Edita Morris

Edith (Edita) Dagmar Emilia Morris, born Toll (5 March 1902 – 15 March 1988) was a Swedish-American writer and political activist.

Edita Morris was born in Örebro in Sweden. Her parents were Reinhold Toll, an agronomist who had published books on dairy and cattle farming, and Alma Prom-Möller. The Toll family was well known in Sweden. Her grandfather was a general. She grew up in as the youngest of four sisters. When she was still a child her father left the family and emigrated to England.

She married in 1925 the journalist and writer Ira Victor Morris (1903–1972), whose father, Ira Nelson Morris, served as the US envoy in . He gave them a manor house in the small village of Nesles-la-Gilberde, 60 kilometers outside Paris. Ira and Edita had several homes and traveled widely throughout the world. They spent the Second World War years in the United States. They were political activists committed to nuclear disarmament and opposed to many U.S policies of the Cold War.

Morris started her literary career with short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar and other publications. In 1943 she published her first novel, My darling from the Lions. During the 1930s and until his death in 1943 in New York she shared much of her life with the Swedish painter Nils von Dardel. She figures on many of his paintings from 1930 onwards.

She is mostly known for her novel The Flowers of Hiroshima (1959). The novel was partly influenced by the experiences of her son, Ivan Morris, later a distinguished Japanologist, as an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy visiting Hiroshima immediately after the dropping of the atomic bomb on the city. The book has been translated into 39 languages. In 1978 she published Straitjacket: autobiography which was followed in 1983 by a second volume, Seventy Years' War, published in Swedish only under the title Sjuttioåriga kriget.

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