Elizabeth Bishop

A signed first edition of North And South by Elizabeth Bishop.

• Elizabeth Bishop (American).
• Cambridge, Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946. 
• Octavo.
• 54 pages.
• Inscription on title page from Elizabeth Bishop to a previous owner, signed flat by Elizabeth Bishop.
• Aged light blue spine with aged white lettering, dust jacket price is uncut.

Elizabeth Bishop was born February 8, 1911 in Worcester, MA. She was orphaned at 5 years old, moving in at first with her maternal grandparents on a farm in Nova Scotia, but later being taken from them to live once more in Worcester with her father's wealthier family. Both these periods are chronicled in Bishop's poems. Bishop would receive little formal schooling until high school due to chronic illness. It would be at the Walnut Hill boarding school were her first poems would be published in a student magazine.

At Vassar College, Bishop would found her own literary magazine Con Spirito with writer Mary McCarthy and others. This work and a friendship with the college librarian led Bishop to meet the poet Marianne Moore with whom she would maintain a lifelong friendship until Moore's death in 1972. After college, Bishop would spend nearly the rest of her life traveling around the world living on an inheritance from her father and sparse employment.

After publishing her first book of poetry, North & South in 1946, Bishop would notably become a Consultant of Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949-1950 and win a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1956. These impressive achievements would not have been possible without Bishop's first book North & South which released in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Poetry Award that same year. This book brings together several of Bishop's most notable poems including "The Man-Moth" (so named for a newspaper misprint of mammoth) and "The Fish" which describes a caught fish in excruciating detail.