Morris Bishop

Who was Morris Bishop?

Morris Gilbert Bishop was an American scholar, historian, biographer, author, and humorist.

Raised in Canada and New York, he attended Cornell from 1910–1913, earning a Bachelor's in 1913 and then a Master of Arts degree in 1914. He then worked in the advertising industry and served in the army in World War I, returning to Cornell afterward to begin teaching in 1921 and to earn a Ph.D. in 1926. He was associated for the whole of his adult life with Cornell University, as alumnus, Kappa Alpha Professor of Romance Literature and University Historian. Bishop wrote the preeminent history of the university, A History of Cornell.

He also wrote biographies of Pascal, Champlain, La Rochefoucauld, Petrarch, and St. Francis, as well as his 1928 book, A gallery of eccentrics; or, A set of twelve originals & extravagants from Elagabalus, the waggish emperor to Mr. Professor Porson, the tippling philologer, designed to serve, by example, for the correction of manners & for the edification of the ingenious, which profiled 12 unusual individuals. His 1955 Survey of French Literature was for many years a standard textbook. 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 under the title The Middle Ages. He was a Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur, taught as a visiting professor at the University of Athens and Rice University and served as president of the Modern Language Association. He was the author of nearly 30 books including the comic mystery The Widening Stain. An expository look into Bishop's perspectives on American history can be found in his frequent contribution of articles to American Heritage Magazine. While he possessed extensive knowledge on the subject, his writings, particularly those concerning the Iroquois, are not without considerable ethnocentric bias.