lifelong fascination with memory and travel, and her unique eye and ear for people and places. This new volume - edited by the Pulitzer Prize-winning critic 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 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 extensive selections from the correspondence between Bishop and the poet Anne Stevenson. Here is a rich and revealing selection, and the indispensible companion to the poems.

Reviews

The virtues of the prose are the virtues of the poems: observation, wit, decorum, a sinuous intelligence adn above all what Randall Jarrell called her 'moral attractiveness' -- Michael Hoffman
Unhurried, methodical, human, she pronounces a true but merciful verdict on our precarious existence -- Craig Raine
[Bishop] was also a fine writer of prose...So hats off to the publishers for gathering all her writings in two separate volumes...her cosmopolitan life is reflected in the breadth of her writings, all suffused with curiosity and quiet intelligence * Sunday Telegraph *
Taken together [with the Poems: The Centenary Edition], these two volumes make a handsome tribute to a writer who is gradually, quietly being recognized...as one of America's greatest * London Review of Books *

Author Bio

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1911 and graduated from Vassar College in 1934. She travelled 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 greatest poets. She died in Boston in 1979.