While attending Vassar, ostensibly to study piano, Bishop read Henry James and Joseph Conrad and discovered American poets H. D., Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman. She regretted that she did not study more Greek and Roman poets, whom she considered sources of mastery. When the editors of The Vassar Miscellany rejected a submission of modern verse, she joined with classmates Mary McCarthy, Eleanor Clark, and Muriel Rukeyser in founding a less conventional literary journal, Con Spirito. With the aid of the college librarian, in 1934, Bishop established a friendship with mentor Marianne Moore that lasted until Moore's death in 1972. After graduating, Bishop produced evocative verse while living on an inherited income. Moore published a few of Bishop's poems in 1935 in Trial Balances, a collection of the works of beginning poets.
Bishop spent the next three years in Europe and North Africa, then settled in Key West, Florida, where the vigor of storms at sea and fishing trips empowered her verse. She then moved to Mexico. Her work appeared in Partisan Review and, in 1945, she won a $1,000 Houghton Mifflin Poetry Fellowship. In the late 1940s, friendships with Randall Jarrell and Robert Lowell sparked a new literary direction. From 1949 to 1950, she served the Library of Congress as poetry consultant, a prolific period that earned her the American Academy of Arts and Letters award and a Houghton Mifflin honor for North and South (1946).
