In a new effort to sum up the protean figure—a seven-year undertaking by the biographer Edmund Morris, who died in May—Edison emerges as a giant containing multitudes ... Morris's book is not built as a revisionist biography—more on its strange architecture in a moment—but it usefully demolishes several myths that have accreted around Edison’s legacy in recent years ... Now I have to tell you something about Morris’s biography: It goes backwards. Thomas Edison dies in the prologue, and toward the end, a young boy called Alva reads a book about electricity and is inspired ... If Morris perhaps felt his innovation would shed fresh light on a life marked by improvisatory creation rather than by structured, strictly cumulative accomplishments, he was mistaken. Nothing is gained by this approach, and much comprehension is lost ... Within the chapters, however, Edison is vibrantly alive, and though Morris doesn’t step back to emphasize this, Edison’s conjuring powers make him a mascot and a microcosm of his turn-of-the-century era.

For some unexplained reason, Morris decided to write this saga in reverse, beginning with Edison’s final years and working backward to his birth in small-town Ohio in 1847. It’s the biographical equivalent of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though Fitzgerald had the good sense to make it a short story, while Morris’s Edison” comes in at just under 800 pages, including footnotes ... This leads to a lot of flipping back and forth through the chapters, with a heavy reliance on the index to keep things straight ... Few biographers, however, possess the narrative talents of Edmund Morris. His ability to set a scene, the words aligned in sweet rhythmic cadence, is damn near intoxicating ... For all his quirks, Morris reminds us, Edison never lost sight of the future. And that, perhaps, is the key takeaway from this elegant, loosely crafted, idiosyncratic book. No inventor did more to nudge the world toward modernity, and few had a better feel for what the next generation of inventors might pursue.

How many biographers does it take to change a light bulb? Who knows, but it takes only one to change a narrative. Every decade or so, for a century now, a new book about Edison has appeared, promising to explain his genius or, more recently, to explain it away ... The delight of Edmund Morris’s Edison is that, instead of arguing with earlier writers or debating the terms of genius, it focusses on the phenomenological impact of Edison’s work. He tries to return readers to the technological revolutions of the past, to capture how magical this wizard’s work really felt. He reminds us that there was a time when a five-second kinetoscopic record of a man sneezing was just about the most astonishing thing anyone had ever seen; people watched it over and over again, like a nineteenth-century TikTok ... Even if you make your peace with [the] reverse narration—which, to be honest, I did, partly because Edison feels so much like a time traveller—Edison is still a frustrating book. It contains little new material, good prose but far too much of it, and no novel argument or fresh angle to motivate such an exhaustive return to an already storied life ... Every person is elusive in one way or another, sometimes even unto herself, but it is possible to confront those inner mysteries in a biography without resorting to fabrications or gimmicks. It’s a lesson Morris could have learned from Edison: sometimes, what’s called for isn’t invention but perfection.

The late Edmund Morris, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer known for his willingness to brush aside the norms of his genre if it suited his narrative ends, does it again ... Morris’ narrative takes a highly unorthodox turn by describing the inventor’s later years in the opening chapters. He then proceeds backward, decade by decade, culminating with Edison’s younger years when many of his most familiar and consequential inventions in electricity and sound replication occurred ... Morris’ willingness to breach the organizational norms of biography may not surprise readers familiar with his even bolder previous work ... Morris’ decision to begin his book with lesser known details about the aging Edison’s inventions and exploits makes for a rousing start ... Morris’ genre-bending biography of Edison is a briskly written, fact-packed work that, like its subject, is also highly illuminating.

Drawing on the archival riches of the Papers of Thomas A. Edison at Rutgers University, Morris deconstructs the human dynamo ... Morris pays more attention to his subject’s two wives and six children than Edison did ... At first blush, Morris’s upended chronology recalls nothing so much as the movie Groundhog Day, each chapter an uphill struggle—to create a reliable alkaline storage battery, say, or perfect successive versions of the phonograph ... Readers accustomed to lives developing through sequential incident may scratch their heads over the introduction ... More problematic than Morris’s rear-view mirror is the clunky dialect of laboratory research...so many lumps of scientific jargon in the stew of elegant, occasionally waspish prose ... None of this detracts from the author’s singular accomplishment of capturing a quicksilver intellect and conveying, in often luminous language, what it was like to be Thomas Edison ... The sobering realization that these are among the last words we will have from Edmund Morris’s pen only heightens our gratitude for this Edisonian portrait that, in intimacy and insight, constitutes its own Eureka moment. As a legacy, it sure beats an expiring breath in a test tube.

