Wright Morris

WRIGHT MORRIS was born in Central City, Nebraska, on January 6, 1910, and although he left the state at fourteen and has since lived in Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and even Venice, he is firmly identified with Nebraska. During a career beginning in 1940, he has published some thirty volumes, including novels, stories, literary and social criticism, and books combining his own photos and text. Almost everything about his career involves paradox and seeming contradiction. Although Morris has been called one of the most original contemporary American authors and although he won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision (1956) and received the Distinguished Achievement Award of the Western Literature Association in 1979, he is still widely unread, and the number of critical studies of his work is small. In an age when the publication of academic criticism is a flourishing cottage industry, this neglect is almost as much a phenomenon as the works themselves. It may be accounted for by several of the other paradoxes which give Morris's works their distinctive character and their originality.

John Aldridge has speculated that Morris has not received the attention he deserves because of his unfashionable subject, especially his concern with the milieu of the plains. Indeed, his work is unfashionable in more than just its setting. At a time when "serious" fiction is what is deemed serious by an academic and critical establishment located in New York and the great universities, Wright Morris is the poet laureate of middle America. It is hard to think of another contemporary novelist who writes about middle class characters in the way he does–that is, with compassion and without condescension, with a clear eye for their shortcomings and yet without creating the feeling, present in a Kurt Vonnegut or Philip Roth, that the reader is on one side and the middle American is on the other. Morris is also the leading chronicler of the average, the uneventful, undramatic, middle-of-the-road quotidian in our national experience.

This picture makes Morris sound a little like a prose Norman Rockwell. In an essay on Rockwell in The Territory Ahead (1958), however, Morris attacked the painter's exploitation of his audience's sentimental nostalgia for a cliché American innocence existing only in the popular imagination, and Morris's fiction often seems to offer a deliberate corrective to Rockwell's sentiment, exposing the emotional blight, the desperation at the futility of the American dream which lurks behind American clichés. There is also an element of the grotesque in Morris's perception of life, evident for instance in Paul Kahler, the psychotic transvestite of The Field of Vision, and in the silent, perhaps retarded Blanche of Plains Song (1980), whose complexion is so translucent that she looks as if she might glow "if a lighted candle could be placed in her mouth." Yet Morris and Rockwell do focus on some of the same areas of American life. This accounts for the charge which has occasionally been made that the types of characters Morris creates are not interesting. It is more accurate to say that they are not sophisticated and thus do not interest a critical audience which prides itself on its sophistication. Even Morris's artist figures, like Webb of The Deep Sleep (1953) or Boyd of The Field of Vision, are small town boys at heart. In Love Among the Cannibals (1957), the subject is sexual liberation in a corrupt, urban present epitomized by Hollywood, but one need only think of what a novelist like Norman Mailer has made of the same material to feel that the writer Horter's hardboiled worldliness is an impersonation.

The paradox is that Morris's mature novels are too sophisticated in another sense to appeal to Rockwell's popular audience. While the fiction of a Thomas Pynchon or a John Hawkes proclaims its difficulty from the opening page, Morris's apparent simplicity obscures the fact that the satisfactions his work offers are rarely immediate but arise out of sustained study and reflection. The perceptions about life which his novels dramatize are elaborate, subtle, and often abstruse, and his technique can also be complicated. Although Morris has discouraged readers from trying to interpret his novels as symbolic, he has admitted that "when the writing is good everything is symbolic," in the sense of being suffused with meaning and integrated into the work's overall design. A character, an episode, or a detail from one of his novels will frequently have a range of implication far beyond its immediate meaning and function. His use of the Nebraska setting is a telling instance. Probably no American writer has evoked the plains as a physical locale any more beautifully than Morris has done in such books as The Works of Love (1952) or Fire Sermon (1971), but as David Madden has pointed out, Morris also exploits all of the historical and geographical suggestiveness of the plains. They embody opposing poles of American culture and character, marking the meeting point of East and West, realism and idealism, agrarian novel and western romance. In the nineteenth century, the pioneer projected on the plains his vision of American promise; in the twentieth, they became the wasteland where the dream turned to dust. On a metaphysical level, their empty expanses suggest the void of reality before it has been processed and given shape by the consciousness of the perceiver.

Although Morris's early experiments in combining photos and text– especially his photo-text narrative about rural Nebraska, The Home Place (1948)–have given weight to the impression that he is a local colorist, his ability to generalize from particular instances, an ability illustrated by his treatment of the plains, insures his best writing against imputations of parochialism. Morris is doing more than recording the look and manners of any particular place. In his fiction, forms of behavior which might seem indigenous to the American West are revealed as expressions of more universal American and human impulses. For instance, the title character of My Uncle Dudley (1942) is a thirties version of the cowboy, but the impulse which inspires Dudley's western style of heroism is also discernible in various of Morris's non-western heroes, such as Virgil Ormsby of Man and Boy (1951) and CharlesLawrence of The Huge Season (1954). The analysis of American life and literature which often emerges in Morris's novels through characters such as these has the same precise and particular meaning and offers many of the same judgments found in his expository writing (especially The Territory Ahead and A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods [1968]) and in critical studies by other writers. His novels of the fifties, for instance, anticipate some of the ideas in Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel.

