Morris graduated top of his class in 1952 and enrolled in the University of Texas, where he became the editor of the student newspaper. He graduated for the University of Texas in 1956 and continued his education as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University. After returning to the United States, he edited Texas Observer, a liberal weekly newspaper, from 1960 to 1962.

Morris became an associate editor of Harper’s magazine in 1963 and editor-in-chief in 1967. During his time at the magazine, he attracted contributions from well-known authors such as William Styron, Robert Penn Warren, Ralph Ellison, Arthur Miller, James Dickey, Walker Percy, and Norman Mailer. His desire to create a relevant magazine spurred him to hire well-established writers as contributing editors. These include Larry King, Marshall Frady, John Corry, and David Halberstam. He later became embroiled in editorial disputes with the publication’s owner and resigned in 1971.

While Morris was working at Harper’s he published North Toward Home, which was a bestseller and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award for nonfiction. After leaving Harper’s he published Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town (1971), an exploration of forced integration of the public schools in the Deep South. He also wrote Good Old Boy (1971), and a children’s book about misadventures in a haunted house. He also wrote The Last of the Southern Girls (1973), a novel about a southern debutante who comes to Washington D.C.

In 1980, Morris returned to Mississippi as writer-in-resident at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, and wrote The Courting of Marcus Dupree (1983). He skillfully combined sports reporting, historical analysis, and biography as he recounts the recruitment of a talented southern black athlete. As writer-in-resident he taught several classes in the English department. A young law student sat in on some of his classes and began writing his first novel. Morris wrote a comment back to him praising his work. The comment appeared in the front cover John Grisham’s best seller, A Time to Kill.

Morris wrote a sequel to North Toward Home in 1993. The sequel, New York Days, discusses his years at Harper’s and the tumultuous 1960s. In 1995, he published My Dog Skip a best seller about boy and his canine friend. The book was eventually made into a movie. Another popular book published in 1998 by Morris was The Ghosts of Medgar Evers. It is a moving account of racist Mississippi about Medgar Evers. This book was also made into a movie entitled Ghosts of Mississippi.

In 1990, Morris married long time friend JoAnne Prichard, an editor at the University Press of Mississippi, who had worked with him on Homecomings. After their marriage, they moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and started writing several novels and books. Morris died on August 2, 1999, of a massive heart attack. His works have set a high standard for generations of authors to come.