Leonard Bishop

In the early 1980s Leonard moved to Kansas when he married his second wife Celia. Here he taught private groups. In the autumn of 2002, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He went through both radiation and chemotherapy. He soon caught pneumonia and on December 19, 2002, at the Mercy Regional Health Center in Manhattan, Kansas he died at the age of 80. He died fulfilled because he had accomplished something. He wrote ““I was no longer a low bum, a hobo, a loser, I had faced the challenge of Opportunity and dared to claim it for my life.”

His books Make My Bed in Hell and The Desire Years were both recognized by the Gold Medal Books. In the late 1960s he traveled to the west coast when one of his books, Against Heaven's Hand, was being made into a movie. The movie was later called “Seven In Darkness”. When the movie was finished he stayed out there and began to teach again. He taught at multiple places but ended at University of California, Berkeley.

In 1952 his first novel Down All Your Streets was published. After the Dial Press offered him a contract. From here he wrote about his experiences in poverty and violence. Following several years of success he started to teach. In the 1950s he started to teach at Columbia University.

Leonard Bishop (October 17, 1922 – December 20, 2002) was an American novelist, writing teacher, and newspaper columnist. He wrote for over five decades, only stopping two weeks before his death in 2002. He has worked alongside other famous authors such as Mario Puzo, William Styron, Joseph Heller, Richard Wright, and Harlan Ellison. Bishop has been recognized as one of the seven top writing teachers in the United States. His career in writing and teaching is archived at Boston University in the Leonard Bishop Collection.

Leonard Bishop was born October 17, 1922, in New York City, where he grew up. He was raised in extreme poverty, spending a year with his older brother, Bernard, in a Catholic orphanage because his mother, Esther, couldn't support them. Meanwhile, his father was a criminal, a heroin addict, and a wife beater who spent time in various prisons around New York and New Jersey. To make matters worse, he was born with clubfoot and dyslexia.