In the series of books from Man and Boy to In Orbit (1967) especially, Morris's cultural observations are not secondary to the personal drama of his characters or merely tacked on to the narrative. Rather, they are the very stuff and focus of the narrative: character, episode, structure, and image are selected for their ability to suggest these observations as well as for plausibility and dramatic appeal. As a result, part of the pleasure in reading Morris comes from recognizing how the action and detail of the fiction work to dramatize his analysis of American culture. Allusions (especially, but not exclusively, literary allusions) play a large part in this dramatization. For instance, in The Field of Vision, the reference to Boyd's piece of Ty Cobb's pocket as "the portable raft on which he [Boyd] floated, anchored to his childhood" connects him with Huck Finn and identifies his audacity in grabbing the pocket with the American male's urge (also manifested in the cowboy figure) to escape from civilized life embodied in marriage and the family into some form of rugged male individualism. In addition, Morris's allusions are not merely verbal echoes, but also govern his choice of structure, character detail, and episode. The bullfight in The Field of Vision alludes to Hemingway's treatment of the macho ethic, and the pattern of success and failure in Boyd's career alludes to American writers like Wolfe who succeeded in early books and failed later.

These remarks illustrate that Morris is a more intellectually demanding writer than it may first appear, and indeed many of his books are concerned with issues of epistemology, aesthetics, and metaphysics as well as American culture. In the thirties and forties, his interest in photography (he received Guggenheim Fellowships in 1942 and 1946 for work in this medium) brought home to him the opposition between the operation of time evident in the decay of Nebraska artifacts around him and the suspension of time in his snapshots of these artifacts. Photos also helped to dramatize differences between what the eye of man and the eye of the camera see and between facts as they exist in the world and the fictions they become in man's imagination. The failures of Morris's first two novels helped to turn him toward related questions of how the art and life of the past affect man's present perceptions and why originality is necessary in art.

As set forth in The Territory Ahead, About Fiction (1975), and other writings, Morris's mature views of these subjects are typical of the romantic tradition. Although reality has an objective, time-bound existence apart from human perceptions of it, man cannot know this reality directly, only the "vision" of it he has in his consciousness. Vision is inevitably shaped by the imagination of the individual, which is influenced in turn by the art of the past. Art presents the vision of the artist in the tangible form of an "image."Some images may contain greater imaginative distortion; some, greater reality. But even the most realistic image, even the photograph which appears to capture reality itself, actually supplies what Morris, borrowing from Wittgenstein, calls a "model of reality." By giving man his model of reality, art in a sense creates the world in which he perceives himself to live. Morris's insistence on originality in art is also typically romantic: the world is in a state of becoming; art must be dynamic, must be constantly making man's vision of the world anew, because only dynamic vision is true to the dynamic character of life.

The idea of a dynamic universe is implicit in Morris's work from the first, but beginning with The Huge Season, he connects it explicitly with a "creative evolution" taking place in nature, of which man is one expression. Man's evolutionary role is creative in two senses–first in the existential sense that, as a being living in time, he makes active choices (and, because they are unpredictable, free choices) in the present and in so doing helps determine the shape of the future, and second in the romantic sense that his consciousness is constantly expanding to create new imaginative possibilities. This dual creativity gives rise to another paradox: as a product of creative evolution, man himself is very much a part of material nature and inescapably subject to time and change, but man's creative acts, like a snapshot or any work of art, achieve a timeless, transcendental status. They are, in one of Morris's favorite phrases,"out of this world." What he writes about Jubal, of In Orbit, is true of man as a whole: "The supernatural is his natural way of life." As with his views on America, Morris's aesthetic views are not just assumptions underlying his work but often explicit themes worked out through the action of the novels. Books like The Man who Was There (1945), The Field of Vision, What a Way to Go (1962), and The Fork River Space Project (1977) are as much about the nature of art and vision, and have the same high degree of self-consciousness, as John Barth's Chimera, John Hawkes's The Lime Twig, or Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and in some ways Morris has a closer affinity with such authors than with more conventional realists like Saul Bellow or William Styron. This affinity has not been widely recognized because his work is representational and because he is dedicated to the vernacular as the dominant language of American fiction. In About Fiction, in Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (1978), and elsewhere, Morris has described how the vernacular tradition–the use of "lifelike" spoken English originating with Twain and stretching through the work of Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, and Faulkner–inspired in the reader the damaging misconceptions that fiction provides the facts themselves and that plain talk and plain facts are enough. By their nature, four-letter words can reveal (and thus encourage an exclusive preoccupation with) only the crudest truths, with the consequent loss of the subtle distinctions and enlarged consciousness found in Twain's great contemporary, Henry James. In this way, Morris says, ". . . the language itself has taken precedence over the complexities of experience the language is supposed to deal with."

