Neil Morgan

Neil Morgan is a North Carolina-born journalist, author and lecturer who saw California first as a Navy ensign and has spent the following half-century as one of its foremost social historians.

He has interpreted the American West in nine books and for Esquire, Harper’s, Holiday, Vogue, Saturday Review, Reader’s Digest and National Geographic. From 1950 to 2004 he was with The San Diego Union-Tribune, serving as senior columnist and editor. He was editor of The San Diego Evening Tribune from 1981 until its merger in 1992, years in which its staff won two Pulitzer Prizes.

His often inciting daily column, begun in 1950, won the Ernie Pyle Memorial Award and many other journalism awards. It frequently focused on the foibles and unattained opportunities of Southern California. Its accuracy and readability made Morgan and his column a regional institution for three generations. He is regarded as a catalyst and leading voice of his home region, where he has become known as “the conscience of San Diego.”

In 2004, he became a regular commentator on the NPR station KPBS. In 2005, he became co-founder and senior editor of the regional news and opinion website, www.voiceofsandiego.org. As a journalist, his decades of prodding regional efforts have helped to make San Diego a center of higher education and scientific research. As he counseled cultural and business leaders, he saw San Diego move from a conservative town of transplanted Midwesterners and Southerners into a research center known around the world.

Through writing, radio, television and lectures, he pioneered cross-border efforts to create binational ties between San Diego and Mexico’s Baja California. He writes of the border metropolis of Tijuana and San Diego as America’s largest binational testing ground: A community “three million in the north and two million to the south.”

His book in 1962, “Westward Tilt,” was praised by critics across America as the seminal study of the cross-country migration which made California the nation’s most populous state. His recent writing deals with a starkly contrasting in-migration and the deflation of many of Californians’ dreams.