John Peale Bishop

John Peale Bishop (born May 21, 1892 in Charles Town , West Virginia , † April 4, 1944 in Hyannis , Massachusetts ) was an American writer and poet .

biography

Bishop made his literary debut in 1917 with the collection of poetry Green Fruit. After the end of the First World War , in which he served in Europe without a combat mission, he was, like his friend at Princeton Edmund Wilson, the managing editor of Vanity Fair magazine . Wilson and Bishop produced The Undertaker's Garland, a collection of prose and poetry , in 1922 . In 1922, Bishop married the wealthy Margaret Hutchins and they toured Italy, Austria, and France for two years. He got to know the painting and sculpture of the Paris School and the famous authors of the lost generation, Ezra Pound, EE Cummings, Archibald MacLeish and Ernest Hemingway. His return to New York was disappointing, his texts continued to appear in magazines, but a manuscript of a novel did not find a publisher. The bishops returned to Europe in 1926, where, after a short stay in Paris, they bought an old house in Orgeval , north of Paris, and lived there until 1933.

In 1931 he published Many Thousands Gone, a collection of related short stories, the novel Act of Darkness was published in 1935. Both books deal with the problems of the southern state tradition. To Bishops later volumes of poetry belonged Now with His Love (1933), and Minute Particulars (1936), that the metaphysical poetry of the 17th century was dedicated. His elegy The Hours on old friend F. Scott Fitzgerald is considered a masterpiece. In 1943 Bishop was appointed advisor on comparative literature to the Library of Congress .

In 1948, a collection of his poems entitled Collected Poems was published posthumously .

literature

• EC Spindler: John Peale Bishop: A Biography (1980)
• Chambers Biographical Encyclopedia , 2002, ISBN 0-550-10051-2 , p. 167

Web links

• Biography (Princeton University)
• PAL: Perspectives in American Literature - A Research and Reference Guide - An Ongoing Project