Henry Canova Vollam Morton FRSL (known as H. V. Morton), (26 July 1892 – 18 June 1979) was a journalist and pioneering travel writer from Lancashire, England. He was best known for his many books on London, Great Britain and the Holy Land. He first achieved fame in 1923 when, while working for the Daily Express, he covered the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamun by Howard Carter.

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H. V. Morton
Born	Henry Vollam Morton[1] (1892-07-26)26 July 1892 Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, England
Died	18 June 1979(1979-06-18) (aged 86) Somerset West, South Africa[1]
Occupation	Journalist and writer
Nationality	British
Citizenship	British South African
Genre	Travel writing, Journalism
Notable works	In Search of... series
Spouse	Dorothy Vaughton Violet Mary Muskett
Website
www.hvmorton.co.uk

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Morton's journalism career began in 1910 at the Birmingham Gazette and Express, where his father was an editor. Two years later, he was promoted to an assistant editor; and relocated to London for most of his British career. His first position in London was as a sub-editor for the Daily Mail.^[1]

After his military service during First World War, he returned to London, working at the Evening Standard in 1919–21, and from 1921 on the Daily Express. His columns on London life in the latter were popular among readers.

Morton also gave readings of his work on BBC radio.^[2]

Morton's first book, The Heart of London, appeared in 1925, which developed his popular Daily Express columns. This was followed by two further collections of his writings on London, in The Spell of London (1926), and Nights of London (1926). In 1926 he wrote a series of articles for the Daily Express based on his travels around England in his bull-nosed Morris car. The series was entitled In Search of England and the vignettes were later adapted into the book of the same name. This became a bestseller and the first of his many In Search of... books.

Morton's first foreign travel book, In the Steps of the Master (1934), was well received and sold over half a million copies.^{[citation needed]} The Master of the title was Jesus, and the book was an account of Morton's travels in the Holy Land. This was soon followed by In the Steps of St. Paul (1936), and describes Turkey 13 years after the Turkish War of Independence and its founding as a modern state.^[7] This was followed by Through Lands of the Bible (1938) in which he visits Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq. Extracts from all three books were combined and published as Middle East during World War II for British servicemen stationed in the Middle East.

In addition to Atlantic Meeting (1941), Morton wrote two books describing England and the War, including collection of essays on London in The Ghosts of London (1939), I Saw Two Englands (1942), and I, James Blunt describing England after the Nazi victory, being fictional propaganda for the British Government. A full-length history of London, (In Search of London) (1951), includes a post-war examination of bombing damage inflicted on London during The Blitz. After the war, South Africa was the subject of In Search of South Africa (1948), and shortly afterwards he and his wife emigrated there. During the mid-1950s and 60s he wrote books on Spain and Italy. A Traveller in Italy is situated in Northern Italy, while A Traveller in Southern Italy explores the poorer provinces of the south.

Morton became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (FRSL).^[when?] Greece made him a Commander of the Order of the Phoenix in 1937 and he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1965. A commemorative blue plaque was erected in Ashton-under-Lyne (Morton's birthplace) in June 2004.

A controversial biography by Michael Bartholomew, based on Morton's private and public writings, titled In Search of H. V. Morton, was published by Methuen in 2004. According to Bartholomew, based on Morton's private memoirs and diaries, Morton was privately a Nazi sympathizer. In a diary entry from February 1941, he confessed: "I must say Nazi-ism has some fine qualities" and, "I am appalled to discover how many of Hitler's theories appeal to me".^[8] In another entry, he described the United States as "that craven nation of Jews and foreigners".^{[citation needed]}

Morton was a prolific writer, with a body of work consisting of several hundred newspaper, magazine articles and features, in addition to his published books.