Background
Edmund Morris was born on May 24, 1940, in Nairobi, Kenya. He was the son of May (Dowling) and Eric Edmund Morris.
2010
Edmund Morris at Google's Mountain View campus on December 7, 2010.
2010
Edmund Morris in Conan in 2010.
2010
Edmund Morris with Conan O'Brien in Conan in 2010.
2011
Edmund Morris at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on April 30, 2011. Photo by David Livingston.
2012
1310 Kanawha Blvd E, Charleston, WV 25311, United States
Edmund Morris at West Virginia Humanities Council in 2012.
2013
1000 Fisk St, Brownwood, TX 76801, United States
Edmund Morris at Howard Payne University in 2013.
2015
Edmund Morris at Pioneer Institute's event on March 26, 2015.
Drosty Rd, Grahamstown 6139, South Africa
Rhodes University where Edmund Morris studied.
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Edmund Morris with Ronald Reagan at the White House.
Pulitzer Prize which Edmund Morris received in 1980.
National Book Award which Edmund Morris received in 1980.
(The Rise covers the time from Roosevelt's birth through h...)
The Rise covers the time from Roosevelt's birth through his ascendancy to the Presidency. It includes the Roosevelt family history starting with his parents' influence, his turbulent childhood illnesses, education, involvement in politics and accomplishments in politics that prepared him to be one of the most influential presidents of the modern era. Specific topics include the philosophy of Roosevelt's father, mother, and his family. Morris examines his life as a young politician driven by a sense of public duty and stewardship and captures multiple aspects of the events that shaped the character and performance of Roosevelt. The book provides insight into the world of influence from a master of corporate power as opposed to leaders who practice personal power.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375756787/?tag=2022091-20
1979
(This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sittin...)
This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sitting President - yet written with complete interpretive freedom - is as revolutionary in a method as it is formidable in scholarship. When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first literary guests was Edmund Morris. Morris developed a fascination for the genial yet inscrutable President and, after Reagan's landslide reelection in 1984, put aside the second volume of his life of Roosevelt to become an observing eye and ear at the White House. And began a long biographical pilgrimage to the heart of Ronald Reagan's mystery.
https://www.amazon.com/Dutch-Memoir-Ronald-Edmund-Morris/dp/0394555082/?tag=2022091-20
1999
(Theodore Rex is the second volume of a trilogy preceded b...)
Theodore Rex is the second volume of a trilogy preceded by The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and succeeded by Colonel Roosevelt (2010). Theodore Rex covers the years of Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, from 1901 to 1909, covering events such as the construction of the Panama Canal, as well as the Roosevelt Administration's political, diplomatic and military exploits during the aforementioned period.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812966007/?tag=2022091-20
2001
(Ludwig van Beethoven was a composer of universal genius w...)
Ludwig van Beethoven was a composer of universal genius whose popularity, extraordinary even during his lifetime, has never ceased to grow and now encircles the globe. His most famous works are as beloved in Beijing as they are in Boston. Edmund Morris brings the great composer to life as a man of astonishing complexity and overpowering intelligence, gigantic, compulsively creative personality unable to tolerate constraints. But Beethoven's achievement rests in his immortal music, whose grandeur and beauty were conceived "on the other side of silence."
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060759755/?tag=2022091-20
2005
(This biography marks the completion of a trilogy. Of all ...)
This biography marks the completion of a trilogy. Of all our great presidents, Theodore Roosevelt is the only one whose greatness increased out of office. What other president has written forty books, hunted lions, founded a third political party, survived an assassin’s bullet, and explored an unknown river longer than the Rhine? Packed with more adventure, variety, drama, humor, and tragedy than a big novel, yet documented down to the smallest fact, this masterwork recounts the last decade of perhaps the most amazing life in American history.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375757074/?tag=2022091-20
2010
(Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, in “wh...)
Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, in “what amounts to a scrapbook of one man’s literary life,” the book ranges widely in tone from the serious to the satirical. Morris begins with a 1972 essay, “The Bumstich: Lament for a Forgotten Fruit,” in which he recounts his time as a schoolboy in Kenya. The author concludes with “The Ivo Pogorelich of Presidential Biography,” an exploration of the process of writing Dutch, his controversial book about Ronald Reagan. This last essay is an updated revision of three seminars the author gave while serving as a writer in residence at the University of Chicago in 2003. In other pieces, Morris laments the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro; probes the psyche of South African writer Nadine Gordimer; explains his passion for writing biographies; narrates his tour through Britain’s Imperial War Museum, and bemoans the loss of the physical pleasure of writing with pen and ink or typewriter.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008QLXQJC/?tag=2022091-20
2012
(Enlightened by seven years of research among the five mil...)
