SOURCE: “John Peale Bishop and the Other Thirties,” in Commentary, April, 1967, pp. 74-82.

In the following essay, Fielder claims that Bishop was the best Southern novelist of the 1930s despite the fact that he published only one novel.

The revival of the literature of the 30's through which we have recently been living—the republication of novels long out of print, the redemption of reputations long lapsed, the compilation of anthologies long overdue—has been oddly one-sided, a revival of one half only of the literary record of that dark decade: the urban, Marxist, predominantly Jewish half, whose leading journal was the New Masses and whose monster-in-chief was Joseph Stalin. And this skewed emphasis, though somewhat misleading, is comprehensible enough; for we live at a moment when a large reading public, educated by a second generation of urban Jewish writers (ex-Marxists, this time around), begins by identifying with...