James Morrow (born March 17, 1947) is an American novelist and short-story writer known for filtering large philosophical and theological questions through his satiric sensibility.
Most of Morrow's oeuvre has been published as science fiction and fantasy, but he is also the author of two unconventional historical novels, The Last Witchfinder and Galápagos Regained. He variously describes himself as a "scientific humanist," a "bewildered pilgrim," and a "child of the Enlightenment".
Morrow presently lives in State College, Pennsylvania with his second wife, Kathryn Smith Morrow, his son Christopher, and his two dogs.
Early life and education
James Kenneth Morrow was born in Germantown, Philadelphia, on March 17, 1947, the only child of Emily Morrow, née Develin, and William Morrow (no relation to the publisher of the same name). During World War II, the U.S. Army exempted Bill Morrow from the draft owing to his employment by the Midvale Steel Works.
After the war, Emily and William bought a small house in the Philadelphia suburb of Roslyn, Pennsylvania, a choice driven largely by the sterling reputation of Abington Township's public-school system. James Morrow attributes his fiction-writing career directly to the humanities curriculum at Abington Senior High School. In particular, his exposure to James Giordano's tenth-grade World Literature class prompted him to imagine himself one day composing novels and stories inspired by the philosophically inclined authors in the syllabus, among them Dante, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus, and Ibsen.
Throughout his adolescence Morrow produced a series of 8mm genre films with his friends, including Joe Adamson, who ultimately made documentary films in Los Angeles; David Stone, who became a Hollywood sound editor; and George Shelps, who remained in the Philadelphia area and became a suburban planner. The output of “Abington-International Movie Company” encompassed adaptations of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Derleth and Schorer’s “The Return of Andrew Bentley,” and Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which received an Honorable Mention in the 1964 Kodak Movie News Teen-Age Movie Contest.
While an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Morrow met his living expenses by working as a filmmaker for the Philadelphia Public Schools, shooting and editing a series of 16mm films documenting and celebrating the innovations for which the system was famous in the late 1960s.
Upon receiving his BA degree from Penn in 1969, Morrow moved to Somerville, Massachusetts, so he could attend the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE).
Pre-fiction career
After receiving an MAT from Harvard in 1970, Morrow found work in the Boston area as an instructional media specialist and graphic artist, first in the Newton Public Schools (1971-1973) and then in the Chelmsford Public Schools (1973-1978). Among the curriculum materials he produced during these years were Moviemaking Illustrated: The Comicbook Filmbook (Hayden Book Company, 1973, coauthored with Murray Suid), and Media and Kids: Real World Learning in the Schools (Hayden Book Company, 1977, also coauthored with Murray Suid).
From 1971 to 1973, Morrow reunited with high-school filmmaking friends Adamson and Stone to create a 16mm satiric short called “A Political Cartoon”, which tells of a cartoon character who gets elected President of the United States. This 22-minute film was exhibited at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1974 and ultimately released on VHS by Kino Video as a part of Cartoongate! (1996), a compilation reel of animated shorts.
In 1972 Morrow married Jean Pierce, a fellow HGSE graduate. They had two children, Kathleen and Christopher. The couple separated in 1995. Morrow married Kathryn Smith—a bookseller, freelance editor, independent scholar, and occasional critic—in 1996.
During the 1980s, Morrow worked as one of the principal writers for the biannual periodical, ‘’A Teacher’s Guide to NOVA’’ (WGBH Educational Foundation). He also became a regular contributor to TV Guide magazine, writing such commentaries as “TV Didn’t Turn Us into Lemmings and Vikings” (October 9, 1982), “Big Brother Isn’t Watching—Yet” (January 28, 1984), “We Need a Nightly News Show on the Nuclear Arms Race” (March 8, 1986), and “The Best Way to Watch TV? Noisily and Together” (April 11, 1987).