Edmund Morris, President Ronald Reagan’s hand-picked biographer whose long-delayed book sparked controversy over imagined scenes, has died.
Morris, 78, died in Connecticut a day after suffering a stroke, according to his wife and fellow biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris.
Morris became well-known after winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1980 for his first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. Reagan was a fan of the Roosevelt book and wanted Morris to be the official biographer of his presidency. He was given unprecedented access to Reagan during his time in office. Morris spent about 14 years working on the book and interviewed Reagan about once a month.
The biography was controversial because Morris inserted a fictionalized version of himself into it and included fictional elements in the writing.
“See, what I’m doing is giving flesh to the biographical mind,” Morris told the Boston Globe. “Instead of saying, ‘Ronald Reagan at 16 stood 6 feet high and wore a wool swimsuit,’ I just simply described it from the point of view of an eyewitness. The reason it worked so well in this book is that his whole life was performance, and performance is meaningless without a witness, without an audience.”
The book, Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, was published in 1999 and received mixed reviews. Reagan’s speechwriter Peggy Noonan called the book a “belly-flop into the pools of Narcissus.”
Morris’ editor, Andy Ward, acknowledged the death in a statement:
“We at Random House mourn this loss with all who knew him and loved him, and with those who read his remarkable books. Our deepest sympathies are with his beloved wife Sylvia,” Ward said.
