Morris Gilbert Bishop (15 April 1893 – 20 November 1973) was an American scholar who wrote numerous books on Romance history, literature, and biography. His work also extended to North American exploration and beyond.
Orphaned at 12, he was brought up in New York state and Ontario, wrote and published precociously, and entered Cornell University in 1910. Other than from 1914 to 1921 and 1942 to 1945, Bishop remained at Cornell for his entire working life and into retirement, at the age of 77 even fending off a demonstrator with a ceremonial mace.
At its core Bishop's work covered Pascal, Petrarch, Ronsard, La Rochefoucauld, Cabeza de Vaca, and Champlain—embracing literature in Italian, Spanish, Latin, and particularly French. He also worked as a translator and anthologist. Bishop was concerned that his books should be lively and engaging yet be soundly based on fact; they were widely praised for achieving these goals, but were sometimes criticized for falling short.
Bishop was a prolific contributor of light verse and short prose pieces to the popular magazines of the day. His light verse was praised by fellow poets such as Richard Armour, David McCord, and Louis Untermeyer.
Early life and career
At the time of Morris Bishop's birth his father, Edwin Rubergall Bishop, a Canadian physician, was working at Willard Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Willard, New York; Morris was actually born in the hospital. His mother, Bessie E. Gilbert, died two years later, and Morris and his elder brother Edwin were sent to live with their Canadian grandparents in Brantford, Ontario. His father remarried, and while he was working in Geneva, New York, the boys were sent to live with father and stepmother. Morris was then aged eight. Both father and stepmother died (from tuberculosis) by the time he was 11, so the brothers were sent to live with their mother's family in Yonkers, New York.
Bishop started writing young: his earliest known publication was in St. Nicholas, when he was 10. He graduated from Yonkers High School in 1910.
Bishop attended Cornell University from 1910 to 1913, earning an A.B. degree, and also Cornell's Morrison Poetry Prize in 1913 (for a poem Bishop later called "hellishly serious") and an A.M. degree in 1914. After that he sold textbooks for Ginn & Co, joined the US Cavalry (and unhappily served under Pershing in the "punitive expedition" in Mexico), was a first lieutenant in the US Infantry in World War I and a member of the American Relief Administration mission to Finland in 1919, and worked as a copywriter in a New York advertising agency, the Harry Porter Company, for a year. He returned to Cornell to begin teaching French and Italian in 1921 and to earn a PhD in 1926; his thesis was on the plays of Jules Lemaître. He was associated with Cornell for the whole of his adult life—not only as an alumnus but as an academic (in 1938 being named Kappa Alpha Professor of Romance Literature) and University Historian.
Bishop worked for the US Office of War Information in New York and London from 1942 to 1944, and with the SHAEF Psychological Warfare Division from 1944 to 1945.
After the war Bishop returned to Cornell. In 1962 he wrote A History of Cornell, its standard history. The same year he was presented with a festschrift, Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature, described in a review as questioning the notion of the "baroque" but showing "a continuing vitality" in its study.
Bishop was a visiting professor at the University of Athens (with a Fulbright teaching fellowship) in 1951, at Wells College from 1962 to 1963, and at Rice University in spring 1966. In 1964, he was president of the Modern Language Association.
After retirement from Cornell in 1960, Bishop served as its marshal, officiating at graduations. During the 1970 ceremony (when he was 77), he used the university mace to fend off a graduate who was trying to seize the microphone. "The jab was given in typical Bishop style: with spontaneity, grace and effectiveness," commented the president, Dale R. Corson.
Writings and scholarship
"[Bishop's] scholarly forte was biography": he wrote biographies of Pascal, Petrarch, Ronsard, La Rochefoucauld, Cabeza de Vaca, Champlain, and St. Francis. Bishop was aware that academic biographies made only a minor impact, and instead wrote for a wide readership: speaking to an audience of writers, he suggested that would-be biographers consider writing "biofiction", which "may be more bio than fiction, or more fiction than bio", but either way "is based solidly on fact", though permitting "a good deal of invention, a good deal of decoration".