Edmund Morris

Morris took the Pulitzer for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt and gave thirty years to the three-volume life, of which Theodore Rex is the middle. Then came Dutch, the authorised Reagan biography, in which he inserted a fictional version of himself as a lifelong witness to Reagan, complete with footnotes citing sources that do not exist. Historians were appalled and said so at length; his defence was that Reagan was so opaque that a conventional biography would have been the larger falsification. Nobody has settled that argument. He also wrote on Beethoven and on Edison. He died in 2019.