ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Lael Warren Morgan was born May 12, 1936, in Rockland, Maine, the first child of Hazel and Eugene Warren. Her father was a salesman, and her mother, an English teacher.

In 1947, the family moved to Augusta where Morgan graduated from Cony High School. She became a drama major at Emerson College in Boston. In 1957 she transferred to Boston University, School of Public Relations and Communications.

In 1958 she married Dodge Morgan, a former Air Force officer. Graduating cum laude in the summer of 1959, she traveled with her husband to Anchorage, Alaska.

From 1963 to 1965 the Morgans sailed over 25,000 miles from Maine, via the Panama Canal to Hawaii and Juneau in a schooner. Returning to Alaska, the couple separated but remained married until 1971 when they got a better than amicable divorce.

Morgan started her journalist career as a student writing for the Malden Press. In 1965 she began working for the Juneau Empire in Alaska and one year later moved on to the Fairbanks News Miner where she covered crime, politics and the Alaska State Legislature. In 1968 she moved on to Jessen’s Weekly in Fairbanks, and a year later was hired by the Los Angeles Times in Orange County, California, to work in the “View” section which was essentially for women. In 1971 she won that paper’s the Photographer of the Year award for best photo feature.

In 1971 Morgan resigned from the Los Angeles Times to work for the Tundra Times, an Alaska Native newspaper based in Fairbanks, which was battling to protect Native rights. A year later she won an Alicia Patterson fellowship backed by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, which helped her establish a national reputation as a reporter/photographer.

Morgan subsequently embarked on a freelance career working for Alaska Northwest Publishing, the Washington Post, The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor and National Geographic Magazine. She graduated from the Nick Harris Detective Agency in Los Angeles and worked for Quest Detective Agency until she acquired her own license in 1983.

Morgan earned her master’s at Boston University School of Communication in 1987 with a focus on publishing. In 1988 she and a partner established Epicenter Press. That same year she joined the Department of Journalism and Broadcasting, University of Alaska Fairbanks, where she taught writing, photography and multimedia.

In 1999 Morgan spent several months traveling the route Jack London in the South Seas.

She then became publisher of the Casco Bay Weekly, in Portland, Maine.

In 2003, Morgan worked as visiting professor at the University of Texas in Arlington teaching writing, editing and photography. In 2006 she returned to live in Saco, Maine.

In 2012 Morgan moved back to Anchorage, retiring as CEO of Epicenter Press, but staying on as an advisor.

Morgan had over 16 books to her credit, including Good Time Girls of the Alaska Yukon Gold Rush, which in 1998 placed her seventh on the Los Angeles Times’ best nonfiction list and won her the distinction of being named Alaska Historian of the year. Her Art and Eskimo Power: The Life and Times of Alaska Howard Rock, was named to a list of 67 best non fiction books of all time by Alaska historians.

She is survived by her brother, Lee Warren (Georgia); nephew Curt Warren (Tatjana), and their two sons; and niece Kim Warren and her two sons; all of Utah. and her adopted daughter, Diana Campbell (Mack), of Alaska.

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