After the war, Emily and William bought a small house in the Philadelphia suburb of Roslyn, Pennsylvania, a choice driven largely by the sterling reputation of Abington Township's public-school system.

In particular, his exposure to James Giordano's tenth-grade World Literature class prompted him to imagine himself one day composing novels and stories inspired by the philosophically inclined authors in the syllabus, among them Dante, Voltaire, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Camus, and Ibsen.

[6][3] While an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, Morrow met his living expenses by working as a filmmaker for the Philadelphia Public Schools, shooting and editing a series of 16 mm films documenting and celebrating the innovations for which the system was famous in the late 1960s.

Six years later, Morrow was hired by Circuits and Systems, a New Hampshire firm, to design the graphics and help shape the script for Fortune Builder (1984), a ColecoVision game sometimes regarded as a forerunner to SimCity.

[2] Over the course of the next thirty-four years, Morrow produced ten novels, three stand-alone novellas, and several dozen short stories, many of them satirizing conventional Christian arguments about the workings of the universe.

[21] Early in 2010, on the strength of the Russian translations of his novel Only Begotten Daughter (1990) and collection Bible Stories for Adults (1996), Morrow was invited to participate in the Fifteenth International Tolstoy Conference.

Around the time of the Tolstoy Conference, Morrow's dark theological comedy Blameless in Abaddon (1996) came to the attention of Bernard Schweizer, a professor at Long Island University, Brooklyn, who invited the novelist to join him and NYU's Gregory T. Erickson in establishing an organization dedicated to celebrating the heretical, blasphemous, and religiously unorthodox dimensions of literature and art.

The Continent of Lies (Holt, Rinehart and Winston 1984) posits a futuristic entertainment medium called "dreambeans" or "cephapples": genetically engineered fruits that plunge consumers into scripted hallucinations.

Although This Is the Way the World Ends (Henry Holt, 1986) was marketed initially as a mainstream novel, the science-fiction community embraced it, giving Morrow his first Nebula Award nomination.

Only Begotten Daughter (William Morrow 1990) represented the author's initial exploration of the subject that would preoccupy him during his mature writing years: the enigma of religious faith.

Though much of the novel plays like straightforward, albeit comic, historical fiction, the author employs a peculiar postmodern conceit: the story is told by a sentient book, Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.

The protagonist, Mason Ambrose, is a failed philosophy student hired to implant a moral compass in a mysterious young woman, Londa Sabacthani, whose conscience is a blank slate.

Blameless in Abaddon (Harcourt Brace, 1996), a modern-dress version of the Book of Job, turns on the plight of Martin Candle, a small-town, small-time magistrate who, sorely afflicted with cancer, resolves to drag God before the World Court and prosecute him for his seeming indifference to human suffering.

Set in the final days of World War Two, Shambling Towards Hiroshima (Tachyon, 2009) describes the U.S. Navy's attempt to leverage a Japanese surrender via a "biological weapon" that anticipates Godzilla.

An homage to early 1950s live television, The Madonna and the Starship (Tachyon, 2014) tells of a New York pulp writer who must convince two hyper-rationalist aliens that a weekly religious program is satiric in intent, for otherwise the invaders will annihilate its audience of two million devout viewers.

Among his better known stories collected in Bible Stories for Adults (Harcourt Brace, 1996) are "Spelling God with the Wrong Blocks" (featuring Darwin-worshiping robots who believe they evolved pursuant to evolutionary principles), "Daughter Earth" (in which a Pennsylvania farmer's wife gives birth to a small planet), and "Arms and the Woman" (in which a canny Helen of Troy attempts to end "the war to make the world safe for war").