Willie Morris

Willie Morris, 64, one of Mississippi's most treasured writers, whose 16 books included memoirs of his Mississippi childhood and of his stint as editor of Harper's Magazine as well as stories based on his childhood in the Delta, died Aug. 2 1999 at a hospital after a heart attack. Mr. Morris, a sixth-generation Mississippian, was born in Jackson and grew up in nearby Yazoo City. He attended the University of Texas, where he edited the school newspaper, and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University, where he studied history. After college, he returned to Texas and joined the staff of the alternative weekly newspaper the Texas Observer and served as its editor in chief from 1960 to 1962. The next year he moved to New York as associate editor of Harper's Magazine. In 1967, at the age of 33, he published a prizewinning autobiography, "North Toward Home," and became Harper's editor in chief--only the eighth in the 117-year history of America's oldest magazine. During Mr. Morris's four years at the helm, the monthly published Seymour Hersh's 40,000-word expose of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and "The Selling of the President," Joe McGinniss's history of Richard Nixon's 1968 presidential campaign. Other contributors included Norman Mailer, Alfred Kazin, William Styron, Bill Moyers and David Halberstam. Mr. Morris found himself at the center of New York's intellectual and literary world--and then on its periphery, forced to resign from Harper's in a dispute over the outspoken content of the magazine. After almost a decade on Long Island's fashionable East End, he returned to Mississippi. He served from 1980 to 1991 as writer in residence at the University of Mississippi. His writing courses proved hugely popular, and his own output--mostly autobiography or reflections on the South--established his name alongside such past or present residents as William Faulkner, Ellen Douglas, Barry Hannah and Richard Ford. He moved to Jackson after leaving the university known as Ole Miss.