Edmund Morris

Edmund Morris, Reagan Biographer Who Upset Conventions, Dies at 78

Edmund Morris, who wrote an acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt but is best known for his life of Ronald Reagan, in which the author inserted himself as a fictional narrator, a device that baffled and angered some historians, died on Friday in Danbury, Conn. He was 78.

His death, at a hospital following a stroke on Thursday, was confirmed on Monday by his wife, the author Sylvia Jukes Morris. He lived in Kent, Conn.

Mr. Morris’s “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt” won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1980. He followed that with two more well-received books on the 26th president, “Theodore Rex” (2001) and “Colonel Roosevelt” (2010).

But “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan” is the work for which he is best known. Published in 1999 to much anticipation (he had been working on it for 14 years), it was told from the viewpoint of a fictional Edmund Morris, who accompanies the future president from his Illinois boyhood, through his Eureka College days in Illinois, and finally to the White House and beyond.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/27/obituaries/edmund-morris-reagan-biographer-who-upset-conventions-dies-at-78.html

Last Modified: Wed, 29 May 2019 08:50:41 SAST