Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris, whose biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan have earned critical acclaim, will deliver the Baird Pulitzer Prize Lecture during Fall Convocation at 6 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 6 in the Koury Center, located on the Elon University campus.
Morris received the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1980 for his biography, “The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt,” which chronicled Roosevelt’s life and career before his presidency. Morris published the second book in an expected trilogy on Roosevelt’s life in 2001, “Theodore Rex.” The book was an immediate New York Times Bestseller and was hailed by The New York Times Literary Supplement as “one of the great histories of the American presidency.”
In 1999, Morris published the national bestseller “Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan.” Morris used an unconventional biographical technique, re-creating himself as a fictional character in Reagan’s life to tell the story. The method proved controversial as critics on both sides weighed in with their opinions. Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter said in a 1999 review, “the fictional world Morris creates, complete with a radical son and a group of ancient friends, is jarring, phony, boring and totally unnecessary.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt defended Morris in The New York Times, writing, “one might of course dismiss Morris’ technique as committing the fallacy of imitative form, matching an artificial narrative with an inauthentic subject. But some would argue that Reagan’s rise to fame was the contradiction of that fallacy….I can think of few conventional political biographies that bring their subjects’ pasts so richly alive.”
The Baird Pulitzer Prize Lecture Series, endowed by James Baird and his wife, Jane, of Burlington, N.C., brings recipients of the Pulitzer Prize to the Elon campus. The Pulitzer is the nation’s most prestigious award in journalism and the liberal arts.
Tickets are $12 or free for those with valid identification. Tickets can be purchased by calling the McCrary Theatre box office at (336) 278-5610. The box office is open from 12:30-5 p.m., Monday-Friday.
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