Essex County - West Orange - Book Launch Reception at Edison National Historical Park

Saturday, October 26 - West Orange, Essex County
Book Launch Reception at Edison National Historical Park

To celebrate the publication of Edison, the new biography of Thomas A. Edison by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edmund Morris, Random House will host a book launch reception from 2:00 - 4:00 pm on Saturday at the park’s laboratory complex. The event is free and open to the general public.

Random House editor Andrew Ward will offer brief remarks at the reception and Thomas Edison National Historical Park will announce the details of “One Book, One Town: West Orange Reads Edison,” a community-wide reading experience to encourage all to read and discuss the biography together.

Copies of Edison will be available for purchase, and on display in the park archives will be rarely-seen historic documents accessed by Edmund Morris while he researched the biography.

Edison is the first major biography of Thomas Edison to be published in the last twenty years. Edmund Morris spent several years exploring the vast five million page archive preserved at Thomas Edison NHP. In the process, he has not only resurrected Edison as a person but as a man of staggering variety – Edison the botanist, naval strategist, the iron-ore miner, the chemist and telegrapher, audio producer and publisher.

Edmund Morris (1940-2019) was born and educated in Kenya and went to college in South Africa. He worked as an advertising copywriter in London before immigrating to the United States in 1968. His biography The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt won the Pulitzer Prize and American Book Award in 1980. Theodore Rex followed in 2001 and Colonel Roosevelt in 2010. Morris was President Reagan’s authorized biographer and wrote the national bestseller Dutch: A Memoir of Ronald Reagan in 1999. He is also the author of Beethoven: The Universal Composer (2005) and This Living Hand (2012), a collection of essays.

This event is FREE but tickets must be purchased The Thomas Edison National Historical Park Laboratory Complex Visitor Center at 211 Main Street, West Orange, NJ to see Glenmont, the Edison Estate. Admission is $15.00 per person and includes the Glenmont Estate and the Laboratory Complex. Children under age 16 are free. For more information, call 973-736-0550 x11 or visit www.nps.gov/edis.
Location: 211 Main St, West Orange, NJ 07052, USA

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