Teresa Nicholas - Willie: The Life of Willie Morris

Willie

Also by Teresa Nicholas

Buryin Daddy: Putting My Lebanese, Catholic,
Southern Baptist Childhood to Rest

The Life of Willie Morris

Teresa Nicholas

Publication of this book was made possible in part by a generous donation by the Reba and Dave Williams Foundation for Literature and the Arts, sponsors of the annual Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of
American University Presses.

Copyright 2016 by Teresa Nicholas

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2016

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nicholas, Teresa.

Willie : the life of Willie Morris / Teresa Nicholas.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-105-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-62846-106-0 (ebook) 1. Morris, Willie. 2. Authors, American20th centuryBiography. 3. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. 4. EditorsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

PS3563.O8745Z78 2016

813.54dc23

[B]

2015025342

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

And again, for Gerry

I had stories I wanted to tell. Thats where the impulse comes from: your memory. Writing is memory, the burden of memory.

Willie Morris

ONE
Growing Up on the Edge of the Delta

TWO
School Days in Yazoo: A Pleasant, Driftless Life

THREE
Ready to Lick This Old World: The University of Texas

FOUR
Leaping and Lingering: From Oxford to the Observer

FIVE
The Harpers Years: Reaching the Organizational Summit

SIX
Self-Exile on Long Island: Molding from This Another Life

SEVEN
Coming Back to Where His Strongest Feelings Lay

EIGHT
Bittersweet, but Fine: Finding Serenity in Jackson

IN THE FALL OF 2012, ABOUT A YEAR AFTER THE PUBLICATION OF my first book, I received a call from my friend John Langston, who is the art director at the University Press of Mississippi. The press was considering publishing a biography of Willie Morris, he told me, and he proposed that I might be the person to write it.

I imagine that everyone who has ever published a book gets well-meaning suggestions from friends, readers, and relatives about what his or her next topic might be. These are rarely of interest, because in order to commit to the months of intense work involved in any project, a writer must feel a deep-down passion for the subject. John had an instinct that I would be hooked by a biography of Willie Morris, and he was right.

John and I had met Willie during the fall of 1969, when we were students at Yazoo High and he was the editor-in-chief of Harpers, come back to his native Yazoo City with his colleagues from the magazine to research an article about the pending integration of the public schools. Afterward I began to correspond with Willieeverybody, including students, called him by his first name. He was a great letter writer, prompt in his reply, warm in his response. He asked me to keep him up to date on what was going on in the recently integrated high school. Aware of my interest in journalism, he encouraged me to get a good liberal arts education, even writing me letters of recommendation for college.

Over the years we lost touch, but I read each of his books as soon as it came out. We reconnected in 1990, when he married JoAnne Prichard. She had lived around the corner from my family in Yazoo City, and I had babysat occasionally for her boys, Gibson and Graham. Many years after meeting Willie, over dinner with JoAnne at the Steak House in Yazoo, he encouraged me to write my first book, peering at me over a plate of frogs legs and asking, as I now know he asked of many aspiring writers, Do you have a book in you?

When I began researching this biography, I knew that I wanted to interview as many of Willies friends as I could, especially from his childhood and college days. In the end, I spoke to more than fifty people who knew Willie, and though they are not all quoted directly in these pages, their voices can be heard in the tenor of the narrative. In my research I have also relied heavily on interviews with his family, and on the letters in the Willie Morris Collection at the J. D. Williams Library at the University of Mississippi.

JoAnne explained that Willie had a habit of tossing the letters he received into a cardboard box for posteritys sake. In 1995, he sold his collection of letters and literary memorabilia to the university. There are nearly fifty boxes of catalogued correspondence, as well as many dozens of boxes of clippings, magazines, manuscripts, contracts, financial records, speeches, programs, and that most elusive and captivating of all categories, ephemera. In addition, there are about thirty boxes that were delivered later to the university that are in the process of being catalogued, and I am thankful to the Morris family and to the library for allowing me to be among the first to sort through all of them.

It can be fascinating to read somebody elses mail, but it was especially fascinating to read Willies. Most are letters to him, beginning in the 1960s when he started at Harpers, although there are a few that he wrote to his parents and maternal grandmother, Mamie, while he was studying at Oxford University. There are legions of letters from the fans of each of his books; love letters from girlfriends and wives; and letters from other writers, many of whom were his close friendsEudora Welty, James Dickey, David Halberstam, William Styron, Winston Groom, among others. There are letters from presidents and letters from his publishers. There is also the occasional, poignant letter that he wrote to himself, and the occasional, playful note addressed to my biographer. Then there are the odditiesin one box, an ashtray and a carefully preserved hairball from his beloved cat Spit McGee. In later years, when Willie had the help of a secretary, there are more of his own letters, drafts penned in longhand in black felt-tip before being typed. But that is not all. There are files about Willies life at the B. S. Ricks Memorial Library in Yazoo City, and in Austin, Texas, copies of his college newspapers and the Texas Observer at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History and the Perry-Castaeda Library. In short, a trove of material for a biographer.

The year after Willies untimely death in 1999, he was voted by readers of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger as Mississippis favorite nonfiction author of the millennium. Today, he remains a much-loved author and talked-about personality. Two previous accounts of Willies life have been published: a scholarly bibliography/biography by Jack Bales, and a personal memoir/biography by Larry L. King. It is my hope that with the new details garnered from my many interviews and my library research, this accessible, illustrated biography will fill a void in the literature for the general reader.