Elizabeth Bishop

In 1961, Elizabeth Bishop wrote Robert Lowell about Madame de Sévigné, France's venerated master of the art of letter writing: "Have you ever read her? She is marvelous, and the wonder is that the letters survived, and are so much better than most...

Robert Giroux, a distinguished giant of 20th-century publishing who guided and supported dozens of great writers from T.S. Eliot and Jack Kerouac to Bernard Malamud and Susan Sontag, died in his sleep early yesterday. He was 94. Giroux, who helped create...

The poet Weldon Kees was born in Beatrice, Neb., in 1914, though what's best known about him is that on July 18, 1955, his car was found abandoned with the keys still in the ignition in a parking lot on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge....

Key West never sought to be different. But by birthright, it simply was: a remote village with a defiant attitude and free spirit that attracted privateers, pirates, entrepreneurs, smugglers, craftsmen, pioneers, poets and writers. It remains a place...

If you're not autumning in New England, this photo book may be the next best thing. In "A New England Autumn," all the roads are back roads. Ferenc Máté's photos take you across six states, from boatyards to church-steepled hillsides. Accompanying the...

I moved to Paris in March. Some would say my timing couldn't have been worse, with the value of the dollar eroding and French-American relations icy. But I think there was no better time for shaking up the gray matter and seeing things from a...

If every musical organization were as enterprising as the Chicago Chamber Musicians, our most prominent composers would all be sharing and talking about their newest music in concerts they create and supervise. Old barriers would be broken, new lines of...

This year's Gathering of the Florida Humanities Council took place in Everglades City. The "city" in Everglades City is, of course, a grand pretense applied to this burg of fewer than 500 people that's miles from anyplace urban. The real Everglades city...

When you find yourself single in a world of couples, there's no worse time than Valentine's Day. While the rest of the world is bathed in a pink cloud of flowers, chocolates and heart-shaped baubles, you're eating sour grapes in solitude. This year,...