Enlightened by seven years of research among the five million pages of original documents preserved in Edison's huge laboratory at West Orange, New Jersey, and privileged access to family papers still held in trust, Morris is able to bring his subject to life on the page - the adored yet autocratic and often neglectful husband of two wives and father of six children. If the great man who emerges from it is less a sentimental hero than an overwhelming force of nature, driven onward by compulsive creativity, then Edison is, at last, getting his biographical due.
https://www.amazon.com/Edison-Edmund-Morris/dp/081299311X/?tag=2022091-20
2019
Edmund Morris was born on May 24, 1940, in Nairobi, Kenya. He was the son of May (Dowling) and Eric Edmund Morris.
Edmund Morris was educated in Kenya and then studied music, art, and literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. He dropped out of college in 1961.
After dropping out of college, Edmund Morris worked in the retail advertising department of a menswear store in Durban. In 1964 he moved to London where he worked as an advertising copywriter before immigrating to the United States in 1968.
Edmund Morris wrote his first book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in 1979. It was the first volume of what would eventually become a trilogy on the life of the 26th president. The author's career took off with the success of this book. In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became President of the United States, he was impressed by the book. In 1985 Morris was chosen by the Reagan family to write the then-president's official biography. Morris spent years watching, studying and talking to the president. He had unprecedented access to everything that went on in the Reagan White House.
But even with all that work and study, Morris found it very hard to define and describe Ronald Wilson Reagan. Reagan's official biographer just stood in a corner and took notes. Morris claimed to have learned little from his conversations with Reagan and White House staff or even from the President's own private diary. Morris eventually decided to scrap writing a straight biography and turn his piece into a faux historical memoir about the President told from the viewpoint of a semi-fictional peer from the same town as Ronald Reagan. But Reagan was always a mystery for Morris.
In 1999, after fourteen years researching and writing the story of Reagan's life, the book Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan was published. Theodore Rex, which followed Dutch in 2002, was in contrast a straight account of Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency (1901–1909). Three years later Morris published Beethoven: The Universal Composer, a short biography that sought to convey in plain prose the essence of great music. Colonel Roosevelt, the final book in Morris's Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, came out in 2010. In October 2012, Morris published This Living Hand and Other Essays, an autobiographical collection of pieces on literature, music, and the presidency.
The New Yorker, The Wilson Quarterly, Harper Magazine, and the New York Times all have published essays from Morris on literature, travel, and the arts. After Morris' death, in 2019, his book Edison was published. One of the achievements of this biography, the first major life of Edison in more than twenty years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison - the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies - as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory.
(Enlightened by seven years of research among the five mil...)
2019(This book, the only biography ever authorized by a sittin...)
1999(Arranged chronologically rather than thematically, in “wh...)
2012(Ludwig van Beethoven was a composer of universal genius w...)
2005(Theodore Rex is the second volume of a trilogy preceded b...)
2001(The Rise covers the time from Roosevelt's birth through h...)
1979(This biography marks the completion of a trilogy. Of all ...)
2010
Quotations:
"The only critic that matters is your heart."
"Continue to cast your net wide, wide, wide: that’s the essence of imaginative research."
"I like the challenge of trying to express with words what music does. Felix Mendelssohn once said very acutely that the reason it's hard to write about music is that music is a superior language. So in using prose to describe music, you’re using something inferior. But I love the challenge and I hope that I succeeded in it."
"There are screams of pain in Beethoven. For example, in the same Ninth Symphony in the finale, the sopranos have to sing that high A 75 times. I counted it. Very painful to sing, very painful to hear. And I think Beethoven was expressing his own aural pain."
"History admires the wise, but elevates the brave."
"There are floods of praise coming in as well as criticism."
Edmund Morris wrote with a fountain pen, but, as a self-professed nerd, took pride in owning one of the first computers.
Quotes from others about the person
"Thorough, honest, prompt, a gentleman with a quick sense of humor and a writer’s curiosity." - Kerri Arsenault
"Morris was a graceful and perceptive writer." - Philip Terzian
"A true, original and generous friend." - Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
"Edmund Morris was a smart man and a gifted writer."
Edmund Morris married Sylvia Jukes Morris in 1968.