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Willie Morris

William Weaks "Willie" Morris (November 29, 1934 — August 2, 1999), was an American writer and editor born in Jackson, Mississippi, though his family later moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, which he immortalized in his works of prose. Morris' trademark was his lyrical prose style and reflections on the American South, particularly the Mississippi Delta. In 1967 he became the youngest editor of Harper's Magazine. He wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction, including his seminal book North Toward Home, as well as My Dog Skip.

Biography

Early years

Morris' parents moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi when he was just six months old. Yazoo City figures prominently in much of Morris' writing. After graduating as valedictorian of his high school class, Morris traveled to Austin to attend the University of Texas at Austin. He became a member of Delta Tau Delta international fraternity, where he has a room named after him in the chapter house.

His senior year in college, Morris was elected editor of the university's student newspaper, the award-winning The Daily Texan. His scathing editorials against segregation, censorship and state officials' collusion with oil and gas interests soon earned him the enmity of university administrators, particularly from the university's Board of Regents. As an example of the animosity, Morris wrote in North Toward Home that the university did not acknowledge his award of a Rhodes Scholarship with even as much as a letter of congratulation. His contribution to the university continues to go unrecognized.

Morris graduated in 1956 and began studying history at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He returned to the United States to be the editor of The Texas Observer, a liberal weekly magazine.

Harper's Magazine

In 1963, Morris joined the staff of Harper's Magazine as an Associate Editor, and became Editor-in-Chief four years later. On publication, North Toward Home became a best-selling book and earned the prestigious Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for non-fiction. It is an autobiographical account of his childhood in Yazoo City, Mississippi, early adulthood in Austin, Texas, and eventual escape from the South to New York City, New York. It is revered for its tender reflection upon Southern American culture, particularly by alienated expatriate Southerners who move north, but are nostalgic for the South.

As the youngest-ever editor-in-chief of the influential literary magazine, Morris sustained the careers of notable writers such as William Styron and Norman Mailer.¹ But the Cowles family, owners of Harper's Magazine, disliked the content Morris published: longer articles of overtly liberal sentiment that offended reactionary advertisers. Amidst falling ad sales, the Cowles family expressed their dissatisfaction with Editor-in-Chief Willie Morris until he ultimately resigned under pressure in 1971.

Morris on Long Island

Following his resignation from Harper's, Morris moved to Bridgehampton, Long Island, where he lived for many years before returning to the South. During that time he became close friends with fellow writer James Jones (author), author of "From Here to Eternity", and Jones's wife Gloria. Later, when his friend lay dying in Southampton Hospital of heart failure, Willie Morris took notes from Jones about his work-in-progress, the novel "Whistle," which Morris finished for his friend Jones.

Morris returns home

In 1980, Morris returned to his native state to be writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi where he encouraged a new generation of Mississippi writers including John Grisham. One of his books, My Dog Skip, was made into a 2000 movie starring Frankie Muniz, Diane Lane, Luke Wilson and Kevin Bacon. (Morris had previously written for Reader's Digest a profile of his dog 'Pete,' whom he had adopted while living in Bridgehampton, New York. When Morris left Bridgehampton, he took Pete, who had formerly belonged to the owner of a local service station and whom Willie referred to as 'the Mayor of Bridgehampton,' back to Mississippi with him.) Morris died of a heart attack just before the movie debuted, after seeing an advance screening of the film and praising it.

Willie Morris is buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Yazoo City, exactly 13 steps (the unlucky number) from the "grave" of the fictitious Witch of Yazoo, a character from one of Morris' books, Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood. In life he counted among his friends a wide circle, including Yazoo City childhood friends, well-known writers like Winston Groom (Forrest Gump'), William Styron (Sophie's Choice), John Knowles (A Separate Peace), James Dickey (Deliverance) and Irwin Shaw (Rich Man, Poor Man), as well as students in his writing classes in Oxford. He was known as a unerring mimic with a warm sense of humor and a sense of the absurd.

Books by Willie Morris

• My Dog Skip
• My Cat Spit McGee[1]
• Faulkner's Mississippi
• Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood
• The Courting of Marcus Dupree
• New York Days
• The Last of the Southern Girls
• My Mississippi
• Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home
• Ghosts of Medgar Evers
• Homecomings
• South Today
• Always Stand in Against the Curve, and Other Sports Stories
• Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town
• North Toward Home
• After All, It's Only a Game
• Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season
• James Jones: A Friendship
• Taps

References

External links and Resources

• Willie Morris' essay "Is There a South Anymore?"
• In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor by Larry L. King
• Diane Rehm (NPR) Interview with Larry L. King, author of Willie Morris biography
• "Willie Morris," by Jack Bales, for The Mississippi Writers Page at the University of Mississippi
• Faulkner's Mississippi. Text by Willie Morris, photographs by Willian Eggleston. (book review by Carl Edwin Lindgren). PSA Journal, July 1991.
• Conversations with Willie Morris, edited by Jack Bales: ISBN 1-57806-237-3
• Shifting Interludes: Selected Essays, by Willie Morris, edited by Jack Bales: ISBN 1-57806-478-3
• Willie Morris: An Exhaustive Annotated Bibliography and a Biography by Jack Bales: ISBN 0-7864-2478-8
• Willie Morris Collection (MUM00321) owned by the University of Mississippi Department of Archives and Special Collections.

Wikipedia content modification information:

• This page was last modified on 29 October 2008, at 15:22.

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