Jim Bishop, Columnist and Author, Dies

DELRAY BEACH, Fla. — Jim Bishop, a former syndicated columnist and author of 21 books, including “The Day Lincoln Was Shot” and “The Day Kennedy Was Shot,” has died at age 79.

Bishop, who worked his way up from newspaper copy boy during a 58-year career, died at his home Sunday of respiratory failure.

A columnist for King Features Syndicate, Bishop wrote “Jim Bishop: Reporter” for 27 years until retirement in 1983. “I walk into the shadows temporarily,” he wrote in closing his last column.

His “The Day Lincoln Was Shot,” published in 1955, combined history and a novelist’s sense of drama in a detailed account of Lincoln’s assassination.

It sold more than 3 million copies, was translated into 16 languages, and pioneered a style Bishop repeated in “The Day Christ Died” in 1957, “A Day in the Life of President Kennedy” in 1964, and later books about Kennedy, and Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

His other books included “The Day Christ Was Born,” 1960; “Jim Bishop, Reporter,” 1965; “The Days of Martin Luther King Jr.,” 1971; “FDR’s Last Year,” 1974; “Birth of the United States,” 1976, and “A Bishop’s Confession,” 1980.

Survivors include his wife, Kelly, and four daughters.