Edmund Morris

Edmund Morris (born May 27, 1940) is a writer best known for his biographies of United States presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Morris received his early education in Kenya after which he attended Rhodes University in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before emigrating to the United States in 1968.

Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of British parents May (Dowling) and Eric Edmund Morris, an airline pilot.

His biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award in 1980. 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.’”