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 but because I could see myself ten years from now, standing inside my father's skin.” 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. 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 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.”
