Board Member Bio: Edmund Morris

Board Member Bios are extremely cursory surveys of the lives of the Modern Library board members who created The List, in hopes of discovering who they are and how or why they chose the books they did.

Image borrowed from Penguin Random House

Name: Edmund Morris

Born: May 27, 1940
Died: Still alive!
Country of Origin/Main Residence: Kenya/United States since 1968

Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Sylvia Jukes Morris, 1966
Children?: Unknown
Education: Rhodes University (South Africa) dropout
Religion: Unknown

Literary Awards: 1980 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

Life:
Edmund Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya (when it was still a British colony) to South African parents. After dropping out of college, he worked in advertising in Durban, and eventually London. After marrying his wife Sylvia in 1966, he moved to the United States.

Morris' claim to fame is as a biographer of American presidents. His first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, won a Pulitzer Prize and brought him to the attention of Ronald Reagan of all people. Our old friend Daniel J. Boorstin and Senator Mark O. Hatfield managed to get Morris appointed as Reagan's official biographer.

In a fairly baffling turn of events, Random House then gave Morris three million dollars to write Reagan's official biography. Morris got an insane level of access to Reagan and his family, and spent fourteen years researching and writing the book that would become Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, in which a fictitious narrator tells Reagan's true life story. This is all very bizarre, and it seems that after all that time, the book was not at all well-received.

Once he'd gotten the Reagan biography squared away, Morris returned to the subject of Theodore Roosevelt, writing two more books about his life. Morris has also written a biography of Beethoven.

Sources: Had a hard time finding much besides his wikipedia entry

Board Member Bio: Vartan Gregorian

Board Member Bios are extremely cursory surveys of the lives of the Modern Library board members who created The List, in hopes of discovering who they are and how or why they chose the books they did.

Image borrowed from Wikipedia

Name: Vartan Gregorian

Born: April 8, 1934
Died: Still alive!
Country of Origin/Main Residence: Iran/United States since 1956

Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Clare Russell Gregorian, 1960
Children?: Yes: 3
Education: History/Humanities
Religion: Armenian Apostolic

Literary Awards: None I could find for literary efforts, but many for contributions to the arts and such, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Life:
Vartan Gregorian was born in Tabriz, Iran, as a member of the Armenian Christian community there. His mother died when he was six years old and his father worked for an oil company, so he was mostly raised by his maternal grandmother. Gregorian went to elementary school in Tabriz, then managed to make his way to Beirut, Lebanon, for secondary school. In 1956, Gregorian moved to the United States to go to university at Stanford. He obtained a BA and eventually a PhD in History and the Humanities.

Gregorian worked as a professor for a number of years before becoming a dean at the University of Pennsylvania (Faculty of Arts and Sciences), then president of the New York Public Library, then president of Brown University. He continued teaching throughout this time. Finally, since 1997, he's been the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, an organization created by Andrew Carnegie a little over a hundred years ago to distribute his vast wealth.

I have to say that Gregorian has blown me away compared to the other board members I've profiled so far. This guy is driven and seems to care tremendously about education. This 2003 interview is long but worth a read. It gets into some sketchy territory at the end where Gregorian and the interviewer both start knocking vocational training a little bit, but I agree in general that arts and humanities education are more important than we're often willing to acknowledge.

From what I could tell, Gregorian has "only" written two or three books, one of which is his autobiography.

Sources: whatever I've linked within the post and also wikipedia

Board Members: Shelby Foote

Board Member Bios are extremely cursory surveys of the lives of the Modern Library board members who created The List, in hopes of discovering who they are and how or why they chose the books they did.

Name: Shelby Foote

Born: November 17, 1916
Died: June 27, 2005
Country of Origin/Main Residence: United States

Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Tess Lavery, 1944 (ended 1946); Marguerite Desommes, 1948 (ended 1952); Gwyn Rainer, 1956
Children?: Yes: 2
Education: Unclear, doesn't seem to have completed a degree (but eventually received an honorary doctorate)
Religion: Episcopalian

Literary Awards: St. Louis Literary Award; Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award

Life:
Shelby Foote was born in Mississippi of pretty solid Mississippi stock (i.e. his great-grandfather was a Confederate Army veteran). He grew up mostly in Greenville, Mississippi, where he and Walker Percy developed a lifelong friendship. He went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for a couple of years before joining the Mississippi National Guard and US Marine Corps during the Second World War. It seems he was a bit of a rebel, because he had trouble getting in to UNC due to his history of making fun of his high school principal, and then was dismissed from the Army because he misused a vehicle to go cavorting with his girlfriend.

Foote's career as a novelist began in earnest after the war and consisted of several novels about the American South at various points in history. His fiction was never especially well known, but earned the admiration of some other writers, including William Faulkner (whose name I can't link to yet because I won't have a review of his work posted until January). I've added September, September to my reading list.

The real big break for Foote came in the form of a letter from our friend Christopher Cerf's dad, Bennett Cerf, at Random House, requesting a short history of the Civil War. Foote ended up writing an enormous three-volume history instead, over a twenty year period. I have not added this monster to my reading list, at least not yet. As a result of this work, Foote ended up appearing in Ken Burns' Civil War documentary (something I regrettably didn't watch while it was on Canadian Netflix) and was thereby catapulted to fame in his later days.

