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Morris' journalistic learning, or non-learning, began at age twelve, when he became sports "editor" of the Yazoo Herald. A decade later he came briefly to public attention when, as student editor of the University of Texas newspaper, he editorially accused the Governor and state legislators of collusion with oil and gas interests. He was asked to resign, but refused. The university countered by appointing a faculty supervisor for the paper. The next day Morris wrote that the appointee would "bring to the Daily Texan ... the sensitivity of high salary and position."
After four years in England, Morris returned to his gadfly role, as editor of the Observer. John Fischer, editor of Harper's (himself a former Rhodes scholar who liked to keep tabs on that elite tribe), then called to offer him an editing job. Morris took it, and for four years worked quietly in Manhattan. In 1967, at Fischer's urging, Harper's president, John Cowles Jr., made Morris the youngest editor in chief of the oldest literary magazine in the U.S. "Making him editor," says one Harper's staffer, "was Fischer's revenge on the New York Jewish Intellectual Establishment. Little did he know."
Morris knew. He brought a Texas friend, Larry King, to the magazine, lured Pulitzer Prizewinner David Halberstam away from the New York Times, and persuaded his friend and fellow Southerner William Styron to run a 35,000-word excerpt from The Confessions of Nat Turner in Harper's at a fee several times smaller than he could have got elsewhere. But his official declaration of independence came when he signed Norman Mailer to recount his experiences at a Washington peace march.
Writers' Prerogatives. Mailer turned in 90,000 words. Morris read them all and deliberated with Executive Editor Midge Decter for most of a drinking afternoon before deciding to run the piece in full, turning over a whole issue of Harper's to what was probably the longest magazine article ever published, "The Steps of the Pentagon." In book form, as The Armies of the Night, it won a Pulitzer Prize for Mailer.
As an editor, Morris acts more as a filter than an originator of ideas, but his greatest strength is in understanding, in Halberstam's words, "writers' prerogatives, what they feel, what they are, what is important to them." Often what is most important to them is to be given the freedom to write in the length and style they want to. Last week, Morris broached a story idea to his old Texas classmate, Bill Moyers, who had just been dropped as publisher of Long Island's Newsday. "Take a month, rent a car, see the country and do a piece on America," were Morris' only instructions. "What appeals to me about doing it," says Moyers, "is that Willie has no hang-ups about style, tradition, length−no preconceived ideas of shaping a writer. He is much more interested in me and what I might have to say than in his own idea of what I should say."