Early Life
Born on May 21, 1892, in Charles Town, John Peale Bishop faced an interesting, but not uncommon, dichotomy of the time. His mother, Margaret Miller Cochran Bishop, was from Virginia, a strongly southern state, while his father’s family (Dr. John Peale Bishop) was originally from Connecticut, obviously a northern state. To compound this, West Virginia was, of course, a border state, thus leading Bishop and many of his local contemporaries to feel somewhat disoriented as to their place in the world in the decades following the Civil War.
Dr. Bishop operated a drug store located on Washington Street, in downtown Charles Town. He encouraged John “Jr.” to appreciate and explore art. Unfortunately, he died on November 5th, 1901, at the age of 42, leaving Margaret to raise the children.
313 S. George Street
Bishop’s family acquired a vacant lot from Roger Preston Chew on S. George Street next to the Catholic Church. Dr. Bishop selected John O’Neal Johnson, a local contractor, to build the home. The structure was ready by January of 1893. The family occupied the home until 1929, when Bishop’s sister, Margaret, sold it upon her marriage. Numerous guests came to stay at the Bishop home, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Allen Tate. The house is presently owned by the Catholic Diocese of Wheeling-Charleston and formerly served as the rectory of St. James Church.
Education
Bishop attended school in Hagerstown, Maryland, before transferring to Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. While there, Bishop’s love of the written word flourished and he filled many notebooks with poems. He submitted “To a Woodland Pool” to Harper’s Weekly and it was accepted for publication.
After a bout with an illness that greatly impaired his eyesight, Bishop entered Princeton University and graduated in 1917. While there he became fast friends with F. Scott Fitzgerald and other future literary brights. Fitzgerald spent a summer visiting with Bishop in Charles Town and Bishop was the inspiration for Thomas Parke D’Invilliers, a character in Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise. The same year he graduated, Bishop released Green Fruit, his first full length poetry collection.
Act of Darkness
John Peale Bishop’s only novel, Act of Darkness, was published in 1935 and caused quite a stir in his hometown. The book describes the assault of a woman by a farmer and is loosely based upon a similar attack in Jefferson County. According to one source, many in the public wrongly guessed the identity of the real-life victim of the rape, thus bringing unwanted attention and scandal to a well-known family.
Mid-Life
Bishop married Margaret Hutchins in 1922. The couple spent two years in New York City, where Bishop was the managing editor at Vanity Fair. In 1924, they moved to Paris, which became their home for the next decade. Life in France proved fruitful for Bishop. He was surrounded by other expatriate writers, including Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, and E.E. Cummings. In 1931, Bishop completed Many Thousands Gone, a collection of short stories loosely set in Charles Town shortly after the Civil War.
With Margaret, there were three sons, Jonathan Peale Bishop, Robert Grosvenor Bishop, and Christopher Bishop.
Later Life
Bishop and his family returned to the United States in 1933 and moved first to New London, Connecticut, then New Orleans, and finally to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. His only novel, Act of Darkness, was released in 1935, and followed by Now with His Love, a series of romantic verses written in honor of Margaret, his wife.
Professionally he spent nearly five years working with Nelson Rockefeller to translate books, presumably into Spanish, for countries in South America. Near the end of his life, he was awarded a fellowship at the Library of Congress.
Bishop released two more volumes of poetry and continued to write essays up until his death in 1944. At the time, his closest blood relative still living was his sister, Margaret Bishop Myers, who moved to Hagerstown, Maryland upon her marriage.