Edmund Morris

Arthur Edmund Morris (May 27, 1940 – May 24, 2019) was an American-South African writer known for his biographies of U.S. Presidents. His 1979 book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and was the first of a trilogy of books on Roosevelt. However, Morris sparked controversy with his 1999 book, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, due to its extensive use of fictional elements. 

Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of South African parents May (Dowling) and Eric Edmund Morris, an airline pilot. He received his early, British-influenced education in Kenya and then studied music, art, and literature at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. Dropping out of college in 1961, he worked in the retail advertising department of a menswear store in Durban. Most of the brochures and advertisements he designed and wrote were for the Zulu market, and he later claimed that this early training in "making words move merchandise" was invaluable to the formation of his literary style. 

Moving to Britain in 1964, he abandoned dreams of becoming a concert pianist. He was employed as a copywriter in the London office of Foote, Cone & Belding, an American advertising agency. Morris's first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, was the first volume of what would eventually become a trilogy on the life of the 26th president and won the 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the 1980 National Book Award for biography.

Theodore Rex, which followed Dutch in 2002, was, in contrast, a straight account of Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency (1901–1909). Morris pointed out that "TR" was a subject so self-explanatory as to obviate any authorial intrusion into the narrative. The book, published by Random House, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. Three years later, Morris published Beethoven: The Universal Composer, a short biography that sought to convey the essence of great music in plain prose. Colonel Roosevelt, the final book in Morris's Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, came out in 2010. City Journal called it "one of the best biographies in modern literature."

In October 2012, Morris published This Living Hand and Other Essays, an autobiographical collection of pieces on literature, music, and the presidency. Random House announced that his next book would be a biography of Thomas Edison, published in October 2019.

Morris wrote extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He lived in New York City and Kent, Connecticut, with his wife and fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris, whom he married in 1966. Morris died from a stroke at a hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, on May 24, 2019, aged 78. His widow died the following January.