Sources: whatever I've linked within the post and also wikipedia

Board Members: Christopher Cerf

Does anyone even remember the last time I did one of these? Here's a hint: it was just over four years ago. I actually did have a draft for this guy created years ago, but couldn't find enough information about him online at the time, so put off finishing it. Anyway, a quick reminder that this is an extremely cursory survey of this person's life, just like the previous bios.

Image borrowed from the Muppet Wiki

Name: Christopher Cerf

Born: August 19, 1941
Died: Still alive!
Country of Origin/Main Residence: United States

Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Geneviève Charbin, 1972? (divorced at some point—the linked article is solid gold); Katherine Vaz, 2015
Children?: No
Education: something at Harvard
Religion: Jewish/Roman Catholic

Literary Awards: None I could find, but he's won some Grammys and Emmys

Life:
Christopher Cerf was born in, I'm guessing, New York, to a Roman Catholic mother and Jewish father, the latter of which was one of the co-founders of Random House. They were very much a media family.  Cerf went to Harvard College and then worked as an editor for a time at Random House.

From there, things get interesting, and I'm officially considering him responsible for any of the fun that's ended up on The List until I hear otherwise. Beginning in 1970 (the first season), Cerf contributed music and lyrics to Sesame Street (!) and multiple other television shows. He appears to be just generally awesome at and invested in children's tv programming, and has notably objected to the use of his work as a torture device, which is a good side to be on.

Cerf also edited the National Lampoon in its early days, and many of his authorial works are satirical, although I'm a bit skeptical about their quality based on some of the titles listed on the wiki page.  I'm very ok with the fact that he doesn't seem to be a stuffy literary novelist, however.

Sources: whatever I've linked within the post and also wikipedia

Board Members: A. S. Byatt

As noted with the previous bio, this is by no means a comprehensive summary. Also I should note that with some of the broad descriptors I’ve chosen, I’m making best guesses as to where the board members fall i.e. I can’t say for sure what anyone’s sexual orientation/religion/sex is if that information isn’t readily available. (And I mean very readily, because I’m lazy.)

from http://www.abolitionist.com/

Name: A. S. Byatt (Dame Antonia Susan Duffy)

Born: August 24, 1936
Died: Still alive!
Country of Origin/Main Residence: England

Sex: Female
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Charles Rayner Byatt, 1959 (dissolved in 1969); Peter John Duffy, 1969
Children?: Yes: 4
Education: Literature
Religion: none

Literary Awards: Booker Prize for Possession: A Romance

Life:
A. S. Byatt was born in Sheffield, England to John Drabble and Kathleen Bloor. She went to Sheffield High School and the Quaker Mount School, then Cambridge, Bryn Mawr, and Oxford. She lectured for several years at London University and University College London.

Byatt seems to be mostly a writer, though, having written everything from fiction to poetry to critical studies and essays (with an output in the >20 range). Her pet themes appear to be naturalism, realism, and the places where fantasy intersects with the real world, and I think I’d definitely be game to pick up at least a couple of her novels.

Wikipedia quotes her as having said that she’s anti-Christian and doesn’t believe that human beings are basically good, which makes me think that she’s probably awesomely sassy, however she’s also in some sort of feud with her sister, writer Margaret Drabble, over a tea set, which is ridiculous.

Byatt had a daughter and son with her first husband (her son died in a car accident when he was 11), and two daughters with her second husband.

Sources: her website and obviously wikipedia

Board Members: Daniel J. Boorstin

As promised at some point in the past, here is the first board member bio type thing. This will by no means be a comprehensive summary of any of these people's lives, although I will focus on a few broad descriptors so that I can summarize them at the end of all this.

Name: Daniel J. Boorstin

Born: October 1, 1914
Died: February 28, 2004
Country of Origin/Main Residence: United States (son of Russian immigrants)

Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: Hetero
Married?: Yes: Ruth Frankel, 1941
Children?: Yes: 3
Education: Law
Religion: Jewish

Literary Awards: Pulitzer Prize for The Americans: The Democratic Experience

Life:
Daniel J. Boorstin's life begins with a very interesting story, involving his lawyer father's participation in the defense of a Jewish man accused of murdering a young girl in Georgia. From there things get a bit less exciting, though.

Boorstin grew up in Oklahoma after his family basically fled Georgia, and went to school at Harvard, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar), and finally Yale Law School, i.e. he was a lawyer by training. He was a professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years and the US Congress librarian, despite not being an actual librarian, for 12 years.

He wrote over 20 books, many of which seem to have very rah rah American subject matter, although some of the others, dealing with celebrity, world history, and the influence of technology on history, look like they might be interesting. After all, a bunch of them were apparently bestsellers.

Besides being a patriot, Boorstin flirted with was a member of the US communist party in the 1930s--probably during his early twenties, in other words. He then abruptly became a conservative. It's unclear whether he was racist or just insistently colour blind.

He and his wife/editor, Ruth, had three children.

Sources: this obituary and of course Wikipedia