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William Weaks
Morris was born on November 29, 1934 in Jackson, Mississippi. When
he was six months old his parents moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi a
small town located, as he writes in North Toward Home, “on
the edge of the delta, straddling that memorable divide where the
hills end and the flat land begins.”
Morris
graduated top of his high school class in 1952 and left Mississippi
for the University of Texas in Austin. It was in college that his
civic mindedness and writing and editing skills came together. His
senior year he became editor of the student newspaper and made a
campus name for himself by tackling segregation, and censorship.
Upon graduating in 1956, he continued his education as a Rhodes
Scholar and studied history at Oxford University.
When he
returned to the states in 1961 he took a position as editor of the
Texas Observer, a weekly newspaper. In 1963, shortly before the
publication of North Toward Home he became the youngest
editor-in-chief in the history of Harper's. and he
transformed the patriarchal magazine into one of the country's most
hip and influential journals. He resigned from this position in 1971
and published Yazoo:
Integration in a Deep-Southern Town.
Subsequent publications include a children’s book, Good Ole Boy
also published that same year, The Last Southern Girls
published in 1973, James Jones: A Friendship, 1978, and the
Courting of Marcus Dupree, 1983. In 1980 he returned to his
beloved Mississippi and took a writer-in-residence position at the
University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi.
Though the
South was the focal point of his work, he did not consider himself a
southern writer. “I am an American writer who happens to have come
from the South,” he often emphasized. “I've tried to put the South
into the larger American perspective.” In a 1979 interview Morris
said 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.”
In 1989 he
touched on this topic with a collection of essays titled
Homecomings. In that same year he published a cover story for
National Geographic titled “Faulkner’s Mississippi”. In
1990 Morris married long-time friend JoAnne Prichard, an editor at
theUniversity Press of Mississippi. They moved to Jackson,
Mississippi, where he began working on a second autobiographical
volume, New York Days 1993, a sequel to North Toward
Home. In 1995 he published My Dog Skip , a bittersweet tribute
to the canine companion of his boyhood as well as a memoir of a
bygone era and A Prayer for the Opening of the Little League
Season a poetic tribute to children’s baseball,
Willie Morris completed a draft manuscript of My Mississippi
in early July 1999. At the end of July 1999, he and his wife flew
to New York to view a preliminary screening of Taps which he called
“an absolute classic.” Taps, was released in 2001, two years after
his untimely death. On August 2, 1999, he died of a heart attack. |
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