From the letters Elizabeth Bishop wrote over 50 years - from 1928 when she was 17 (and already a poet) to her death in Boston in 1979 - Robert Giroux, her editor during her lifetime, has selected over 500, and has written an introduction. The letters constitute in one sense an autobiography, including the love story between Lota Soares and Bishop in Brazil, which ended in Lota's suicide 15 years later. The book records Bishop's intense relationship with her two mentors, Marianne Moore and Robert Lowell (who received more letters than anyone else), as well as her many friendships.