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Published Nov 2019
432 pages
Genre: Biography/Memoir
Publication Information
An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop.
Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I've known." This new biography reveals just how she learned to marry her talent for life with her talent for writing in order to create a brilliant array of poems, prose, and letters—a remarkable body of work that would make her one of America's most beloved and celebrated poets. In Love Unknown, Thomas Travisano, founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society, tells the story of the famous poet and traveler's life.
Bishop moved through extraordinary mid-twentieth century worlds with relationships among an extensive international array of literati, visual artists, musicians, scholars, and politicians—along with a cosmopolitan gay underground that was then nearly invisible to the dominant culture. Drawing on fresh interviews and newly discovered manuscript materials, Travisano illuminates that the "art of losing" that Bishop celebrated with such poignant irony in her poem, "One Art," perhaps her most famous, was linked in equal part to an "art of finding," that Bishop's art and life was devoted to the sort of encounters and epiphanies that so often appear in her work.
"A definitive biography–cum–literary study of Elizabeth Bishop…Travisano's essential volume illuminates Bishop's life and, most valuably, her work." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Utterly captivating...illuminating, interwoven analysis of [Elizabeth Bishop's] work." - Booklist (starred review)
"Although not groundbreaking, Travisano's sympathetic perspective, thorough research, and perceptive close readings lucidly portray the complexities of a writer noted for her "reserve, calm, meticulous accuracy, and humorous detachment. A finely textured portrait of an acclaimed poet." - Kirkus Reviews
"This is the biography we've been waiting for. Alternately heartbreaking and joyous, it contains many fascinating discoveries, all orchestrated by an insightful, sympathetic narrator." - Steven Axelrod, President of the Robert Lowell Society and author of Robert Lowell: Life and Art
"Thomas Travisano's new critical biography, Love Unknown, is as illuminating as it is engrossing—a major addition to our ever-deepening understanding of Bishop's life and singular art." - Lloyd Schwartz, poet, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, and co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters
"You are confident, reading Travisano's Love Unknown, that his biography comes as close to communicating an understanding and appreciation of the elusive and complicated Bishop as can be achieved." - Scott Donaldson, author of Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald and The Paris Husband
This information about Love Unknown was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Thomas Travisano is the founding president of the Elizabeth Bishop Society and the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Her Artistic Development and Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman. He is principal editor of the acclaimed Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell and served as co-editor of Elizabeth Bishop in the 21st Century and the three-volume New Anthology of American Poetry. Travisano's work on Love Unknown was supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Hartwick College.
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