Cody, Morrill, 1901-

Epithet: US government official and writer

Morrill "Bill" Cody was born in Lake Forest, Illinois on April 10, 1901, the son of Sherwin Cody (AC 1889) and Marian Hurley. He attended secondary school in France. After graduating from Amherst College in 1921, he returned to Paris as a journalist, living and working with the American artists and writers of the "Lost Generation." In the 1930s, Cody worked as a magazine editor and writer in New York, contributing to the Literary Digest among other publications. He published This Must Be the Place, a memoir of Montparnasse, in 1934, and Passing Stranger, a novel, in 1936. At the time of his marriage to Marion Holbrook in 1935, he had a son, Malcolm Peter (b. 1925). His daughter, Judith Alden, was born in 1936. Cody joined the Foreign Service in 1941, holding diplomatic posts in Paraguay, Argentina, Mexico, Washington, Paris, Stockholm, and Madrid. In 1960 he married Jane Hoster, and had another daughter, Gabrielle Hamilton Cody. Before retiring from the Service in 1963, he served as assistant director of the United States Information Agency under Edward R. Murrow. In his later years, Cody headed the Paris bureau of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe, and wrote two more books, The Favorite Restaurants of an American in Paris (1966) and The Women of Montparnasse (1984). Morrill Cody died in Maryland on November 23, 1987.