The books that inspired Morgan Freeman the most: “My imagination was cranked high all the time”
If Morgan Freeman were to become anything other than an actor, he’d probably be a sailor, and it was a youth spent devouring as many books as possible that initially fostered a lifelong love of the open water.
Reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick for the first time was a transformative experience for the future cinematic superstar, and even after he finally caught his big break on the cusp of turning 50 years old when his Academy Award-nominated performance in Street Smart propelled him towards the mainstream, he never abandoned his fondness for the ocean.
Freeman has sailed plenty of boats, owned a few in his time, and even wears his signature gold earring for superstitious and fairly morbid reasons after sailors sported them to ensure they were carrying something of enough value to pay for a burial were they lost at sea and ended up being discovered washed up on the shore after the tides carried their lifeless body to shore. It’s grim, but it makes him happy.
Unsurprisingly, John Huston’s adaptation of Moby Dick starring Gregory Peck also happens to be one of his favourite movies, but he isn’t a one-book kind of guy. Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, and the Bible all come highly recommended by Hollywood’s favourite wizened sage, but he didn’t start out with the heaviest prose.
Instead, Freeman confessed that because he “spent a lot of time alone when I was a kid” living in Chicago, where “the winters were horrendous,” he was “very bookish as a child.” He enjoyed mysteries, adventures, and stories about animals, presenting him with the gateway to gradually stick his nose into more complicated, technical, and non-fictional tales.
“My imagination was cranked high all the time,” he told Hey U Guys. “Books like Nancy Drew, stuff for kids. Animal stories, Silver Chief Dog of the North, things like that. Then I graduated into books about flying and then graduated into regular novels, not history books.”
The inspiration was clear, at least for the books about flying, seeing as Freeman enlisted in the United States Air Force in the mid-1950s to work as a radar repairman, after which he moved to Los Angeles and signed up for his first acting classes.
He may have been drawn to children’s stories spanning multiple genres because he was the target demographic, but what was the first major role of his career? Playing a cavalcade of different characters on The Electric Company across six seasons and almost 800 episodes. The series was aimed at kids and sought to be educational, informative, and entertaining all at once, something Freeman had plenty of experience in after spending his own childhood occupying himself with books of a very similar nature.
