EDMUND S. MORGAN, who received his Ph.D. at Harvard University studying with Perry Miller, was born in 1916 in Minneapolis. He has written for the New York Review of Books for over forty years and has published more than fifteen books, including Benjamin Franklin; Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, which won Columbia University’s Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989; and American Slavery, American Freedom, which won the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Historical Association’s Charles S. Sydnor Prize, and the American Historical Association’s Albert J. Beveridge Award.
Joining the faculty at Yale University in 1955, he trained a generation of students in early American history and was named a Sterling Professor in 1965, retiring over two decades later in 1986. In 1971 he was awarded the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa’s William Clyde DeVane Medal for most outstanding teaching and scholarship, considered one of the most prestigious teaching prizes for Yale faculty. One year later, he became the first recipient of the Douglas Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association. Among other honors, he has received the National Humanities Medal in 2000, the 2006 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ 2008 Gold Medal for History. A woodturner and furniture craftsman of distinction, he lives in New Haven with his wife, Marie Morgan.