Morris, Edmund

A MEMOIR OF RONALD REAGAN: DUTCH [Signed]

New York: Random House, 1999. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, xx, 874 pages. In Very Good condition with a Very Good dust jacket. In blue cloth quarter binding with blue paper boards. Jacket is white with black lettering. Jacket shows light shelving wear along the edges, with wrinkling at the head and top fore corners. Very small stain near the bottom edge of the jacket front cover. Price unclipped: "$35.00". Boards show very light shelving wear, with bumping to top fore corners and shallow crinkling to head of spine. Text block is lightly scuffed on the bottom edge. Interior clean. Inscribed by Morris to Neil and Susan Sheehan on the title page: "To Neil and Susan / -two writers who understand, as few can, that ars longa est / with regards and respect / Edmund / November, 1999". Shelved in Case 1 1/2.

1412829

Shelved Dupont Bookstore

Price: $200

NOTES

Inscribed by Edmund Morris to Neil and Susan Sheehan, “two writers who understand, as few can, that ars longa est,” and dated November 1999. Morris was one of the most prominent American biographers of the late twentieth century, best known for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and for his later presidential biographies of Ronald Reagan and Theodore Roosevelt. Dutch, his authorized “memoir” of Ronald Reagan, was one of the most controversial major biographies of its period: granted unusual access to Reagan and his circle, Morris employed an experimental form that introduced fictionalized elements and an invented narratorial presence into the life of a real president. This approach provoked substantial debate over the boundaries between biography, history, and imaginative narrative reconstruction. The association with Neil and Susan Sheehan is particularly apt. Both Sheehans devoted their careers to forms of nonfiction writing that required extended immersion, documentary reconstruction, and creative literary shaping. Morris’s inscription recognizes the Sheehans as fellow practitioners of a demanding art of prose / nonfiction; writers who, like Wilson, understood that serious nonfiction is not merely about accurate and timely reporting, but work intended to outlast the moment of its creation.

Second Story Books is honored to offer this item from the personal collection of Neil and Susan Sheehan. Neil Sheehan (1936–2021) and Susan Sheehan (born 1937) were a distinguished husband-and-wife team whose careers helped define American literary journalism in the second half of the twentieth century. Neil Sheehan, a Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter for The New York Times, is best known for his role in bringing the Pentagon Papers to public attention and for his landmark book "A Bright Shining Lie", while Susan Sheehan built a parallel reputation as a leading voice at The New Yorker, crafting deeply reported narrative nonfiction on subjects ranging from mental health to social institutions, earning her own Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Their longstanding ties to major publications, particularly The New Yorker, placed them at the center of an influential cultural and intellectual network, and the books from their library carry added provenance through this close connection to the magazine’s editorial and artistic community.