However, a much later survey of the American reception of Francis of Assisi judged that "the book is derivative and generally undistinguished". At the time of his death, Bishop was working on a biography of Cola di Rienzo. Bishop also published articles on other writers: as examples, Chateaubriand and Dante Cabeza de Vaca The earliest of Bishop's biographies was The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca (1933). This book, on the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c1490 – c1558), was praised in North American Review. The review in The New York Times concluded: "Despite an overwhelming mass of detail and despite the fact that most of his characters are unknown to the general reader, [Bishop] has made de Vaca live; and one feels admiration and indignation, as though the issues involved were things of yesterday." Comparing the book with John Eoghan Kelly's Pedro de Alvarado Conquistator, the poet Theodore Maynard wrote that "[Bishop's] style is not distinguished, but is at least vivacious", praising the book as entertaining but regretting that Bishop "indulges his propensity for fanciful speculation". The reviewer for The Journal of Modern History found it a "highly entertaining and instructive narrative". The reviews in both The Hispanic American Historical Review and The Journal of Negro History pointed out various problems (starting with the protagonist's name); yet the former concluded that the book was largely accurate as well as "delightfully written", and the latter that the book was "a brilliant piece of historical research". Just six years after publication of his book, Bishop himself acknowledged the superiority of a newly published alternative, writing that Cleve Hallenbeck "has produced the best informed and best argued study of Cabeza de Vaca's route that has ever been made". More recently, Bishop's own book has been criticized. The authors of a larger biography of de Vaca published in 1999 give their predecessors "low marks for shoddy research and implausible or plainly erroneous readings and interpretations. . . . But [the authors] are hardest on the errors, obfuscations, and lacunae of biographer Morris Bishop and [editor] Enrique Pupo-Walker. . . ." A 2013 paper describes Bishop's book as "a breezy narrative about Cabeza de Vaca, spiced with imaginary dialogue"; saying that it "made no attempt to advance a new route interpretation. Instead, Bishop accepted the conclusions of [Harbert] Davenport and [Joseph K.] Wells set forth some fourteen years earlier" – a Mexican interpretation