America's Boswell By Marie Arana-Ward Sunday, September 27, 1998; Page BW11

There is a curious and seemingly serendipitous quality to Morris's rise as biographer. He is not a homegrown historian, bred and steeped in a collective memory of this land. He is a South African born in Kenya, a '60s college dropout, a writer of ads, a latecomer to the capital. But with luck and the considerable gift for a story, he has achieved a kind of stardom: His first book won him a Pulitzer Prize; his second, a multimillion-dollar contract. There is good reason for his success: For all the seeming spareness, there is a scholarly heft to Morris, and a canny ability to turn a prism on the familiar.

His father was an airplane pilot, chief of East African Airways, a flier who marked out skyways over Africa: He remembers being taken from Nairobi to Dar es Salaam, hearing wind rush into the cockpit, feeling envy for the very tactile, romantic world his father inhabited. He was, however, too absent-minded a child to aspire to something as technical as flight. He lived in books, dreamt of becoming a famous pianist, and then aspired to something more abstract: a life up north, in a longitude where he felt history was being made.

After a year at Rhodes University in South Africa, he moved to England to try his hand at copywriting. He wrote ads for airlines, motor oil companies, small manufacturers, capping his career with a manual for the "Heatrae," a natural gas boiler that was popular at the time. When he married an English schoolteacher, Sylvia (a future biographer herself), and came to New York, however, everything changed.

He began writing for a number of major advertising agencies – Foote, Cone & Belding; Ogilvy & Mather, among them – but had no taste for corporate life. One employer after another ended up firing him. "God was trying to tell me something," he says. "And then, when I started to write as a freelancer, my ads kept mutating into articles." He and his wife took what work they could find, collaborating, for instance, to produce travel tapes for TWA. Then, as the bicentennial year of 1976 approached, Morris decided to act on his newfound infatuation with America: He wrote a screenplay about "an all-American subject": Theodore Roosevelt. The script never sold, but he took his prodigious research and worked to turn it into a biography. By decade's end, it was done: a prizewinner, bestseller, staple of the history lover's bookshelf.

Now, as he contemplates the imminent publication of his authorized biography of Reagan, he has an idea why he was able to slide so easily from writing ads to writing about presidents. "I learned the essence of literary communication in writing about men's clothing for the Zulu market in Durbin. I had to move a product in short and simple words. If 75 sports coats a week didn't move, my ad had failed. Literature is the same: Words move products. It doesn't really matter if those products are cultural or emotional or satirical. If your words aren't plain enough to move your readers, your books will fail. It's as clear as that."

Once Dutch is published, Morris will return to his task of completing the second volume of the Roosevelt biography. In all his work on political titans, it is not the careers he finds compelling, it is the men themselves. Morris claims to be resolutely apolitical, finding the task of revealing character infinitely more interesting than that of recording a career. What does he contemplate writing about in the future? Something entirely different, he indicates, with his customary and courtly archness. Something he's always had it in mind to do. A book on astronomy, perhaps. With a bit of poetry in the title. Rushing Starlight?