"Sidelights"

Morris Bishop gained a great deal of respect for his scholarship as a professor of Romance languages and literature at Cornell University and for his poetry, often published in the New Yorker and other magazines. Yet, he made perhaps his greatest mark among general readers by chronicling the lives and works of extraordinary and eccentric figures from history and literature, figures often little known or appreciated before Bishop brought them to light.

In his first such history, Bishop gathered together a collection of these figures, beginning in third-century Rome and progressing to modern times. In 1928's A Gallery of Eccentrics; or, A Set of Twelve Originals and Extravagants from Elagabalus, the Waggish Emperor, to Mr. Professor Porson, the Tippling Philologer, commented a reviewer for the Nation, "Mr. Bishop's style often has a cool lucidity that is rare in these journalistic days." The same reviewer did fault Bishop for "a preciosity that smacks too obviously of the grotesqueries which characterized the subjects it delineates." Yet, in the opinion of a Bookman contributor, Bishop's scholarship and writing skill succeeded in bringing these different characters "together in his book with all the success of singers of close harmony."

In The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca, published in 1933, Bishop provided the first biography in the English language of one of the most remarkable characters in the early history of Europeans in America. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was a member of Panfilo de Narvaez's Spanish expedition that set out from Cuba in 1528 in search of gold among the Native Americans of Florida. More than eight years later, after suffering battles and captivity among the Native Americans of Florida and Texas, navigating the Gulf and its hurricanes on rafts, and finally crossing the Southwest desert, Cabeza de Vaca and three other Spaniards reached the Gulf of California where they found a company of Spanish soldiers in northern Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca told his own account of these adventures in La Relacion, published in Spain in 1542.

"It is almost incredible that the epic of the first white man who crossed the North American continent from coast to coast should have waited so long to find its Homer," noted a contributor to America. Added the reviewer, "The brilliant young Cornell professor has done a notable service in calling attention to a hero well deserving a place with Cortez, De Soto, Coronado, and Pizarro." Yet, Cabeza de Vaca's story did not end with this adventure. He returned to the New World as a governor of Spanish conquests in South America. There he governed with respect and appreciation for the native peoples. For this kindness, he received the scorn of his own countrymen and he was arrested and returned to Spain. In the estimation of a reviewer for Christian Century, Cabeza de Vaca's "name deserves to be bracketed with that of [Father Bartoleme de] Las Casas--one a conquistador, the other a priest, both true Christians and friends of the Indians."

Arthur Warner noted in...