Edmund Morris died this past May of a stroke at the age of 78, having written the final sentence of “Edison” several months before. Composing in longhand and obsessed with the craft of writing — he considered 300 well-chosen words a day to be his productive limit — Morris was known for taking his time. His magisterial trilogy of Theodore Roosevelt, published over a span of three decades, won him a Pulitzer Prize for Volume 1. His next project, “Dutch,” a 14-year journey into the mind of Ronald Reagan, earned him something perhaps more coveted than a Pulitzer: a $3 million advance. Given free run of the White House and unparalleled access to Reagan himself, Morris came down with a severe case of writer’s block. He couldn’t get a handle on the president, whom he found inscrutable and “simply boring.” To liven things up, Morris added a handful of fictional characters (the lead one named “Edmund Morris”) to stand by Reagan’s side and tell his story in a more memorable way. The reviews weren’t kind.
Thomas Edison presents few such problems. A figure of astonishing brilliance and manic productivity, he cared so little for the feelings of other people (save the big investors who bankrolled his ventures) that he saw no reason to keep anything bottled up inside. His archive runs to five million pages, including the pocket notebooks he carried everywhere to record the ideas that came in torrents, and the brutally frank letters he wrote about the failures of immediate family members he otherwise studiously ignored. Were it left solely to Edison, he would have locked himself away in his lab, emerging every few months to announce yet another miraculous discovery. “His need to invent,” Morris says, “was as compulsive as lust.”
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