Published in 2017
386 pages
Megan Marshall is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, and Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, her work has been awarded the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the BIO Award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization to a writer who has advanced the art and craft of biography. Marshall is Charles Wesley Emerson Professor of writing, literature, and publishing at Emerson College.
What is this book about?
A biography of the brilliant, award-winning poet by one of her former students, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Margaret Fuller.
Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America’s most revered poets. And yet she has never been fully understood as a woman and artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop’s letters to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares.
By alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Megan Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader an original and compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined.
