Edmund Morris

South African-American · 1940 to 2019

Arthur Edmund Morris was born on May 27, 1940, in Nairobi, then part of Kenya Colony, to South African parents, and grew up between Kenya and South Africa. He studied music, art, and literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown but left in 1961 without finishing a degree, taking a job in retail advertising in Durban, where he designed materials aimed at Zulu-speaking customers. In 1964 he moved to London and worked as a copywriter for the advertising agency Foote, Cone and Belding, and in 1966 he married Sylvia Jukes, herself a biographer, beginning a lifelong literary partnership. The couple later settled in New York, where Morris continued in advertising while researching, in his spare hours, a life of the president who had fascinated him since childhood: Theodore Roosevelt. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, published in 1979 after nearly a decade of work, traced Roosevelt from a sickly, asthmatic boyhood to the vice presidency, and won both the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and the National Book Award in 1980, launching Morris from advertising copywriter to one of America's foremost biographers almost overnight. In 1985 President Ronald Reagan, an admirer of the book, invited Morris to become his authorized biographer with unrestricted access to the White House, an arrangement that eventually produced the controversial Dutch, A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in 1999, in which Morris inserted a fictionalized version of himself as a lifelong witness to Reagan's story, a device that divided critics. He returned to Roosevelt twice more, with Theodore Rex in 2001 and Colonel Roosevelt in 2010, completing a trilogy that many historians consider the definitive life of its subject, and also published a biography of Beethoven in 2005. Morris and Sylvia divided their time between New York City and Kent, Connecticut, for more than five decades. He died of a stroke on May 24, 2019, in Danbury, Connecticut, at seventy-eight, shortly before the posthumous publication of his final book, a life of Thomas Edison.