Leonard Bishop

Leonard Bishop (1922–2002) was a 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, NY, 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.

During his early years, teachers would call him stupid and became accustomed to the dunce hat. He had a difficulty for learning and soon dropped out. Leonard began to steal to help support his family but was sent to a camp in Maine to learn a trade. After completing the program he became a hobo and traveled around the country on trains. While traveling a woman hobo taught him how to read and gave him the book Beau Geste. He became inspired and wanted to achieve more out of life, so he went home and enrolled in The New School of Social Research. Leonard attended creative writing classes here. Soon people noticed that he had a gift in writing; his early works were vulgar and powerful.

After just three months of college he left. Soon after he entered a writing contest and won $500. The same day his brother Bernard called him saying that their father was outside, with a gun in hand, waiting for their mother to come home. Leonard attacked his father and took the gun away. Leonard later wrote “I was deeply shocked, not because he was trying to kill my mother (he had tried it several times before) but because I could see myself ten years from now, standing inside my father’s skin.”

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