Edmund Morris (writer)

Edmund Morris (born May 27, 1940) is an American writer best known for his biographies of United States Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan.

Life and career

Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of British parents May (Dowling) and Eric Edmund Morris, an airline pilot. He received his early education in Kenya and then attended Rhodes University in the Union of South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before emigrating to the United States in 1968.

His first book was the Roosevelt biography, published when he was forty. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won a Pulitzer Prize^{citation needed} and the 1980 National Book Award in Biography.

After spending fourteen years as President Reagan's authorized biographer, he published the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in 1999 (edited by Robert Loomis, executive editor at Random House, Morris' publisher). This book generated controversy because, although Morris had access to Reagan's papers and correspondence, including his private diary, and he had been chosen as Reagan's official biographer, Morris wrote the book in a fiction-like fashion with a fictional version of himself as the narrator. Morris chose this course because, he admitted, he was never able to bring the president into focus. "He was truly one of the strangest men who's ever lived," Morris said. "Nobody around him understood him. I, every person I interviewed, almost without exception, eventually would say, 'You know, I could never really figure him out.'"

Morris's other books include Theodore Rex (2001), the second in what is now a three-volume chronicle of the life of Theodore Roosevelt; Beethoven: The Universal Composer (2005); and the final book in his Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, Colonel Roosevelt (2010), which City Journal called "one of the best biographies in modern literature".

Morris has also written extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine.

Edmund Morris lives in New York City and Kent, Connecticut with his wife and fellow biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris.

Bibliography

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan. 1979. ISBN 0-375-75678-7. 
• Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. New York: Random House. 1999. ISBN 0-394-55508-2. 
• Theodore Rex. New York: Random House. 2001. ISBN 978-0-394-55509-6. 
• Beethoven: The Universal Composer. New York: Atlas Books/HarperCollins. 2005. ISBN 0-06-075974-7. 
• Colonel Roosevelt. New York: Random House. 2010. ISBN 978-0-375-50487-7. 

External links

• Booknotes interview with Morris on Dutch, December 5, 1999.
• In Depth interview with Morris, October 6, 2002
• CSPAN-Q&A Television interview Nov. 21, 2010, 1 hr interview with host Brian Lamb, discussing all his works. (Transcript and video both available at CSPAN website).