David Brown Morris, hybrid writer-scholar, received a BA from Hamilton College (1964) and a PhD from the University of Minnesota (1968). He began teaching at the University of Virginia in 1969, and in 1982 — after a brief stop at American University in Washington, DC — he left a position as full professor at the University of Iowa in order to write full time. When his wife fell seriously ill, he returned to the University of Virginia in 1982, continuing for five years as University Professor in a position split between English and Medicine. A wanderer by necessity, he now lives in Coral Gables, Florida.
He is the author of two prize-winning books in eighteenth-century studies — The Religious Sublime (1972) and Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984). The Culture of Pain (1991) won a PEN prize and led to multiple lectures and essays for medical audiences. (Mentioned in a recent book: “His lectures began to be included in academic medical courses and in pain society meetings, he ranked among the giants of the pain field as an invited lectures. His book became required reading for anyone going into the pain field.” 1) The Culture of Pain also initiates an accidental trilogy that includes Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age (1998) and, after a long interval that he spent as primary caregiver for his late wife, Ruth, Eros and Illness (2019).
In addition to numerous essays and articles, he has written three books of narrative nonfiction: Earth Warrior (1995), about an anti-driftnet mission with activist Paul Watson; Civil War Duet (2019), a self-published intergenerational dialogue with his great grandfather, Newton Brown who served with the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry; and Wanderers: Literature, Culture and the Open Road (2022). His most recent book, also narrative nonfiction, is Ten Thousand Central Parks: A Climate-Change Parable (forthcoming from Fordham University Press in Fall 2025). It traces an arc from the nineteenth-century origins of New York beloved landmark to the existential challenge of our lifetimes.
Honors:
- 1992 Pen Award for The Culture of Pain
- 1985 Gottschalk Prize for Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense
Follow this link to read or download David’s CV.
1 Jane C. Ballantyne, John Loeser: The Man Who Reimagined Pain (Cham, Switzerland: Springer-Nature, 2023), 126.