He had only been in the hotel room for five minutes when the big brown envelope slid under the door. His name and the news of his arrival had traveled quickly in Belgrade.
It was late 1992, and Lance Morrow, a Time magazine writer, was there with his friend, Boston University professor Elie Wiesel, in the midst of a civil war. Morrow opened the envelope and found dozens of pictures of atrocities, decapitated bodies and people burned to death in ditches.
Now, from his office at Boston University, Morrow reflects on life, writing and events, such as those in Belgrade, while penning a book about evil due out next September. The as-of-yet-untitled book, according to Morrow, will focus on ‘how to discuss these things if you don’t use the word evil.’
As a veteran journalist, the 63-year-old Morrow is in a unique position to discuss the nature of evil a subject that philosophers and theologians have grappled with for thousands of years because he’s seen the effects of it firsthand.
‘I’m trying to be a little more common sense about it,’ Morrow said.
Morrow said evil is a topic that is pertinent today not only because of Iraq, but also because of ‘strange cases’ occurring in America.
‘I tell a lot of stories,’ he said. ‘Evil is always a story of one kind or another.’
During his 37-year career with Time, where he still contributes as an essayist, Morrow has honed his storytelling skills and imparts these lessons to his students at BU. In his course, ‘The Essay,’ he tells them that details are crucial to good writing.
‘There’s nothing more persuasive than detail,’ Morrow said. ‘There’s no need for generalizations when you can dramatize it.’
For Morrow, creative writing is an act of conjuration, and in one assignment he asks students to conjure up a place where they have lived or visited using vivid details. Morrow, who lives with his wife, Susan Brind Morrow, on a farm in Chatham, N.Y., and commutes to Boston and New York City, recalls one from his childhood.
‘Washington, D.C., has been important to me,’ Morrow said. ‘It’s the place I feel most at home because I grew up there.’
Born in Philadelphia, Morrow moved with his family to Washington, D.C., when he was three years old during World War II. His father worked as an editor for The Saturday Evening Post, and his mother was also a magazine writer. He grew up in his parents’ milieu, which he says included Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and Joseph McCarthy.
‘People like Lyndon Johnson and Nixon would come to dinner … and my parents knew them, and my father, being an editor of The Saturday Evening Post, had a lot of these people coming around and knocking on his door wanting to publish things or get publicity,’ Morrow said. ‘My next book after the evil thing is a book on Johnson, Nixon and Kennedy in 1948. It’s sort of a prequel to what happened to them later on.’
Morrow, who converted to Catholicism when he was 13, attended Gonzaga University, where Pat Buchanan was a few grades ahead of him. After high school, he took a year off to work at the Washington Star before attending Harvard University.
He said his best friend at the time was Carl Bernstein, and the two remain close associates.
After graduating in 1963, Morrow submitted writing samples through a friend of his father’s and began his career at Time in 1965. Since then he has worked as a writer, editor and essayist for the magazine, writing more than 150 cover stories and covering each presidential election since 1968.
He has also written two memoirs, two collections of essays and a book about East African wildlife.
Having written curiosity is an important trait for a journalist, Morrow said he stays curious about many things including evil and ‘what’s happening to this country … and its relationship with the rest of the world.’ He sits on the edge of his classroom desk head down and feet hanging but not dangling curious to hear his students read their essays.
‘His approach is so allowing,’ said Alex Zito, a University Professors Program junior. ‘The only thing he said to us [for this latest assignment] is ‘it has to be going somewhere.”
So far, Morrow’s students have been warming up to his strong opinions. After they arranged their desks in a semi-circle ‘campfire style’ at the beginning of class, the cerebral Morrow, wearing a conventional gray jacket and maroon tie, took his seat at the front.
‘Are you the fire pit?’ joked one student, referring to a Salman Rushdie anecdote Morrow had shared with them.
Once Morrow laughed, they all did.
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