John Peale Bishop is usually remembered for his associations with the Princeton circle of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson, the expatriate group in Paris that centered around Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway, and the Nashville Agrarians who produced the literary magazine the Fugitive (1922-1925) and I'll Take My Stand (1930). Best known during his lifetime for his poetry, Bishop has in recent years been the subject of scholarly and critical attention focused more on his prose--fiction, essays, and letters--than on his sparse but high quality verse.

John Peale Bishop was born on 21 May 1892 in Charles Town, West Virginia, a quiet county seat in the eastern panhandle of the state. Founded by, and named after, a brother of George Washington, it preserves to this day a good deal of its original architecture from the late-eighteenth century. The scene of John Brown's trial and execution in 1859, Charles Town generally regarded...