SOURCE: “John Peale Bishop: A Celebration,” in Reality and Myth: Essays in American Literature in Memory of Richmond Croom Beatty, edited by William E. Walker and Robert L. Welker, Vanderbilt University Press, 1964, pp. 80-97.

In the following excerpt, Haun asserts that Bishop is a lesser-known writer than such contemporaries as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway because he wrote about a wider variety of subject matter in different genres.

During the nineteen-twenties, when I was a small boy, one of the last full-scale Confederate reunions took place in our town. The town put the big pot into the little one because the reunion had not been held there for almost twenty years, and we realized that there would never be another. My mother and my grandmother wept as the old men, too old even to carry their own banners, marched for the last time down Main Street. It...