Author and biographer Edmund Morris was born in Nairobi, Kenya on May 27, 1940. After dropping out of Rhodes University in South Africa, he worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. He is best known for his biographies of U. S. Presidents, but he has also written about travel and the arts for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Harper's Magazine. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award in 1980 for The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. He was appointed President Ronald Reagan's authorized biographer and in 1999 he published Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan. However, this biography is considered… controversial because Morris created fictional characters that figure into Reagan's early life. He said they were devices used to help get Reagan's story across, but many critics called the stunt egotistical or just plain irresponsible. His other works include Theodore Rex (2001), Beethoven: The Universal Composer (2005), and Colonel Roosevelt (2010).