Willie Morris

After he graduated from high school in 1952 as valedictorian of his class, he left the familiar Mississippi Delta for the University of Texas in Austin, where he became editor of the student newspaper, the Daily Texan, in his senior year. A member of Phi Beta Kappa when he graduated in 1956, Morris continued his education as a Rhodes Scholar, studying history at Oxford University. When he returned to the United States, he edited the crusading Texas Observer, a liberal weekly newspaper, from 1960 to 1962.

In 1963 Morris became associate editor of Harper's magazine and in 1967 he was named editor-in-chief, shortly before the publication of North Toward Home. Throughout this "autobiography in mid-passage" he relates his personal development to that of America itself, paralleling his own experiences to various social and cultural forces that characterized the nation during the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. With an acute sense of history, place, and family—significant themes in much of his writing—Southern expatriate Morris struggles to understand and come to terms with his own origins and regional identity as he confronts the turbulent complexities of his generation.

North Toward Home not only was a best-seller but also received the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for nonfiction as well as several other honors. A selection of the Literary Guild, it was widely praised by critics, including a reviewer for America who was prompted to exclaim that "Harper's is indeed in good hands."

As the youngest editor-in-chief in the history of the nation's oldest magazine, Morris aggressively transformed the venerable yet stodgy Harper's into one of the country's most exciting and influential periodicals, attracting contributions from such well-known writers as William Styron, Larry L. King, David Halberstam, Robert Penn Warren, Arthur Miller, James Dickey, and Norman Mailer. Such success notwithstanding, he eventually became embroiled in editorial disputes with the publication's owner. Unwilling to change the focus and content of Harper's, Morris quit in 1971—a step that immediately prompted the mass resignations of most of the magazine's contributing editors.

Morris's departure followed on the heels of a painful divorce, and he withdrew to Bridgehampton, New York, a small town on the east end of Long Island. A few months after leaving New York City, he published Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town (1971), a moving exploration of how the forced integration of the public schools affected this Deep-Southern town on the edge of the Mississippi Delta. Subsequent books include the children's classic Good Old Boy (1971), a celebration of Morris's youth complete with boyish misadventures, a daring rescue in a haunted house, and the infamous Witch of Yazoo; Book-of-the-Month Club selection The Last of the Southern Girls (1973), a novel of a Southern debutante who comes to Washington, D.C.; and James Jones: A Friendship (1978), a heartfelt reminiscence about his longtime comrade and fellow author.

In 1980 Morris returned to his native state as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford and wrote The Courting of Marcus Dupree (1983). In this alternate selection of the Literary Guild, the author skillfully combines sports reporting, historical analysis, and biography as he recounts the madness surrounding the college recruitment of a talented Southern black athlete.

As writer-in-residence, Morris eagerly encouraged aspiring young authors, especially when they exhibited exceptional talent. One example was an Ole Miss freshman named Donna Tartt, whose work particularly caught Morris's eye. Her first novel, A Secret History (1992), was begun while she was still in college and ended up on Publishers Weekly's bestseller list for thirteen weeks. In another instance, a University of Mississippi law student who had sat in on some of Morris's classes began writing his first novel and asked Morris for advice, which was generously given. Subsequently, Morris wrote a blurb for the book's dust jacket, praising John Grisham's A Time to Kill (1989) as "a powerful courtroom drama" and "a compelling tale of a small southern town searching for itself."

Morris told an interviewer in 1979 that "if there is anything that makes southerners distinctive from the main body of Americans, it is a certain burden of memory and a burden of history.... I think sensitive southerners have this in their bones, this profound awareness of the past." Morris's rich heritage is particularly evident in his books of essays. He is a master stylist in this genre; Homecomings (1989), with its original artwork, in particular illustrates his precision and eloquence in crafting short works of fiction and nonfiction. His lengthy narrative "My Own Private Album: The Burden and Resonance of My Memory," introduces A Southern Album (1975). His cover story in the March 1989 issue of National Geographic, "Faulkner's Mississippi," with photographs by William Eggleston, forms the core of the coffee-table book that appeared a year later under the same title. A Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season (1995) is Morris's poetic and heartfelt tribute to children's baseball, with watercolor illustrations by prize-winning artist Barry Moser.

In 1990 Morris married long-time friend JoAnne Prichard, an astute, imaginative editor at the University Press of Mississippi who was responsible for Homecomings, his award-winning essay collection. After their marriage, they moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where he began poring over Harper's papers and writing old comrades for reminiscences in preparation for a second autobiographical volume, New York Days (1993). In this triumphant sequel to North Toward Home, he reflects not only on his exhilarating years at Harper's but on how that period mirrored the tumultuous 1960s. He followed this Book-of-the-Month Club selection with another, the widely reviewed bestseller My Dog Skip (1995), which is not only a poignant, bittersweet tribute to the canine companion of his boyhood but a memoir of a bygone era as well.

While Morris contemplates the inevitable South Toward Home, he continues to work on other projects, having, as he puts it, "no alternative to words." In the last few years his eclectic endeavors have included writing the introductory essay to the official souvenir program of Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Games, "A Prayer Before the Feast," and the introduction to Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi (1996), part of Oxford University Press's acclaimed twenty-nine-volume set The Oxford Mark Twain. He also served as a consultant on the Rob Reiner motion picture Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), a true story of the murder of civil rights leader Medgar Evers and the thirty-year-long pursuit of the assassin, Byron de la Beckwith. His article on the movie production appeared in the January 1997 issue of George magazine, and he has recently completed a book on the subject for Random House. At the Natchez Literary Festival in 1996 he received the third annual Richard Wright Medal for Literary Excellence, joining the select company of the previous two winners, Eudora Welty and Margaret Walker.

Morris died August 2, 1999, following a heart attack in Jackson, Mississippi. He had nearly finished his latest work, a project with his son about his home state's history and future. He was 64.