A cottage industry of sorts has developed around examining and capturing the story of the life of one of Mississippi’s most enduring men of letters, the late Willie Morris. Willie’s life has to date garnered serious biographies from at least three writers.
William Weaks Morris died of heart failure in Jackson on Aug. 2, 1999. At this death, The New York Times described Morris as “the writer and editor whose life and work reveled in the endless contradictions of the South and the region’s ghostlike hold on its native sons and daughters.”
The obituary in the nation’s newspaper of record continued: “Mr. Morris, who turned his childhood in Yazoo City, Miss., into a place almost as complex and resonant as William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, went from a country boy to a Rhodes Scholar to a literary Wunderkind, becoming editor in chief of Harper’s Magazine at age 32.”
Peter Applebome, who penned Willie’s obituary for The Times, understood some of the magic of Morris: “Mr. Morris drank too much bourbon and red wine, smoked too many Viceroys, stayed up too late and caroused too much. Indeed, friends have marveled at his ability to defy most of the conventions of good health. But, like his writing, his life style betrayed a singular personality, given to long, rambling evocative conversation, and the indelible stamp of his early days in Yazoo City. And friends and admirers say that whatever barbs he could fling at the South’s failings were leavened by the degree to which he was, in the end, such a quintessential Southerner.”
In 2006, Willie’s longtime writer friend Larry L. King released a biography of called “In Search of Willie Morris: The Mercurial Life of a Legendary Writer and Editor.”
King, who died in 2012, claimed to offer readers a warts-and-all examination of Willie’s life. The result, however, was something somewhat meaner than that.
A far better biography and a far more valuable reference to the life and work of one of Mississippi favorite literary sons is the 2006 book “Willie Morris: An Exhaustive Annotated Bibliography and a Biography by Jack Bales” (McFarland & Co., $75). Bales in the reference librarian at the University of Mary Washington Library.
The body of Willie’s literary works – 23 books and numerous newspaper and magazine articles spanning from The Daily Texan student newspaper in 1955 during his college days at the University of Texas until his death – are meticulously chronicled in Bales’ book.
But this month, Teresa Nicholas has written a more nuanced biography simply called “Willie: The Life of Willie Morris” published by University Press of Mississippi. Nicholas, a native of Yazoo City, is an accomplished writer with an impressive pedigree in the publishing industry.
She is the author of “Buryin’ Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic, Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest,” published in 2011 by the UPM. Built on exhaustive research and personal interviews with those who knew Morris, Nicholas has produced a surprisingly intimate and insightful biography of an incredibly complex individual.
Like a lot of people of my generation who write for a living, Willie Morris was incredibly influential and inspiring. Willie’s book, “The Courting of Marcus Dupree,” was a Christopher Award-winning examination of big-time college football recruiting against the backdrop of Mississippi’s historic struggles with questions of race, class and heritage. The book holds up well after almost 35 years, despite a premature, almost surreal end to Dupree’s athletic career.
Our friendship was enduring and we had fun together. It was Willie who introduced me to my longtime friend and business partner Gale Denley of Bruce at Clyde Goolsby’s Holiday Inn bar in Oxford in 1981.
Willie’s son, David, later worked for me in Forest at The Scott County Times, a forerunner to David’s solid career as a photojournalist and documentarian.
Unlike the Bales book, this isn’t a bibliography. And while not claiming the level of insight that the more flamboyant King promised, Nicholas actually delivers a far more revealing glimpse into the often triumphant and at times tragic life of the Mississippi writer. Nicholas did not exclude or excuse Willie’s excesses, but neither did she display them gratuitously.
This biography of Morris is written with empathy as well as with honesty and the result of Nicholas’s work is a very pleasing visit with an old and dear friend.
(Sid Salter is a syndicated columnist. Contact him sidsalter@sidsalter.com)