Authors starting with B

- Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 - October 6, 1979) -

Ancestry: Worcester, Massachusetts, USA

Elizabeth Bishop was an American poet and writer. She was the Poet Laureate of the United States from 1949 to 1950, and a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1956. Elizabeth Bishop House is an artist's retreat in Great Village, Nova Scotia dedicated to her memory. She is considered one of the most important and distinguished American poets of the 20th century.

Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. After her father, a successful builder, died when she was eight months old, Bishop’s mother became mentally ill and was institutionalized in 1916. Bishop would later write about the time of her mother's struggles in her short story "In The Village." Effectively orphaned during her very early childhood, she lived with her grandparents on a farm in Nova Scotia, a period she would later reference in her writing. Bishop's mother remained in an asylum until her death in 1934, and the two were never reunited.

Later in childhood, Bishop's paternal family gained custody and she was removed from the care of her grandparents and moved in with her father's much wealthier family in Worcester, Massachusetts. However, Bishop was very unhappy in Worcester and her separation from her grandparents made her very lonely. It's also significant to note that while she was living in Worcester, she developed chronic asthma which she would suffer from for the rest of her life. This time in her life is briefly chronicled in her poem "In The Waiting Room."

Bishop boarded at the Walnut Hill School in Natick, Massachusetts (where her first poems were published by her friend Frani Blough in a student magazine). Then she entered Vassar College in the fall of 1929, shortly before the stock market crash. In 1933, she co-founded Con Spirito, a rebel literary magazine at Vassar, with writer Mary McCarthy (one year her senior), Margaret Miller, and the sisters Eunice and Eleanor Clark.