said that literary comprehension came when he stopped trying to separate Reagan the performer ("I've got the biggest theatre in the world right here," the president once joked in the Oval Office) from the performance itself. Like most born actors, "Dutch" came alive only on stage. His biographer therefore had to be, in effect, his audience, right from the time when "Arthur Edmund Morris" first became aware of "Dutch" Reagan in the early 1920s, through to the actual acquaintance of author and subject half a century later. Morris believed that any reader willing to join him in watching The Ronald Reagan Story [his original title for the book] would yield to it as a drama true in every biographical detail. Later works Theodore Rex, which followed Dutch in 2002, was in contrast a straight account of Theodore Roosevelt's Presidency (1901–1909). Morris pointed out that "TR" was a subject so self-explanatory as to obviate any authorial intrusion into the narrative. The book, published by Random House, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography. Three years later Morris published Beethoven: The Universal Composer, a short biography that sought to convey in plain prose the essence of great music. Colonel Roosevelt, the final book in Morris's Theodore Roosevelt trilogy, came out in 2010. City Journal called it "one of the best biographies in modern literature". In October 2012, Morris published This Living Hand and Other Essays, an autobiographical collection of pieces on literature, music, and the presidency. Random House simultaneously announced that his next book would be a biography of Thomas Edison, which was published in October 2019. Personal life and death Morris wrote extensively on travel and the arts for such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He lived in New York City and Kent, Connecticut with his wife and fellow biographer, Sylvia Jukes Morris, whom he married in 1966. Morris died from a stroke at a hospital in Danbury, Connecticut, on May 24, 2019, aged 78. His widow died the following January. Bibliography References External links 1940 births 2019 deaths 20th-century American historians 20th-century American male writers 21st-century American historians 21st-century American male writers American biographers American male non-fiction writers South African emigrants to the United States National Book Award winners Official biographers to the presidents of the United States Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography winners Rhodes University alumni Writers from