Brazil, January 1, 1502 (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Elizabeth Bishop was born on February 8, 1911, in Worcester, Massachusetts, to a well-off family. She was an only child whose father died when she was eight months old. Four years later, her mother suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized. (After the age of five, Bishop would never see her mother — who was diagnosed as permanently insane — again.) Young Elizabeth was sent to Nova Scotia to live with her maternal grandmother until she was six, then she moved in with her father’s parents, and, finally, she settled in her aunt’s home in Massachusetts. Although her formal education was spotty, Bishop did attend high school until 1930. She then spent four years at Vassar College, during which time she developed as a poet because of her education, the influence of her classmates (several of whom, including Muriel Rukeyser, Mary McCarthy, and Eleanor Clark, would also become noted writers), and through her friendship with the already well-known poet Marianne Moore, whom she met through a librarian. It was Moore who helped convince Bishop to renounce her plans to become a doctor and instead focus on poetry.

After graduating from Vassar College in 1934, the same year her mother died, Bishop moved to New York City, where she continued living comfortably off her father’s estate. In 1935, Bishop had a poem published in Moore’s anthology titled Trial Balances. For the next three years, Bishop traveled to Europe and north Africa; she also bought a house in Key West. From 1945 to 1951, Bishop lived in New York, and she published her first book, North and South, in 1946. Her personal life was not happy, however; she suffered from asthma, depression, and alcoholism and was alienated by her status as an orphan, woman poet, and lesbian. At the advice of her doctor, Bishop set off on a cruise around the world in 1951. One of her first stops was in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she visited Lota de Macedo Soares, a friend she had met at a party in New York. The two began a relationship, and Bishop stayed in Brazil until 1966.

Bishop returned to the United States to take a job at the University of Washington in Seattle in 1966. After her longtime friend Robert Lowell retired in 1969, Bishop assumed his post as poet-in-residence at Harvard University. By the time Bishop died in 1979 in Boston of a cerebral aneurysm, she had won the Pulitzer Prize for Poems: North and South — A Cold Spring (1955), a National Book Award for Complete Poems (1969), and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Geography III (1976).

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