There's a great story inside Edison. You just have to work around author Edmund Morris ... The problem with Edison: Morris wrote it backwards ... The result is a confusing, frustrating, and circular read. I muddled through about 200 pages and was ready to give up before — with a bit less ingenuity than it takes to invent the lightbulb or phonograph, but still much more than is usually needed to read a book — I suddenly came up with a solution: Read it backwards ... I can see an argument for the end-to-beginning structure. Great lives — maybe all lives — are evaluated, appreciated, and better understood when they're coming to a close. Connections, trends, and threads are more clear when you're at the end of the line looking backward ... Or maybe Morris was just looking for one last challenge ... Either way, the narrative I had to construct for myself was fascinating and lively. I just wish Morris hadn't made it so hard to get there to begin with.

This isn’t the first time Morris experimented with structure. He drew criticism by inserting himself as a fictional narrator in his biography of Reagan. But here the book’s unusual shape makes good plotting sense and builds anticipation: As Thomas Edison grows younger, readers grow closer to the moment he creates his most famous invention, the incandescent light bulb. Morris portrays the months leading up to this moment with cinematic power, giving equal weight to the intriguing details of Edison’s experiments and to his emotional state as he emerged, at last, from an abyss of failures ... Exhaustive in scope but paced like a novel, Edison is a definitive biography by one of the finest practitioners of the craft.

Morris deploys those extraordinary talents again to sculpt a staggeringly grand likeness of the American genius Thomas Alva Edison ... With the kind of relish and study that would exhaust most biographers, Morris evidently set himself the task of understanding and mentally replicating every one of Edison’s scientific and engineering schemes...Such rapture can sometimes go on for paragraphs — a tacit invitation to skim, with polite respect, as one might the whale tutorials in Moby-Dick ... With the same energy and boundless curiosity Morris wades into every patent dispute, corporate merger, partnership and estrangement and lawsuit that preoccupied Edison when he was not in the laboratory ... has a structural distinction that begs for attention ... This ludic approach makes for some awkward challenges for the reader...the effect is unnecessarily dizzying ... Fortunately, both Edison and Morris were eccentric and brilliant enough to make even a life told in reverse a compelling experience.

... impressive ... The structure dictates that, at times, effects precede their cause, but Morris’s unorthodox narrative works, enticing readers to forge ahead and discover the backstory of this brilliant, driven man ... Morris skillfully weaves this lesser-known personal history, replete with friction and domestic dramas, into his epic account of experiments, setbacks, triumphs, and corporate empire-building. The result is a fully formed, engrossing portrait of one of the world’s most important and influential figures.

The lyric acuity that the late Edmund Morris brought to biography is on flickering, posthumous display ... The engineering and political maneuvers it would soon take to light up Lower Manhattan—a sort of demonstration project for the rest of the world—are rendered by Morris with casual rapture ... The loveliness of such narrative moments counterbalances what results from Morris’s attempts, elsewhere, to extract a kind of poetic thrill from the specialized vocabularies of experimentation ... This apparent effort to spellbind through diction only ends with the reader’s eyes glazed over. Even so, Morris continues with such technical rhapsodies, sometimes letting the men in Edison’s story get lost in the machines, as if the biographer were perpetrating a kind of industrial accident ... Maddening failures of exposition and resonance occur because of this structural experiment that Morris refuses to abandon ... the ass-backwards strategy of Edison seems merely perverse, a pointless gesture of literary self-assertion that leaves form flummoxing function at every turn ... Morris’s constant reversals ultimately take down the whole grid and leave the reader in the dark.

Morris tends to bewilder readers lacking advanced degrees in science or mechanics ... Although we recall Edison as a genius of light, Edison is anything but light, with its 700-plus pages ... Morris goes into intricate detail on Edison’s business dealings, even though those dealings seem of limited interest to general readers ... Weighty prose, indeed. Still, readers will enjoy Morris’ depictions of Edison’s personality and his work habits ... This book shines some light on the man behind that bulb.

Morris... takes a risk with his new biography of Thomas Edison—he runs the inventor’s life backwards like a film in reverse, finding fresh truths in the story of a genius of almost metaphysical proportions ... This absorbing biography, Morris’ last (he died in May 2019), has flaws, notably an excess of scientific and engineering detail. Its life-story-told-backwards technique demands attention, but at the end the reader sees Edison fully revealed, a small child about to transform the world.

...[an] outstanding biography ... Morris rivetingly describes the personalities, business details, and practical uses of Edison’s inventions as well as the massive technical details of years of research and trial and error for both his triumphs and his failures. For no obvious reason, the author writes in reverse chronological order, beginning in 1920, with each of the seven following chapters backtracking a decade. It may not satisfy all readers, but it works. Not only the definitive life, but a tour de force by a master.

Inspiration and perspiration prodigiously unite in this sweeping biography of one of America’s greatest inventors ... The ordering is something of a gimmick—the book reads nicely back to front—but along the way Morris vividly fleshes out Edison’s extraordinary intellect and industry ... Writing in amusing, literate prose that’s briskly paced despite a mountain of fascinating detail, Morris sets Edison’s achievements against a colorful portrait of his splendid eccentricity ... The result is an engrossing study of a larger-than-life figure who embodied a heroic age of technology.