SOURCE: “The Achievement of John Peale Bishop,” in The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Literature, Rutgers University Press, 1963, pp. 203-28.

In the following essay, originally published in the Spring 1962 issue of The Minnesota Review, Frank places Bishop among the best poets and fiction writers of the “Lost Generation.”

John Peale Bishop, who died in 1944, was one of the most gifted and sensitive talents among the American writers who came to maturity after the First World War. A classmate of Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald at Princeton, Bishop was the third member of a triumvirate destined to take a prominent place in modern American letters; but his own work never won him the fame of his collegiate friends. Bishop was an exacting rather than a powerful writer, and his limited production, perfect though much of it was, never imposed itself on the American literary scene with...