Time writer Lance Morrow in Central Park's Literary Walk. Morrow, who lived in Spencertown, died Nov. 29 at 85.

Kikuyu school children sitting and standing around Time writer Lance Morrow, right, and photographer Neil Leifer in village school room. Morrow, who lived in Spencertown, died Nov. 29 at 85.

Portrait of Time writer Lance Morrow. Morrow, who lived in Spencertown, died Nov. 29 at 85.

Lance Morrow found his calling at 16 at The Danville News in Pennsylvania as a journalist apprentice.

He never left the ink-stained trade that became a lifelong obsession. He honed his craft across seven decades of relentless deadlines and millions of words poured out in award-winning essays for Time magazine, columns for the Wall Street Journal and a dozen books.

When he died on Nov. 29 at age 85 of prostate cancer at his home in Spencertown, Columbia County, he carried a reputation as one of the most elegant prose stylists of his generation. He could write authoritatively on any subject and for decades spun 900 words of the week’s zeitgeist on the coveted real estate of Time’s back page. He shaped sentences into something akin to a Sargent portrait — technically proficient and totally enthralling.

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He had a daily practice of waking at 5 a.m. and sitting at his writing desk before dawn. He opened a vein and lost track of time. He scoffed at writer’s block. He kept his rear end in the chair until lunchtime, mentally exhausted by a six- or seven-hour session. He stuck to this routine his entire adult life. He worked things out on the page, adhering to Joan Didion’s dictum: “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

He finished a piece for WSJ a week before he died.

His mother, Elise Morrow, wrote a syndicated column, “Capital Capers,” about the Washington social scene in the 1940s and 1950s. His father, Hugh Morrow Jr., was an editor at The Saturday Evening Post. Their son grew up in a golden age of journalism. Just out of Harvard with a degree in English literature, Morrow worked alongside Carl Bernstein as a dictation typist at The........

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