John Peale Bishop, essayist, fiction writer, critic, and poet, was never in Paris for longer than a year or so, but he spent nearly a quarter of his short life in fairly close proximity to the city, passing in and out of it and through it for about ten years. The experience of Paris had, seemingly, little influence on Bishop's work, but the French culture of which it was the capital meant much to him: it symbolized both contemporaneity and tradition.

Because of a protracted childhood illness, Bishop, a native of Charles Town, West Virginia, was twenty years old when he entered Princeton in 1913. At Princeton he quickly distinguished himself among the minority of students concerned with writing and the serious study of literature; he also entered upon his lifelong friendships with Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald (who portrayed him as Thomas Parke D'Invilliers in This Side...