From a Pulitzer Prize&;winning author, a brilliantly rendered life of one of our most admired American poets

Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America&;s best-loved poets. And yet&;painfully shy and living out of public view in Key West and Brazil, among other hideaways&;she has never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop&;s letters&;to her psychiatrist and to three of her lovers&;to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with the Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares.

These elements of Bishop&;s life, along with her friendships with poets Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell, are brought to life with novelistic intensity. And by alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader a compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined.

Finally, in this riveting portrait of a life lived for&;and saved by&;art, Marshall captures the enduring magic of Bishop&;s creative achievement.

About the Author

MEGAN MARSHALL is the winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in biography for Margaret Fuller and the author of The Peabody Sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Mark Lynton History Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2006. She is the Charles Wesley Emerson College Professor at Emerson College. 

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Shaker Mill Books is the annex of The Bookloft in Great Barrington, MA, one of the only independent bookstores in the Berkshires for over 35 years. Located in West Stockbridge, MA, Shaker Mill Books houses nearly ten thousand rare, out-of-print and/or signed books. We specialize in Berskhire Books (many now out-of-print or otherwise unavailable), including local histories and biographies, as well as a large collection of books by nature writer Hal Borland.

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