Morris Gilbert Bishop (15 April 1893 – 20 November 1973) was an American scholar, based at Cornell University, who wrote numerous books in Romance history, biography and literature, but whose work encompassed the early exploration of North America and the history of Cornell. He was also a prolific contributor of light verse and short prose pieces to the popular magazines of the day; his verse has also been collected in books. 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. However, both father and stepmother died (from tuberculosis) by the time he was 11; and 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 Cornell's Morrison Poetry Prize in 1913 (for a poem that Bishop later called "hellishly serious") and an A.M. degree in 1914. He then 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 one year, before returning to Cornell to begin teaching French and Italian in 1921 and to earn a Ph.D. in 1926; his thesis being on the plays of Jules Lemaître. He was associated for the whole of his adult life with Cornell, not only as an alumnus but also 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