| Notes: | Series X contains restricted budget, personnel and student materials. The remainder of the collection is open to research.
William Morgan's childhood was spent moving around following his father's lecture itinerary. His basic education came from his parents. In 1923, Morgan entered Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. He was an excellent student in English. However, he was also a particularly good student in physics and mathematics. He impressed Professor of Physics and Astronomy Benjamin A. Wooten. Wooten had obtained a small, professional-quality refracting telescope for the university and Morgan soon began observing the sky. In 1926, on Wooten's recommendation, Morgan started his graduate work at the Yerkes Observatory. In 1930, he began a Ph.D. thesis on the spectra of A stars. Morgan completed his thesis and received his doctoral degree in 1931. He remained in the same assistantship he had held as a graduate student. In the summer of 1932 he was promoted to instructor and in 1936 to assistant professor. Morgan lived and worked at Yerkes Observatory for almost seventy years. An accomplished teacher and, for a period, editor of The Astrophysical Journal, Morgan's greatest achievements came from research. From the beginning of his work at Yerkes, Morgan's methods were grounded in the systematic organization of concrete data. Eschewing the then new field of theoretical astrophysics, he built his reputation as one of the greatest astronomers of the twentieth century with the morphological classification of stars based on stellar spectra. With Phillip Keenan and Edith Kellman, he created the MKK system for stellar classification, later refined to the MK system that remains in use today. Morgan's work, though rigorous, was eclectic and improvisational, relying on his ability to wring significance from spectra that others could not interpret. In 1951, Morgan proved that the Milky Way Galaxy had spiral arms--a hypothesis proposed one hundred years before by Alexander. For this he received an unprecedented standing ovation from a meeting of the American Astronomical Society. In late 1951 or early 1952, Morgan suffered a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for several months. Soon afterwards, he began to keep a journal recording his private thoughts and experiences. The collection contains almost 250 volumes of this journal, in which Morgan wrote regularly until 1990, when he seems to have begun to experience the effects of Alzheimer's Disease. In these journals, Morgan tries to psychoanalyze himself by following closely Freud's works as well as the works of other psychoanalysts and philosophers of the twentieth century. Also, the reader can find Morgan's own reflections, critiques and foundations to his corpus of work. For the astronomer the dividing line between science and art was blurry, and as proof of this he gives his own research. In addition to his scientific work, Morgan never stopped taking photographs or writing about art in his journals. In one of his writings, Morgan states that his most important works were his photography and journal.
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