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Morgan approached his work as both scholar and hobbyist. He had no agent and didn't accept advances because he disliked deadlines. Only when the Franklin manuscript was finished did he bother showing it to the Yale University press.
"Surprise" was a favorite word of Morgan's, and he loved discovering the unexpected in American history, whether the Puritans' tolerance and even advocacy of sex, or the 1787 persecution and murder of a suspected witch just outside the State House in Philadelphia where the U.S. Constitution was being drafted.
Morgan did not plan to major in history much less specialize in the colonial era. Born in Minneapolis and raised in New Haven, Conn., and the Boston area, he dreamed of owning a ranch as a boy and preferred English to history when he entered Harvard University. In one European history test, taken freshman year, he scored 27 out of 100.
But after studying at Harvard under colonial historian Perry Miller, Morgan became fascinated by the Puritans and wrote about them in his first book, "The Puritan Family," published in 1944. "Miller was an atheist, and so was I, but we both had this tremendous regard for the intellectual grounding of their theology," Morgan told the AP in 2002.
Morgan's restless mind often led him well away from the sedentary work of scholarship. After retiring as a Yale professor, in 1986, he took up flying, set up both a wood and metal shop in his basement and put together a lathe in his garage.
Known for his thorough research, Morgan preferred the founder's own words to the books written about them. He read all of Franklin and James Madison, both of whom lived into their 80s. He also worked through multiple volumes of Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington.
"I don't read many biographies," he said in 2002, acknowledging that he hadn't even gotten around to David McCullough's million-selling book on Adams. "I can spend all day reading Washington's papers. ... I can do that all day long. But if I pick up the kind of book that I write I go to sleep."
Morgan was married twice. He and his first wife, Helen M. Morgan, co-authored "The Stamp Act Crisis," published in 1953. In recent years, he collaborated on reviews and essays with his second wife, Marie Morgan.
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