Arthur Edmund Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya on May 27, 1940. He studied literature, art, and music at Rhodes University in South Africa before leaving in 1961. He worked in the advertising department of a men's clothing store in South Africa and as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968.
He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. His other books included Theodore Rex, Beethoven: The Universal Composer, Colonel Roosevelt, and Edison. He was best known for Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, where he inserted himself as a fictional narrator. He also wrote about travel and the arts for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He died after a stroke on May 24, 2019 at the age of 78.
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