Elizabeth Bishop

(1911 - 1979)

When Elizabeth Bishop was eight months old, her father died of Bright’s disease; when she was five, her mother was diagnosed as insane. After living briefly in Nova Scotia with her maternal grandparents, she moved in with her paternal grandparents in Massachusetts, where, she recalled, “at night I lay blinking my flashlight off and on, and crying.” Bishop published Poems: North and South—A Cold Spring in 1955 and received a Pulitzer Prize for it.