John Peale Bishop

Who Was John Peale Bishop?

John Peale Bishop was one of the gifted minor figures of the Lost Generation — a poet, fiction writer, and critic whose work has been largely overshadowed by that of his more famous Princeton contemporaries F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. Born in Charles Town, West Virginia, educated at Princeton, he served in the First World War and spent much of the 1920s in Paris before returning to the United States, where he lived quietly in Cape Cod until his death in 1944.

His poetry, collected in Now With His Love (1933) and Minute Particulars (1935), shows a classical formalism and a preoccupation with history, time, and loss that distinguishes it from the more experimental work of his contemporaries. His novel Act of Darkness (1935) is a Southern Gothic narrative that draws on his West Virginia origins. His criticism, collected in The Collected Essays (1948), includes some of the best writing on his generation.

Bishop is significant for TLA as a figure who embodied, with unusual clarity and without self-deception, the spiritual condition of his literary generation: the sense of living after something had ended, in a world whose inherited forms no longer corresponded to felt experience.

In Their Own Words

Selected Bibliography

• Now With His Love — 1933 — poetry
• Minute Particulars — 1935 — poetry
• Act of Darkness — 1935 — novel
• The Collected Essays of John Peale Bishop — 1948 — posthumous