SOURCE: “The Fiction of John Peale Bishop,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 7, No. 1, April, 1962, pp. 3-9.

In the following essay, Elby traces the influence of American Southern culture in Bishop's Act of Darkness and the short story collection Many Thousands Gone.

For a time it seemed that John Peale Bishop (1892-1944) would be remembered largely as a secondary character in the history of American expatriation during the 1920's, as an obscure figure pushed occasionally into the foreground by his friends Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Admirers of his poetry felt that he deserved more than a footnote linking him with Fitzgerald's Thomas Parke D'Invilliers and more than was implied by R. P. Blackmur's phrase “a superlative amateur” or Joseph Frank's “perfect minor achievement.”¹ During the evaluation of the “Lost Generation,” Bishop was overlooked for various reasons: his “lostness” was primarily inconspicuous and undramatic; his poetry was “eclectic, derivative, anonymous”;² and...