Local author Roy Morris Jr. has just published his fifth book, The Long Pursuit: Abraham Lincoln’s Thirty-Year Struggle with Stephen Douglas for the Heart and Soul of America. The book, published by HarperCollins, details the decades-long personal and political rivalry between Illinois neighbors Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, culminating in Lincoln’s election as president in 1860 and the resultant Civil War.

The book is available at Barnes and Noble, Rock Point Books and Books-a-Million. It is also available online at Amazon.com.

Mr. Morris, a former staff writer for the Chattanooga Times and the Chattanooga News-Free Press, is currently the editor of Military Heritage magazine, which is published bimonthly out of Herndon, Va. Prior to that, he was editor of America’s Civil War magazine for 13 years. He resides in North Chattanooga with his wife, Leslie, and their daughter, Lucy, a junior at Girls Preparatory School. Their son, Phil, is a junior at UTC.

Mr. Morris has published four previous books on American history: Fraud of the Century: Rutherford B. Hayes, Samuel Tilden, and the Stolen Election of 1876; The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War; Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company; and Sheridan: The Life and Wars of General Phil Sheridan.

In the course of his career, Mr. Morris has appeared on the celebrated author-interview program, “Book Notes,” on C-SPAN and has spoken at the Smithsonian, the National Portrait Gallery, the New York Art League, the Southern Festival of Books and Book TV. In addition, he has served as a historical consultant for the History Channel and A&E. His books have been reviewed in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, the Washington Post, the Boston Globe and many other major newspapers and magazines. In 1986, he was awarded the Author’s Prize by Civil War Times Illustrated magazine for best article of the year.

Mr. Morris recently completed a three-year project as editor of a series of three books for Purdue University Press based on the annual Symposium on the Civil War, the 19th Century Press and Free Expression at UTC. The first book, Memory and Myth: The Civil War in Fiction and Film from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Cold Mountain, was published last year.