Morris Gilbert Bishop (April 15, 1893 – November 20, 1973) was an American scholar who wrote numerous books on Romance history, literature, and biography. His work extended to North American exploration and 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.
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.
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 education 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 his 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.Charlotte Putnam Reppert, "Introduction"; in Morris Bishop, The Best of Bishop: Light Verse from "The New Yorker" and Elsewhere (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1980).Joseph M. McCarthy, "Bishop, Morris Gilbert", American National Biography, vol. 2 (Oxford University Press, 1999). . Bishop began to write while very young: his earliest known publication was in St. Nicholas, when he was 10.Joel Rudin, "Morris Bishop dead at 80", The Cornell Daily Sun, 26 November 1973.[John Marcham], untitled essay/obituary, pp. 3, 4, 6, 8 of "A Spirit on This Hill", Cornell Alumni News vol. 76, no. 6 (January 1974). (In the original publication, the author is identified only as "JM"; Charlotte Putnam Reppert names him on p. 22 of her introduction to The Best of Bishop.) He graduated from Yonkers High School in 1910."Professor Bishop '14 retires", Cornell Alumni News, vol. 62, no. 10 (February 1960), p. 344.
Bishop attended Cornell University from 1910 to 1913, earning an A.B. degree,Alden Whitman, "Morris Bishop, scholar and poet, dies," The New York Times, 22 November 1973, p. 40. Reproduced on pp. 8–9 of "A Spirit on This Hill", Cornell Alumni News, vol. 76, no. 6 (January 1974). and also Cornell's Morrison Poetry Prize in 1913"Bishop, the prize winner this year, is a member of the Era board and has contributed some sparkling verse to that magazine. His prize poem is entitled 'A Mood'." Untitled news summary, Cornell Alumni News, vol. 15, no. 26 (2 April 1913), p. 305. (for a poem Bishop later called "hellishly serious")C. Michael Curtis, "Faculty 10: Morris Bishop: The versatile belle-lettrist", Cornell Alumni News, September 1962, pp. 16–19. 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,"Morris Bishop." Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors, Gale, 2000. Gale in Context: Biography. . Accessed 11 August 2022."Morris Bishop – 1959: By the river of Hochelaga: The land the French found", Beatty Lecture Archive, 3 March 1959, McGill University. Accessed 11 August 2022. 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.Donald D. Eddy, "Morris Bishop: Separate publications", in Marcia Jebb and Donald D. Eddy, Morris Bishop and Alison Mason Kingsbury: A Bibliography of Their Works (The Cornell Library Journal, no 12, April 1971). He was associated with Cornell for the whole of his adult life—not only as an alumnus but as an academic (he was named Kappa Alpha Professor of Romance Literature in 1938 ) and University historian.
Career 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. Bishop returned to Cornell after the war. He wrote A History of Cornell, its standard history, in 1962. That 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.E.B.O. Borgerhoff, untitled review of Studies in Seventeenth-Century French Literature, Romanic Review, vol 55 (1964), pp. 293–294.
Bishop was a visiting professor at the University of Athens (with a Fulbright teaching fellowship) in 1951,"Bishop to go to Greece", The Ithaca Journal, 19 June 1951, p. 5. Via newspapers.com. at Wells College from 1962 to 1963,"Retired professor gets Wells post", The Ithaca Journal, 19 June 1951, p. 3. Via newspapers.com. and at Rice University in spring 1966.Morag Fullilove, "Pitzer names 52 new professors in university faculty", The Rice Thresher, 23 September 1965, p. 4. In 1964, he was president of the Modern Language Association."The eighty-five presidents of the Modern Language Association", PMLA, vol. 90 (1975), p. 528. .
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.Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick, Cornell: A History, 1940–2015 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2014), p. 110. . . "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".Morris Bishop, "How to write a biography", Revista de la Asociacion de Mujeres Graduadas, Universidad de Puerto Rico, July 1941 (vol. 4), pp. 46–49. This carries the explanation: "Address delivered before the First Inter-American Writers' Conference, University of Puerto Rico, April 21, 1941". The speech continues by describing how one might create a biography of Juan Ponce de León.
His Survey of French Literature, first published in 1955, was for many years a standard textbook (revised editions were published in 1965 and, posthumously, in 2005). During the late 1950s and early 1960s his reviews of books on historical topics often appeared in The New York Times. , his 1968 history of the Middle Ages is still in print."American Heritage Library Series: The Middle Ages" (sales page), HarperCollins. Accessed 23 January 2026. He was a frequent contributor of historical articles to American Heritage and also wrote a miscellany of lighter material, including the pseudonymous comic mystery The Widening Stain and humorous verse and prose pieces published by a variety of magazines.Marcia Jebb, "Morris Bishop: Contributions to periodicals"; pp. 17–45 within Marcia Jebb and Donald D. Eddy, Morris Bishop and Alison Mason Kingsbury: A Bibliography of Their Works (The Cornell Library Journal, no. 12, April 1971). His entry in American National Biography reads:
Bishop's more than 400 publications are noteworthy not only by reason of their volume and their varied subject matter but also because of their charming style and formidable erudition. Bishop was fluent in German, French, Spanish, Swedish, modern Greek, and Latin; his command of the entire breadth of literature in the romance languages was exceptional. His scrupulous accuracy and keen insight gave substance not only to his core studies, those dealing with French language and civilization, but also to those in areas with which he was less familiar.
On working in those areas of relative unfamiliarity, Bishop said:
I get bored by doing the same thing over. No, it's not a question of being the "well-rounded" man, but I simply wish to satisfy my curiosity about one thing and then go on to another.Seth S. Goldschlager, "Personal profile: Bishop discusses Cornell trends", Cornell Daily Sun, 27 April 1965, pp. S8, S35, S40.
Bishop's papers are held at Cornell University Library's Special Collections.Morris Bishop papers, 1901–1974, library catalog, Cornell University Library.Morris Bishop papers, 1901–1974: Collection number 14-18-641, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Pascal The review of Bishop's book Pascal: The Life of Genius (1936) in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "the first complete description of Pascal as man and as historical figure to appear in English", and praised it highly, particularly for its lively description of the dispute between the Jesuits and Port-Royal.Clark Mills, "Took all learning for his province" (review of Pascal: The Life of Genius), St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 6 December 1936, page 4I. The New York Times review described it as "a solid, comprehensive and valuable addition to the library" with "a heroic attempt to explain the achievements of Pascal as a scientist, philosopher and theologian", and praised Bishop's enthusiasm in writing about Pascal.P. W. Wilson, "A comprehensive view of Pascal" (review of Pascal: The Life of Genius), The New York Times, 13 December 1936.
The Romance studies scholar Arthur Livingston admired the book as a literary biography, particularly for the way in which Bishop "follows the motive of the 'child prodigy' through the varied influences of that fact in Pascal's life upon his temperament, his moral outlook and the various episodes of his career"—a viewpoint Livingston thought led to perceptiveness and fairness. But Livingston criticized what he saw as Bishop's unnecessary dalliance with "a rather timid Freudianism". He claimed that Pascal evolved "[from] a prig into a charlatan", that his learning is obsolete, and "It is in recovering Pascal the poet and artist from the dross of his biography and his thought that Professor Bishop's criticism is perhaps least effective". Yet Livingston concluded by praising the book as suggestive, comprehensive, and thorough.Arthur Livingston, untitled review of Pascal: The Life of Genius, Romanic Review, vol. 29 (1938), pp. 85–87.