John Peale Bishop was born on May 21, 1892, in Charles Town, West Virginia, the State that had come into being less than thirty years beforehand when during the Civil War it had broken away from the larger part of Virginia. Thus, although in cast of mind and cultural allegiance Bishop was to regard himself as very much a Southerner, he knew from early on that his regional inheritance was a divided and ambivalent one, all the more so because his parental grandfather had been an unwelcome interloper from alien and abhorred New England, who, as family legend had it and as Bishop recorded in his poem, “Beyond Connecticut, Beyond the Sea”, “wandered South/When long war had burned the corn/And saw his sons stoned, little boys”. Bishop’s father, a medical doctor and painter manqué,…
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Citation: Butterfield, Herbie. "John Peale Bishop". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 25 August 2004 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=420, accessed 26 November 2024.]
