Joseph Bucklin Bishop (September 5, 1847 – December 13, 1928), was an American newspaper editor (1870–1905), Secretary of the Isthmian Canal Commission in Washington, D.C., and Panama (1905–1914), and authorized biographer and close friend of President Theodore Roosevelt. Bishop was the author of 13 books and dozens of magazine articles, and he edited the 1920 best-seller, Theodore Roosevelt’s Letters to His Children.

Bishop was born September 5, 1847, in Seekonk, Massachusetts, today the village of Rumford in East Providence, Rhode Island. He was the sixth of seven children of James Madison Bishop (1812–1864), a farmer, and Elzada Balcom Bishop (1808–1892), a homemaker. His ancestors were early New England settlers, arriving in Salem, Massachusetts, from England in 1639. Bridget Bishop, his great grandmother via marriage, was the first woman executed during the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s. Shortly after Bridget's death on June 10, 1692, the family escaped to Rehoboth, Massachusetts, where many later generations of Bishops lived and worked. Joseph's great grandfather, Phanuel Bishop, a wealthy innkeeper in Rehoboth, led a company of Minutemen that marched on the alarm of the "shot heard ‘round the world" at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. Phanuel Bishop was a member of the United States Congress from Massachusetts (1799–1807) and a delegate to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1778 in Boston.

Joseph grew up on his family farm, graduated from Pawtucket, Rhode Island, High School in 1866 and from Brown University, with a Bachelor of Arts degree, in 1870. An early Providence Journal profile recorded that he was "a genial, companionable fellow" but "did not rank high in his class (of 53)... as a matter of fact he was not a brilliant scholar." He supported himself through college by working on the editorial staff of the Providence Morning Herald, a short-lived Democratic voice in local politics.

Joseph married Harriet Louisa Hartwell (1848–1917) in the Newman Congregational Church in Rehoboth, December 14, 1872. Raised on a New Hampshire farm, Harriet was the fourth of five children of Samuel Estabrook Hartwell and Lucy King Hartwell. She was orphaned at age 11 and sent to live with relatives, John and Harriet Hartwell in Providence. Harriet's great-great grandfather, Ephraim, owned a popular tavern in Concord, Massachusetts during the early days of the Revolution. Hartwell's Tavern is now an historic landmark, situated along Concord's Battle Road, and managed as a visitor attraction by the National Park Service.

At the time of his marriage, Bishop was working on the city staff of the venerable New York Tribune, edited by the legendary but eccentric Horace Greeley. It was, arguably, the nation's leading newspaper of the time. Bishop recorded that in spite of a shabby work environment on Printing House Square in lower Manhattan, the Tribune’s offices “harbored a moral and intellectual spirit that I met nowhere else in my 35 years of journalistic experience.” After just six months, he was promoted to the paper's editorial staff where he came under the tutelage of a senior editor, John Milton Hay, former assistant secretary to President Abraham Lincoln and future United States Secretary of State under President Theodore Roosevelt. To supplement his meager income, Bishop moonlighted as an American correspondent for the London Daily News. His historically-significant dispatches included reports of the assassination of President James A. Garfield and the grand opening of the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge.

In July 1883, Bishop departed the Tribune for Edwin Godkin’s New York Evening Post, “the home of absolute intellectual freedom, intellectual courage and intellectual honesty.” For more than a decade and a half, from the waning days of Reconstruction to the close of the Industrial Revolution, Bishop thrived professionally under Godkin's tutelage. He recalled his years there as “the most enjoyable and profitable” of his journalistic career. Bishop's advocacy led to the institutionalization of the paper's groundbreaking Voter's Guide (to counter Tammany Hall propaganda) and the adoption in New York of the novel Australian paper ballot by which voters selected candidates for office in private, on impartial, state-produced forms. His determined investigative research helped to uncover and publicize incriminating letters by James G. Blaine, the 1884 Republican presidential nominee. The so-called Mulligan Letters played a critical role in the candidate's eventual defeat. Later on, Bishop helped Godkin publish a series of “biographies” of leading Tammany Hall figures that exposed their roles in crime and corruption in New York City Hall.

Bishop's association with Theodore Roosevelt began in the spring of 1895 when TR, as New York City Police Commission president, was radically reforming the corrupt and patronage-laden force. Roosevelt welcomed the editorial support he received from Bishop at the Evening Post, and they began a correspondence that would number more than 600 letters over 25 years. Early on, when Bishop's loyalty was questioned, Roosevelt put his journalist friend to a stern personal test, challenging his allegiance in an eyeballs-to-eyeballs confrontation. Bishop passed without flinching, and Roosevelt declared, “What I value in you is that you give me the advice you think I need rather than the advice you think I’d like to have.”

With the retirement of Godkin in 1899 and anti-Roosevelt sentiment rising among new Evening Post managers, Bishop joined an exodus of writers to the rival New York Commercial Advertiser (later the Globe and Commercial Advertiser) where he became chief of editorial writers. Working alongside editor John Henry Wright, Bishop helped evolve the scrawny weakling of a paper into a dignified, readable journal – a clear alternative to the “yellow” rags of William R. Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Bishop editorialized vigorously against a scheme by New York State power brokers to kick Governor Theodore Roosevelt “upstairs” to the Vice Presidency on the William McKinley ticket. But when Roosevelt was nominated by the Republicans, Bishop fell into line, helping to strategize his New York general election campaign. When Roosevelt assumed the Presidency in 1901, on McKinley's assassination, Bishop editorialized, “Nobody who has followed Theodore Roosevelt’s public career or has had the privilege of personal acquaintance with him has any doubt about his ability to fill with honor to himself and usefulness to the country the high office upon which he has entered.”