詹姆斯·莫罗

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 lived in State College, Pennsylvania with his second wife, Kathryn Smith Morrow, and their two dogs. They currently live in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania.

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 8 mm genre films with his friends at Abington High School, including Joe Adamson, who ultimately made documentary films in Los Angeles; David E. 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 Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, August Derleth and Mark Schorer's "The Return of Andrew Bentley", and Samuel Taylor 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 16 mm 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 1972 to 1973, Morrow reunited with high-school filmmaking friends Adamson and Stone to create a 16 mm satiric short called A Political Cartoon, which tells of a cartoon character who gets elected President of the United States. According to Morrow, the 22-minute film was their second "satiric sally against the American republic", following one of their previous collaborations from the 1960s, The Man Who Owned America. The film also featured two cameo appearances from Warner Bros.' Bugs Bunny. It was distributed by The Creative Film Society in 1994, and exhibited at the Orson Welles Cinema in Cambridge, Massachusetts that same year. In 1996, the film was released on VHS by Kino Video as a part of Cartoongate!, 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).

In 1977, TSR published James Morrow's murder-mystery board game, Suspicion, which he was inspired to create after seeing the 1974 movie adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. Six years later, Morrow was hired by Circuits and Systems, a New Hampshire firm, to design the graphics and help shape the script for Fortune Builder (1984), a ColecoVision game sometimes regarded as a forerunner to SimCity.

Fiction career

With the publication of his first novel, The Wine of Violence, in 1981, James Morrow embarked on a full-time career as a writer of comedic but philosophically informed fiction, thus fulfilling the pact he'd made with his tenth-grade self to participate in the universe of ideas opened up to him by James Giordano's World Literature class.

Over the course of the next thirty-four years, Morrow produced ten novels, three stand-alone novellas, and several dozen short stories, many of them satirizing conventional Christian arguments about the workings of the universe. Beyond his fascination with religious questions, Morrow's characteristic themes include the folly of war, the necessity of feminism, and the parent-child bond. Ever since high school, his worldview has been essentially secular and atheistic.