News Release

Book Launch Reception: Saturday, October 26, 2019 Edison by Edmund Morris

Cover of Edison by Edmund Morris new biography.

News Release Date: October 19, 2019

Contact: Leonard DeGraaf, 973-736-0550  x22

Thomas Edison NHP News Release For Immediate Release
Contact: Leonard DeGraaf
Phone: [phone] x22

Book Launch Reception: Saturday, October 26, 2019
Edison by Edmund Morris


“I do not find it so easy to talk about my Father . . . I have yet to find a biography of him that satisfies me as a picture of the whole man."
                       Edison’s daughter, Madeleine Edison Sloane, as quoted in Edison

WEST ORANGE, NJ – To celebrate the publication of Edison, the new biography of Thomas A. Edison by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris, Random House will host a book launch reception from 2-4 pm on Saturday, October 26, 2019 at the park’s laboratory complex. The event is free and open to the general public.

Random House editor Andrew Ward will offer brief remarks at the reception and Thomas Edison NHP will announce the details of “One Book, One Town: West Orange Reads Edison,” a community-wide reading experience to encourage all to read and discuss the biography together.

Copies of Edison will be available for purchase, and on display in the park archives will be rarely-seen historic documents accessed by Edmund Morris while he researched the biography.

Edison is the first major biography of Thomas Edison to be published in the last twenty years. Edmund Morris spent several years exploring the vast five million page archive preserved at Thomas Edison NHP. In the process he has not only resurrected Edison as a person, but as a man of staggering variety – Edison the botanist, naval strategist, the iron-ore miner, the chemist and telegrapher, audio producer and publisher.

Edmund Morris (1940-2019) was born and educated in Kenya and went to college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award in 1980. Theodore Rex followed in 2001 and Colonel Roosevelt in 2010. Morris was President Reagan’s authorized biographer and wrote the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in 1999. He is also the author of Beethoven: The Universal Composer (2005) and This Living Hand (2012), a collection of essays.

Thomas Edison National Historical Park is a National Park Service site dedicated to promoting an international understanding and appreciation of the life and extraordinary achievements of Thomas Alva Edison by preserving, protecting, and interpreting the Park’s extensive historic artifact and archive collections at the Laboratory Complex and Glenmont, the Edison family estate. The Visitor Center is located at 211 Main Street in West Orange, New Jersey. For more information call 973- 736-0550 extension 11 or visit our website at www.nps.gov/edis. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook.
-NPS-