Willie Morris; Mississippi Delta Writer

Willie Morris, one of Mississippi’s most treasured authors, who wrote many stories based on his childhood in the Delta, died Monday night. He was 64.

He died at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson, where he had been taken earlier Monday after suffering a heart attack.

Morris, who developed what he called a “good ole boy” love for the South, grew up in Yazoo City, the small town that would become the focal point for many of his stories.

Most of his writing was about himself, but he brought to his novels and nonfiction works an understanding of the South and showed how his life and the region’s related to a larger national experience.

“I go back to the South, physically and in my memories, to remind myself who I am, for the South keeps me going,” he wrote in “Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home,” published in 1981.

In his 1967 autobiography, “North Toward Home,” he wrapped his personal history around the history of the country as a whole, giving his life story both character and rich context. In writing about such diverse experiences as life in Yazoo--a city “on the edge of the Delta, straddling that memorable divide where the hills end and flat land begins”--and the high-powered New York publishing world, he spoke “in the accent of a region,” reviewer Peter Schrag wrote in the Reporter, giving readers “something fundamental in the meaning of America.”

In “Yazoo,” “Good Old Boy” and “Terrains of the Heart,” he reminisced about his hometown and early years, explaining transformations in Southern society through his own experiences. In “Yazoo,” published in 1971, he returned to his hometown to explore how a Supreme Court order to integrate the local schools was carried out. The change was made peacefully, he wrote, and he spoke of the values and traditions that held the community together through what could have been a traumatic episode.

Morris had more than a dozen books to his credit. His latest was “The Ghosts of Medgar Evers,” a 1998 work about the history of the production of the 1996 film “Ghosts of Mississippi.” That film was about the 1963 assassination of the civil rights figure and the conviction of Byron De La Beckwith for his murder.

The book explores what the three trials and the film of the surrounding events say about race in America, especially in his home state.

“The basic crisis in America is that of racism,” Morris wrote. “Mississippi has always been the crucible of national guilt.”

Morris was a journalist early in his career. He was editor in chief of the Texas Observer in Austin from 1960 to 1962. Then he moved to Harper’s magazine as associate editor, rising to become its youngest editor in chief in 1967, when he was 33. He left Harper’s in 1971 but stayed in the New York area until 1980.

“He brought that magazine kicking and screaming into the present. With his love of words and very considerable charm, he’d taken an archaic magazine and made it an exciting magazine that was on the cutting edge,” said writer David Halberstam, recruited by Morris at Harper’s. “There was a moment he sort of owned New York.”

He returned to Mississippi, serving as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, where he wrote “The Courting of Marcus Dupree,” a 1983 book based on a standout football player.

In 1996, he was the winner of the Richard Wright Medal for Literary Excellence.

Writer Larry Wells said Morris “was one of the true literary voices of the South and of America.”

On a personal level, he said Morris was a famous practical jokester who “had fun; everything about him was fun.”

Morris and his only child, David, a freelance photojournalist living in New Orleans, were collaborating on a new book. The author is also survived by his second wife, JoAnne Prichard, whom he married in 1990.