Lance Morrow, a journalist and author whose elegant essays, often with historical sweep, appeared for two decades on Time magazine’s back page when it was a significant corner of American opinion journalism, died on Friday at his home in Spencertown, N.Y., in Columbia County. He was 85.
His wife, Susan Brind Morrow, said the cause was prostate cancer.
Hired by Time in 1965, Mr. Morrow initially wrote about celebrities for its People section, an assignment he hated, he said. But he soon began reporting on the riots in Detroit in 1967 and the Vietnam War.
His many cover articles included seven “Man of the Year” features. (The name was changed to “Person of the Year” in 1999.) Among his subjects were, in 1973, Henry A. Kissinger, then the secretary of state, and President Richard M. Nixon, a joint selection, and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, in 1977, for advancing Middle East peace by meeting with Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel.
“In a wash of klieg lights,” Mr. Morrow wrote, “the Egyptian who had hurled his armies across the Suez Canal in 1973 stood at attention next to the old Irgun guerrilla whose name has been a dark legend to Palestinian Arabs for 30 years.”
Mr. Morrow began to write back-page essays in 1976 and continued to do so until the mid-1990s.
“If I was the jazz piano player, he was the formal classicist,” said Roger Rosenblatt, whose Time essays alternated weekly with Mr. Morrow’s from 1980 to 1990. “He wrote wonderful essays that were not devoid of humor or passion yet were beautifully constructed.”
One of his best-known essays, “The Case for Rage and Retribution,” appeared in the hours after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
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