MORRIS, WILLIE 1934-

Magazine editor

Magazine Troubles

Willie Morris, at thirty-two years old, became the youngest editor in chief in the history of Harper's magazine on 1 July 1967. He replaced John Fischer, the man who hired him and brought him to New York from Texas in 1963. Harper's in the 1960s was suffering from competition with television. In 1966 the magazine had 277,000 readers and $1.8 million in revenues, figures which belied the problems faced by narrowly focused news and literary magazines during the 1960s. Though Harpers's had been revered and sustained by the literary elite, the magazine's owners and editors found that the traditional readership was not able to sustain Harper's financially.

Early Life

The hiring of Morris was part of an editorial plan to bring the magazine more in line with the changing American society of the 1960s. Morris's background was certainly not that of the typical New York editor. He was born in 1934 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and grew up with the discomfort associated with the racism of that society. After high school he went to the University of Texas at Austin. As editor of the college newspaper, the Daily Texan, Morris became a campus celebrity because of his activist stand, defending the right of the paper to comment on campus, local, state, and national issues. While at Texas he became a liberal and used his journalistic talents to expound his political beliefs in that Democratic, but conservative, state.

In Texas

Morris moved to England in 1956 after his graduation from Texas and studied history at Oxford University as a Rhodes scholar. In 1960 he received a request from Ronnie Dugger to return to Texas to edit the political weekly the Texas Observer. A journal with a circulation of six thousand, the Texas Observer had an influence far greater than its subscriber list, attempting to report honestly what went on in Texas politics, stepping on all the toes that goal entailed. During his editorship his talents as a political observer were noticed, and he was able to publish essays on southern and Texas politics in magazines such as Harper's.

Changes in New York

Hired first as an editor at Harper's in 1963, Morris worked to update the literary and journalistic content of the magazine. He signed novelist William Styron, Socialist and social scientist Michael Harrington, and psychiatrist Robert Coles to write for the magazine. After his appointment as editor in chief, a move that also brought The New York Times writer David Halberstam and freelancer Larry King as editors to Harper's, he sent Halberstam to report on the Vietnam War, printed Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night (in an issue-length piece), and generally upgraded the content of the magazine. He wrote the first volume of his autobiography, North Toward Home (1967), at age thirty-two. He did not, however, solve the problems of the magazine. He was fired as editor in chief in 1971 and returned to a more sedate lifestyle in the Northeast and, eventually, at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1993 he published New York Days (Random House), the second volume of his autobiography.

Sources:

Susan Lardner, "Willie Morris (b. 1936 - ) and Frank Conroy (b. 1936 - )," New Yorker, 43 (3 February 1968): 106, 109-111;

Willie Morris, North Toward Home (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967);

"North by South," Time, 90 (10 November 1967): 61-62;

"A Spur for Harper's," Newsweek, 69 (22 May 1967): 68-69;

"Youth for Harper's," Time, 89 (19 May 1967): 56.