(Seated left to right) Larry L. King, Rick Bragg, Gene Edwards, and Richard Howorth

Willie Morris’ list of achievements goes on and on—high school valedictorian, Rhodes scholar, youngest editor ever of Harper’s Magazine, best selling author… He was a mentor, a friend, a father and a husband. And he was a Mississippian.

 

Willie Morris grew up playing pranks and learning about life in Yazoo City. The times were simple, before television and the internet. Those early, formative years and his Southern experience always figured in his work.

 

Willie left Yazoo City for Austin, Texas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and then studied in Oxford England. After he returned to Texas to edit a weekly newspaper, his work was spotted by Jack Fischer, then Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s. Willie joined the magazine’s editorial staff and in 1967, at the age of 32, took over the helm. At the same time, he published his first book, North Toward Home, a memoir and best seller.

 

“I don’t know what special magic was in Willie,” says writer Larry L. King, a friend of 40 years. “He could cut right through to the heart of the matter. He knew what the story was about and what it should be about and the angle that the writer was writing it from and he would edit consistently to that.”

 

Willie launched King’s career when he invited him to write an article for Harper’s and in all, King wrote 25 more under Willie’s direction. He was on the team as Willie Morris transformed Harper’s from a rather dry literary journal to a forum for the issues of the turbulent 60s.

 

“The whole context of the nation was changing so drastically in the 60s, and I had the most profound hunch that the oldest magazine in the country had to reflect what was happening in the largest society,” Morris says in an interview taped in 1996. “And the only way to do that was to encourage the best writing of the day from the most daring and the most honest writers.”

 

So Willie Morris published articles by David Halberstam, Arthur Miller, Bill Moyers, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Milton Friedman, John Updike, and Walker Percy to name just a few. “I think writers were starved for a truly national magazine and for Harper’s to return to its sturdier literary traditions,” he adds.

 

In his first issue as Editor-in-Chief, Willie Morris published a large excerpt from William Styron’s novel The Confessions of Nat Turner and devoted his second issue to “A Dialogue Between Generations on Vietnam, affluence, instant art, sex, drugs, middle-class values.” Later, he published Norman Mailer’s “On the Steps of the Pentagon,” which won the Pulitzer as a book. At 90,000 words, it was the longest magazine article ever published.

 

“What does it mean to you if an editor says you’ve got the space to tell the story that you want to tell?” asks host Gene Edwards of another guest at the Writers’ roundtable. Rick Bragg replies that it’s one of the things that “makes a writer absolutely giddy.” A Pulitzer Prize winner himself, Bragg added that Willie Morris stood behind his writers.

From a younger generation, Bragg never wrote specifically for Morris but considered him a mentor. “He would spend hours and hours and hours on someone else’s work,” and adds that Willie Morris was a reader, a sage, a supporter for “an awful lot of writers.” “I think that refers to the human quality of Willie,” agrees Richard Howorth, an Oxford, Mississippi, bookstore owner. “He wanted writers to succeed.”

 

Howorth opened his Square Books in 1979, just months before Willie moved to Oxford to take the position of Writer in Residence at Ole Miss. Willie invited his friends to Mississippi to speak to his classes and to visit the bookstore. “That was when the literary renaissance of Oxford began to occur,” remembers Howorth.

 

Although Willie Morris was committed to serious writing during his time at Ole Miss, he also called himself the “world’s oldest sixth grader.” “He had so much energy and he was always stirring something up,” jokes Howorth, who leads the laughter with a tale of a particular political prank. Larry L. King chuckles about a pseudo writers award Willie presented him. “It was an old bowling trophy. It had a bowling ball on top of it and all.”

 

In 1990, Willie Morris married his editor JoAnne Prichard and moved to Jackson, the place he spent summers as a young child. “If it’s a good marriage, it involves all the great things in life which is reasonable stability, love, writing books, going to ball games, having dogs and cats and friends and being together,” he says, again from 1996. He adds, “I think she has made me a more productive writer. I know she has.”

 

Host Gene Edwards remembers, “She sent him down to what he called the dungeon and one of the things that came out was this.” It was New York Days, his sequel to his memoir of 25 years earlier. He wrote other books, too. After watching Byron de la Beckwith be convicted of murdering Medgar Evers, he wrote a book that became the movie The Ghosts of Mississippi. “It’s a profoundly personal book. It’s about me. It’s about Medgar Evers, God bless him”

 

Another personal book touched the collective American heart—My Dog Skip. “Skip was the dog of my childhood and boyhood,” Willie recalls in another taped interview. “For some reason as I mature, I go back to that period, but Skip has always resonated in my memory. He’s about the smartest dog that ever lived.”

 

On August 2, 1999, Willie Morris suffered a massive heart attack and died that same day. Richard Howorth was a pallbearer at his funeral. Larry L. King was in Rome and went to the coliseum to pay his unique respects by singing to Willie. Rick Bragg, who wrote the eulogy for the New York Times, observes, “We needed Willie to be an elder statesman. We needed him to be around, you know, to help everything make sense, pat us on the head, tell us what a good job we were doing or what we were doing wrong. We’ve got these stories but we don’t have enough.”

 

Richard Howorth adds, “We all hated to see him go, but I’m grateful that he was with us, among us the way that he was for as long as he was and gave us so many books and he gave us so much.”