Lance Morrow


Lance Morrow is an American essayist and writer, chiefly for Time magazine, as well as the author of several books. He won the 1981 National Magazine Award for Essay and Criticism and was a finalist for the same award in 1991. He has the distinction of writing more "Man of the Year" articles than any other writer in the magazine's history and has appeared on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson and The O'Reilly Factor. He is a former professor of journalism and University Professor at Boston University.

Background

Lance Morrow was born on September 21, 1939, and was raised in Washington D.C., where he attended Gonzaga College High School. His father, Hugh Morrow, was for many years a chief aide to New York Governor and later Vice President Nelson Rockefeller.
Morrow graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1963 with a BA in English literature.

Career

Morrow joined Time in 1965 after a brief stint with the now-defunct Washington Star. As a reporter, he covered the 1967 Detroit race riots, the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration and the Watergate scandal. He also has penned several of Times "Man of the Year" articles.
In 1976, Morrow became a regular writer of Times backpage essay. He won the National Magazine Award for his essays in Time in 1981, was a finalist for the award in 1991, and was among the Time writers who won the award in 2001, for their coverage of September 11. In his award winning September 11 essay, "The Case for Rage and Retribution" he wrote:
A day cannot live in infamy without the nourishment of rage. Let's have rage... Let America explore the rich reciprocal possibilities of the fatwa. A policy of focused brutality does not come easily to a self-conscious, self-indulgent, contradictory, diverse, humane nation with a short attention span. America needs to relearn a lost discipline, self-confident relentlessness and to relearn why human nature has equipped us all with a weapon called hatred... This is the moment of clarity. Let the civilized toughen up, and let the uncivilized take their chances in the game they started."
Morrow was a University Professor at Boston University from 1996 to 2006, when he was asked to write the authorized biography of Henry Luce, the founder of Time magazine.
In 2018, he began contributing to City Journal magazine.

Personal life

Morrow lives in Chatham, New York, with his wife Susan Brind Morrow, who is also an author. He has two sons, Justin, a writer and filmmaker, and James, a political consultant and journalist in Sydney, Australia.
Morrow’s cousin is the science fiction writer James K. Morrow.

Criticism

Lance Morrow published an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, attempting to explain why it was dangerous for [the United States to discuss reparations for slavery, which was described by Michael Harriot as the most racist thing he had ever read.