Letter from the Archive: Elizabeth Bishop's Letters

Elizabeth Bishop’s first poem in The New Yorker, “Cirque d’Hiver,” appeared in 1940, but that wasn’t her first contribution to the magazine. In November of 1934, a few months after she graduated from Vassar College, Bishop was one of three writers who contributed to a tiny, funny Talk of the Town story about a man and his cleaning lady. And, in the decades since, The New Yorker has published a surprisingly diverse collection of Bishop’s work: more than fifty poems, as well as Talk st...