Obituary: Richard M. Morse (1922–2001)

Dick Morse died on 17 April 2001, at his Haitian home in Pétionville. Thus Latin Americans lost one of their most beloved interpreters, Latin Americanists, their only pensador.

Richard McGee Morse was on born 26 June 1922, in Summit, New Jersey; the family moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, early on. Morse's family name was distinguished by three centuries in New England; his grandfather, a merchant, figured in the earliest commerce with Japan. His father followed in Asian trade, residing in New York, where the family enjoyed social prominence and wealth, until the Crash of 1929. From his mother, Morse took his love of literature, cultivating it in elite private schools. He followed his father to Princeton, in 1939. There, he studied literature with Allan Tate and R. P. Blackmur. The summer of his first year, Morse sought to travel abroad. Access to France was problematic in 1940; he had some notions of Cuba from a Princeton classmate, and went there, instead. He lived in Havana for two months; for him, it was a turning point. He returned to Princeton and began to study Iberian and Latin American civilization with two Spanish exiles, Augusto Centeno and Américo Castro; he began Latin American history with Dana Munro and Woodrow Borah. In 1941 he traveled to Chile, Argentina, and Brazil. That December, editing The Nassau Lit, he first wrote of Latin America. At that point, a short story suggests he dreamed of a literary life in Latin America, and the abandonment of New York commerce. A 1942 Mexican trip made possible his senior thesis on postrevolutionary education. He was graduated magna cum laude, with a major in the School of Public and International Affairs, in 1943, and then departed for the war in the Pacific. In 1945 a play written during the war won a prize in New York; The Narrowest Street was based on his Cuban experience. By 1946 Morse was studying at Columbia, but only to exercise his mind. He had no academic ambition; he only wanted to write. He studied under Frank Tannenbaum, whose work on Mexico he admired and whose emphasis on Latin American writers and visiting intellectuals he liked. In 1947-48, curious about São Paulo's sudden and incongruous modernity, he used a windfall grant to return there, hoping to make his name as an author. Fourteen months of research followed, first in literature, then in archives, often guided by the paulistas who became his lifelong friends--among them, Antônio Cândido, Florestan Fernandes, and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Then, his life was turned about again. Tannenbaum offered him a faculty position. Morse began, teaching Latin American and European history, rising from lecturer to assistant professor in 1949-58. During these years, his Brazilian research became a 1952 dissertation. Published in São Paulo (1954), it was reviewed by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who became a staunch friend. In 1958 Morse lengthened it into From Community to Metropolis: A Biography of São Paulo, Brazil. He also published a variety of articles and collaborated on the courses and texts that became Columbia's celebrated Contemporary Civilization series. In 1954, a third sea-change: Morse married Emerante de Pradines, daughter of a prominent Haitian popular lyricist, Auguste de Pradines, and a recorded singer and established dancer in her own right. She was on her second trip to New York, studying dance with Martha Graham and anthropology at Columbia, where they met. It would be a marriage and a cultural collaboration that would last for nearly five decades.

In 1958-61, at the University of Puerto Rico, Morse founded the Institute of Caribbean Studies, visiting Harvard briefly as a lecturer in 1960. In 1961, Morse chaired the history department of the State University of New York, Long Island. In 1962 Morse accepted an appointment at Yale. The Yale years (1962-78) would confirm his international position as a historian and an institution builder. A consultant to...