SOURCE: “The Sorrows of John Peale Bishop,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. XC, No. 3, Summer, 1982, pp. 480-84.

In the following excerpted review of The Republic of Letters in America, Simpson finds that Bishop's fiction displays more of an affinity to the writings of Thomas Wolfe than to the writing of Allen Tate.

The Donald Davidson-Allen Tate letters (edited by John Tyree Fain and Thomas Daniel Young, University of Georgia Press, 1974) and the John Peale Bishop-Tate letters [The Republic of Letters in America: The Correspondence of John Peale Bishop & Allen Tate, edited by Thomas Daniel Young and John J. Hindle. University Press of Kentucky, 1981, 232 pages] … have one striking aspect in common. In both exchanges Tate was corresponding with a man older than himself (by six years in the case of Davidson, seven in that of Bishop), who, unlike Tate, had seen service in France in World War I; yet...