Archives West Finding Aid

Dale Lowell Morgan was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1914. When he was five years old his father died, and his mother taught school to support the family. When he was fourteen, Morgan contracted meningitis, which left him totally deaf. He graduated from West High School in 1933, and went on to the University of Utah. In 1937 he earned a bachelor's degree in art, with a minor in English.

Morgan's first job was with the Utah Works Progress Administration (WPA). He wrote introductory historical essays for the Historical Records Department, and his talents were soon acknowledged. The WPA published Morgan's first monograph in 1940. In the same year, the Utah Historical Quarterly published his The State of Deseret. He was soon transferred to the writer's program of the WPA, where he edited and did most of the writing for Utah, A Guide to the State, published in 1941.

The WPA project closed in 1942, and Morgan went to Washington, D.C., to work for the Office of Price Administration, until 1946. In 1947, he received his first Guggenheim fellowship. He wrote The Great Salt Lake in 1947, and Jedediah Smith and the Opening of the West in 1953. In 1961, the California Historical Society presented him with the Henry R. Wagner Memorial Award in recognition of his editions of The Overland Diary of James A. Pritchard, 1959. In 1970, he received his second Guggenheim fellowship.

Throughout his career as historian and writer, Morgan contributed chapters and sections to books by other authors, and wrote articles and book reviews, in addition to his own projects. He worked on a project he called "The Mormons and the Far West," which entailed typing more than 2,000 pages of articles from microfilm. Since his move to Washington in 1942, Morgan compiled material for the publication which was eventually published as A Mormon Bibliography in 1978.

In 1954, Morgan took a position with the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. He remained there until his death in 1971. His bibliography was completed and published in 1978 after six years of work on behalf of a committee formed by Dr. Everett L. Cooley, Director of Special Collections at the Marriott Library at the University of Utah, and Chad Flake, Curator of Special Collecttions at the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University.