Edmund Morris was born and educated in Kenya and attended college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His first book, THE RISE OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980. Its sequel, THEODORE REX, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2001. In between these two books, Morris became President Reagan’s authorized biographer and wrote the national bestseller DUTCH: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. He then completed his trilogy on the life of the 26th president with COLONEL ROOSEVELT, also a bestseller, and has published BEETHOVEN: The Universal Composer and THIS LIVING HAND AND OTHER ESSAYS. EDISON is his final work of biography. He was married to fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris for 52 years. Edmund Morris died in 2019.

Books by Edmund Morris

Edison

by Edmund Morris - Biography, History, Nonfiction

Thomas Alva Edison’s invention of the first practical incandescent lamp 140 years ago so dazzled the world --- already reeling from his invention of the phonograph and dozens of other revolutionary devices --- that it cast a shadow over his later achievements. In all, this near-deaf genius patented 1,093 inventions --- not including others, such as the X-ray fluoroscope --- that he left unlicensed for the benefit of medicine. One of the achievements of this biography, the first major life of Edison in more than 20 years, is that it portrays the unknown Edison --- the philosopher, the futurist, the chemist, the botanist, the wartime defense adviser, the founder of nearly 250 companies --- as fully as it deconstructs the Edison of mythological memory.

Colonel Roosevelt

by Edmund Morris - Biography, Nonfiction