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 acquisitions editor Lisa McMurtray.
Willie Morris Books in Memoir and Biography
The Steps We Take
Ellen Ann Fentress is a veteran writer for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Atlantic. She’s also a seasoned southern woman, specifically a white Mississippi one. “Women do a lot for ...
To Dance, to Live
Thalia Mara’s story spans the history of dance in the twentieth century and the rise of the arts in her adopted city of Jackson, Mississippi. As an adolescent Mara (1911–2003) studied with renowned ...
With Hawks and Angels
With Hawks and Angels: Episodes from a Southern Life chronicles the fortunate life of a man born in the Cajun country of Louisiana and his interaction with the three distinct parts of his home state: ...
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats
Becoming Ezra Jack Keats offers the first complete biography of acclaimed children’s author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916–1983) intended for adult readers. Drawing extensively from his unpublished ...
Political Animal
During Mardi Gras 1973, Stewart Butler (1930–2020) fell in love with Alfred Doolittle—a wealthy socialite and schizophrenic from San Francisco. Their relationship was an improbable love story that ...
The Mama Chronicles
Winner of the 2022 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award for Life Writing
Growing up in the Delta town of Yazoo City, Mississippi, Teresa Nicholas believed that she and her country-born and -bred ...
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 ...