Edmund Morris, who died in May at the age of 78, was a biographer highly praised for his 1979 book The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award). And he was pilloried for his 1999 biography Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan, because he (I quote from Morris’s New York Times obituary) “inserted himself as a fictional narrator.” Edison is Morris’s posthumous biography of one of American history’s most important and influential figures and, after the chastising he received for Dutch, what could go wrong? Surely he learned to leave the avant-garde tricks to fiction. Gentle reader, it turns out that Morris didn’t eschew the eccentric legerdemain this time either, and in due course I will count the ways.
Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931) is his nation’s greatest inventor — the phonograph (his “favorite invention”), incandescent electric light bulb, moving-picture camera, ad infinitum, 1,093 patents just in the United States — and during his life was revered as such by his compatriots (a 1922 New York Times poll named him the “greatest living American”). He was also a very strange man. It wasn’t just his peculiar personal habits: the shabby clothing; his penchant for sleeping on whatever free space presented itself in his laboratory or workshop; his “cheap Corona cigars, which . . . he liked . . . for their strong, coarse taste”; the fact that “from earliest youth he had half-starved himself, faithful to the dictum of the temperance philosopher Luigi Cornaro (1467–1566) that a man should rise from the table hungry.” He was also strange because his virtues — a remarkably intuitive, ingenious mind; self-assurance; demonic perseverance — could mutate into professional faults, and those faults, when accompanied by self-delusion and ruthlessness, had repercussions that extended into society at large.
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