A series of biographies and memoirs that explore all aspects of contemporary American life and preserve the ineffable in the human experience.
For more information or to submit a proposal, contact associate editor Lisa McMurtray.
Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
The Mama Chronicles
Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred mother weren’t close. She knew little of her mother’s early life as a sharecropper ...
Flights from Fassberg
Wolfgang W. E. Samuel, Colonel, US Air Force (Ret. ), interweaves his story and that of his family with the larger history of World War II and the postwar world through a moving recollection and exploration ...
The Nightcrawler King
While growing up in rural Indiana during World War II, William Fagaly began his first venture—collecting and selling earthworms to locals—from which he was christened with a childhood moniker. The ...
The Power of One
For thirty-four years Sister Anne Brooks, a Catholic nun and doctor of osteopathy, served one of the nation’s most impoverished towns and regions, Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County in the Mississippi ...
In Faulkner's Shadow
What happens when you marry into a family that includes a Nobel Prize winner who is arguably the finest American writer of the twentieth century? Lawrence Wells, author of In Faulkner’s Shadow: A Memoir ...
Stone Motel
In the summers of the early 1970s, Morris Ardoin and his siblings helped run their family's roadside motel in a hot, buggy, bayou town in Cajun Louisiana. The stifling, sticky heat inspired them to find ...
Deep South Dispatch
Former New York Times correspondent John N. Herbers (1923-2017), who covered the civil rights movement for more than a decade, has produced Deep South Dispatch: Memoir of a Civil Rights Journalist, a ...
Something Inside So Strong
In 1922, Mildred Pitts Walter was born in DeRidder, Louisiana, to a log cutter and a midwife/beautician. She became the first member of her family to go to college, graduating in 1940. Walter moved to ...
Cups Up
George T. Malvaney's life epitomizes the old maxim that "You cannot make this stuff up. " Combine a young Klansman from Mississippi, an armed coup attempt in the Caribbean, a stay in prison, and a life-changing ...
Confessions of an Undercover Agent
This true story of an ex-Marine who fought crime as an undercover cop, a narcotics agent, and finally a federal prosecutor spans a decade of crime fighting and narrow escapes. Charlie Spillers dealt with ...