Volume 46, Number 17 · November 4, 1999
'The Day Was Hot and Still…'
By Joan Didion
Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan
by Edmund Morris
Random House, 874 pp., $35.00
Edmund Morris, who became in 1985 the choice of Michael Deaver and Nancy Reagan for a curious and unprecedented post, that of 'in-house historian' at the White House, or official biographer to a sitting president, was born in 1940 in Nairobi, Kenya, the son of a pilot for East African Airways, a self-described 'colonial boy' who grew up believing that books were written only in 'another, superior hemisphere' and who after two years at Rhodes University in South Africa, opting for that 'superior hemisphere,' dropped out without receiving a degree and worked, from 1964 until 1968, as an advertising copywriter in London. In 1968, he moved with his wife, Sylvia Jukes Morris, to New York, where, according to the 1989 Current Biography Yearbook, the entries in which are submitted to its subjects for approval before publication, he 'applied his versatile writing skills to a variety of freelance projects…including poetry, travel ar-ticles, science fiction, radio scripts, screenplays, advertising copy, and mail-order catalogs.'
Review, 4845 words
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