On this day in ...... 1911 (100 years ago today), Elizabeth Bishop (left) was born in Worcester, Massachusetts. Her father died when she was an infant, and her mother was committed to a mental institution when she was 5; she grew up 1st on her maternal grandparents' Nova Scotia farm and then with her father's family in Worcester. (photo credit) A published poet as a high school student, Bishop cofounded a literary magazine with her Vassar classmate Mary McCarthy. Bishop would go on to live in France, Brazil, and elsewhere, to publish many works of poetry, to teach at Harvard and other universities, to serve as the United States' Poet Laureate from 1949 to 1950, and to win the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book North & South (1946). She died in 1979.
(Prior February 8 posts are here, here, and here.)
