Edita Morris


Edita Morris was a Swedish-American writer and political activist.

Biography

Edita Morris was born in Örebro in Sweden. Her parents were Reinhold Toll, an agronomist who had published books on dairy and cattle farming, and Alma Prom-Möller. The Toll family was well known in Sweden. Her grandfather was a general. She grew up in Stockholm as the youngest of four sisters. When she was still a child her father left the family and emigrated to England.
In 1925, she married the journalist and writer Ira Victor Morris, whose father, Ira Nelson Morris, served as the US envoy in Stockholm; and whose grandfather, Nelson Morris, was the founder of the Chicago meatpacking firm, Morris & Company. He gave them a manor house in the small village of Nesles-la-Gilberde, 60 kilometers outside Paris, France. Ira and Edita had several homes and traveled widely throughout the world. They spent the Second World War years in the United States. They were political activists committed to nuclear disarmament and opposed to many U.S policies of the Cold War.
Morris started her literary career with short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar and other publications. In 1943, she published her first novel, My Darling from the Lions. In 1930, she began an affair with fellow Swede and artist Nils Dardel, despite her marriage to Morris. The relationship lasted until Dardel's death in 1943 in New York. She figures on many of his paintings from 1930 onwards.
She is mostly known for her novel The Flowers of Hiroshima. The novel was partly influenced by the experiences of her son, Ivan Morris, later a distinguished Japanologist, as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy visiting Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city. The book has been translated into 39 languages. In 1978, she published Straitjacket: autobiography, which was followed in 1983 by a second volume, Seventy Years' War, published in Swedish only under the title Sjuttioåriga kriget.
With her husband, who came from a wealthy family background, she founded a rest house in Hiroshima for victims of the bomb.
After her death, the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture, usually known as the Hiroshima Foundation, was established. The purpose of the Foundation is to promote peace by supporting efforts in the cultural sphere to favor peace and reconciliation. The Foundation presents awards to women and men who contribute, in a cultural field, to fostering dialogue, understanding and peace in conflict areas. Morris died in Paris in 1988. She is buried, with her husband and her son, in the village of Nesles.

Foundation awardees

The following persons have received awards:

Morris Collection

The following published short writings are mentioned in the list of papers within the Morris Collection at Columbia University:
  • "After the Ball", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, November 1943
  • "Amar-to Love", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, 15 September 1941
  • "Auntie Ninna", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, April 1943
  • "Ball of Yarn", short story, in Selected Writing, no. 5
  • "A Blade of Grass", short story, in Story Magazine, August 1936
  • "Caput Mortuum", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, June 1941
  • "Dress Rehearsal", short story, in Mademoiselle, April 1943
  • "The Gateway to India", short story, in Eastern Horizon, December 1961
  • "Heart of Marzipan", short story, in Mademoiselle, October 1943
  • "Hiroshima Man", article, in The Mennonite, 25 May 1965
  • "Horse with Hoof of Fire", short story, in The New Mexico Quarterly Review, 1945
  • "Let's Remember Together", short story, in Good Housekeeping, May 1944
  • "Lili Died in April", short story, in Lovat Dickson's Magazine, Vol.3, no. 6, December 1934
  • "The Melody", short story, in Mademoiselle, February 1945
  • "Nature's Child", short story, in The Reader's Digest, September 1944
  • "The Open Mouth", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, July 1943
  • 2The Pagan", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, July 1944
  • "The Sorrow of Ape-in-pants", short story, in American Dialog, 1964
  • "The Survivors of the Bombs", article, in the New Statesman, 2 August 1958
  • "Survivors of the Bombs", article, in Opinion, 1961
  • "Young Man in an Astrakhan Cap", short story, in Harper's Bazaar, December 1942