Donald Murray (writer)

Murray died in December 2006 from heart failure in Durham, New Hampshire at the age of 82. He donated over 100 of his writing journals — or, as he called them, "daybooks" — to the Poynter Institute, a non-profit school for journalism with which he had long been associated.

Murray’s theory of the writing process requires thoughtful, recursive revision. In 1981, he wrote that revision “is not just clarifying meaning, it is discovering meaning and clarifying it while it is being discovered.” To achieve these ends, Murray argued that the writer must “go back again and again and again to consider what the writing means and if the writer can accept, document, and communicate that meaning. In other words, writing is not what the writer does after the thinking is done; writing is thinking.” Murray also believed it was essential that students care about their academic writing, to ensure their writing would be meaningful. he also implored teachers to allow their students to write about topics other than literature, as he understood that students were more likely to be invested in their writing if they were allowed to choose topics of great importance to them.

Murray's first marriage ended in divorce. In 1951, he married Minnie Mae Emmerich Murray and his wife had three children, Anne, Hannah, and Lee. Daughter Lee died at 20 years of age and Murray later wrote about the experience in The Lively Shadow: Living with the Death of a Child.

Murray was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up nearby in Quincy. He graduated from Tilton School, a college preparatory school in Tilton, New Hampshire. A paratrooper during World War II, he attended the University of New Hampshire, graduating with a degree in English in 1948. He got his start as a copyboy at the Boston Herald and became a staff reporter in 1949. After working briefly for Time magazine and as a freelance writer in the 1950s, Murray joined the University of New Hampshire faculty in 1963.

Donald Morison Murray (September 16, 1924 – December 30, 2006) was an American journalist and English professor. He wrote for many journals, authored several books on the art of writing and teaching, and served as writing coach for several national newspapers. After writing multiple editorials about changes in American military policy for the Boston Herald, he won the 1954 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. For 20 years, he wrote the Boston Globe's "Over 60" column, eventually renamed "Now And Then". He taught at the University of New Hampshire for 26 years.