Edwin D. Morgan (businessman)

Edwin D. "Eddie" Morgan (16 February 1921 – 28 June 2001) was an American businessman and Pioneer Fund director from 2000-2001.

He was born Edwin Denison Morgan III on 16 February 1921, in New York. His parents were Edwin D. Morgan Jr. and Elizabeth Winthrop Emmet (1897–1934), daughter of Christopher Temple Emmet and Alida Beekman Chanler (1873–1969), and grand-daughter of John Winthrop Chanler, U.S. Representative from New York, and Margaret Astor Ward (1838–1875), of the prominent Astor family of New York.

Mr. Morgan enlisted in the Marine Corps immediately after Pearl Harbor and his 1st Marine Division in Guadalcanal, New Guinea, New Britain and Peleliu in August 1942. Subsequently, he fought in the battles of eastern New Guinea, New Britain and Peleliu, rising to the rank of sergeant. After the war, he briefly worked for the New York Herald Tribune in New York and the Marshall Plan in Europe. He did not attend college, however, he became an authority on the military and political history of the battle of Guadalcanal.

In 1954, while living in Paris, Morgan founded of Overseas Credit, Inc., which financed cars across Europe for U.S. military personnel and Marshall Plan employees. From this, he became a friend and adviser to many American writers and editors who gravitated to the Paris. He was a well-known figure in the expatriate American literary community in Paris in the 1950s and 1960s.

He later founded Holographics, Inc., which developed useful laser technologies.

In 1949, Morgan married Nancy Marie Whitney (1926-2006), the daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney (1899-1992) and Marie Norton Harriman. Whitney was the granddaughter of Harry Payne Whitney and Gertrude Vanderbilt. Together Morgan and Whitney had two children:

• Alida Morgan
• Pamela Morgan

Morgan and Whitney divorced in 1959 and she later married Edward Augustus Hurd, Jr. (1918-2001), and later well known water colorist Pierre Lutz (1923-1991) Morgan later married Jacqueline Johnson, which also ended in divorce.

In 2001, he died in New York City of cancer.