Edita Morris

Edita Morris (born Edita Dagmar Emilia Toll; 5 March 1902 – 15 March 1988) was a Swedish-American writer and political activist.

Edita Morris was born in Örebro in Sweden.

Her parents were Reinhold Toll, an agronomist who had published books on dairy and cattle farming, and Alma Prom-Möller.

The Toll family was well known in Sweden.

Her grandfather was a general.

She grew up in Stockholm as the youngest of four sisters.

When she was still a child her father left the family and emigrated to England.

In 1925, she married the journalist and writer Ira Victor Morris (1903–1972), whose father, Ira Nelson Morris, served as the US envoy in Stockholm; and whose grandfather, Nelson Morris, was the founder of the Chicago meatpacking firm, Morris & Company.

He gave them a manor house in the small village of Nesles-la-Gilberde, 60 kilometers outside Paris.

Ira and Edita had several homes and traveled widely throughout the world.

They spent the Second World War years in the United States.

They were political activists committed to nuclear disarmament and opposed to many U.S policies of the Cold War.

Morris started her literary career with short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar and other publications.

In 1930, she began an affair with fellow Swede and artist, Nils Dardel despite her marriage to Morris.

She figures on many of his paintings from 1930 onwards.

In 1943 she published her first novel, My darling from the Lions.

The relationship lasted until his death in 1943 in New York.

She is mostly known for her novel The Flowers of Hiroshima (1959).

The novel was partly influenced by the experiences of her son, Ivan Morris, later a distinguished Japanologist, as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy visiting Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city.

The book has been translated into 39 languages.

In 1978, she published Straitjacket: autobiography which was followed in 1983 by a second volume, Seventy Years' War, published in Swedish only under the title Sjuttioåriga kriget.

With her husband, who came from a wealthy family background, she founded a rest house in Hiroshima for victims of the bomb.

After her death, the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation for Peace and Culture, usually known as the Hiroshima Foundation, was established.

The purpose of the Foundation is to promote peace by supporting efforts in the cultural sphere to favor peace and reconciliation.

The Foundation presents awards to women and men who contribute, in a cultural field, to fostering dialogue, understanding and peace in conflict areas.

Morris died in Paris in 1988.

She is buried, with her husband and her son, in the village of Nesles.

The following persons have received awards:

English titles only

The following published short stories are mentioned in the list of papers within the Morris Collection at Columbia University :