Morris's fictional aim is to enlarge the rhetorical possibilities of Twain's vernacular to the point that it can accommodate the fine distinctions and dedication to implication over bald statement found in James, as well as the philosophical interests of Morris himself. Like James, Morris registers the private tremors of consciousness, tremors set off in Morris by the public events and personal traumas of postwar America. The reader is thus confronted with another of the paradoxes which have made it so hard for Morris's fiction to find its audience. Honed by his work with photography, the author's eye for the palpable fact–for the object which evokes place, the custom which reveals ethos, the gesture which delineates character– is impressively sharp, but the central focus of his best prose is often on nuances of consciousness almost too elusive, too fine, to put into words. If Morris's photos seem to offer an image of the material subject, "it is," as he said of James, "the immaterial we find in his books."

Morris's method for capturing the immaterial involves a deliberate reticence about the subjects the fiction deals with and the way they are dealt with. Given the preoccupations of the age, his work is distinguished as much by what it leaves out as by what it brings in. In a revealing essay, "Privacy as a Subject for Photography," Morris has written, "If I once believed that there could be no peace until everything had been said, I now seem to believe that such talk would make peace impossible; that the important things are those that remain unsaid; that the problems of art are concerned with how we hint at them." One result of this desire to hint at truths is a language that is tentative and hedging. Another result is suggested in the same essay when Morris recounts how he rejected one photo of a rural Nebraska bedroom because a chamber pot under the bed spoke too shrilly to the viewer. The chamber pot represented an indisputable fact of rural life, but the modern eye, conditioned by the passion for plain seeing, for plain speaking, would seize on this stark fact and miss other subtler meanings the room might convey. Twenty Morris novels have been devoted to suggesting the more general ambience and less material realities.

In The Territory Ahead, Morris attributed the tendency of our native authors to write promising first books and disappointing later ones to a peculiarly American lack of consciousness about what they were doing: having relied on unschooled intuition for success, they did not understand what produced their success once it came and thus could not duplicate it. In contrast, Morris's work shows a sustained improvement made possible by a growing self-consciousness about what he is doing. Elements used instinctively in early books are later employed with a conscious purpose; values and behavior espoused early are later held up for critical appraisal and their shortcomings demonstrated; allusion becomes more prominent and relevant, structure and image more elaborate and functional, style more controlled, and theme more carefully focused. It is not too much to say that such works as The Huge Season and The Field of Vision are, among other things, directly concerned with why earlier works like My Uncle Dudley and The Man Who Was There failed.

Writing did not come easily for Morris. He labored eight years before his first novel, My Uncle Dudley, was published, and even so it contains elementary lapses in the handling of theme and structure. Centering on a car trip across the Southwest from California to Arkansas, the novel portrays Dudley's egalitarianism, individualism, and spontaneous wit as the qualities of one who lives in the present, but his final act in the novel, spitting in the eye of a brutal policeman, is a comic rendition of the western shootout and more appropriate to the past. In addition, the episodes of the journey seem randomly strung together, and the climactic jail scene is not integrated into the novel. The Man Who Was There consists of three novellas centering on the artist-turned-soldier Agee Ward and introduces some major Morris themes. The hero Ward, physically absent in Books One and Three, is nevertheless "there" in the effect he has upon the imagination of his landlady and a boyhood friend, in whom his creative qualities are symbolically reborn. The autobiographical Book Two describes Ward's earlier return to his roots in Nebraska, where he found that creative traits of his ancestors were perpetuated in him. As in his subsequent novels, Morris distinguishes two types of creative power–the power to give physical life, identified with females, and the power to imagine, identified with males. He admitted later in The Territory Ahead that this novel and My Uncle Dudley (which also contained autobiographical elements) failed because he was so fascinated with his own past as sheer experience that he could not work out its significance.

From such failures grew Morris's dissatisfaction with the past as a model for action and his distrust of nostalgia. The artist, he decided, needs a distanced perspective on the past, one that will dispel its enchantment and allow him to discover its meaning: the man on the street also needs such a perspective so that he can live in the present. Initially the products of a nostalgic desire to preserve the past, Morris's first two photo-text books ultimately help him to achieve such a distancing. The Inhabitants (1946) combines photos of buildings from all over the United States with two texts-a continuous meditation on what it means to be an American and a series of separate vignettes of American life. The Home Place combines photos of rural Nebraska with an autobiographical novella about an author's return to his ancestral farm. This second book records, in the person of the hero Clyde Muncy, Morris's own dawning recognition that the "protestant" virtues of the pioneers–"abstinence, frugality, and independence"–were achieved at the sacrifice of pleasure and feeling and are of diminished value in a land tamed by progress. In The World in the Attic (1949), a sequel to The Home Place from which photos were dropped, Muncy's nostalgia turns to "home town nausea" as he discovers that the pioneer past has engendered the culturally and emotionally sterile small town of the late forties.

In his next three novels, Morris begins to examine the destructive effects of the past. In Man and Boy, the Ormsbys represent the sort of marriage produced by the protestant ethic. Capitalizing on a false air of moral purity which this ethic grants to the female, Mrs. Ormsby dominates her weak-kneed husband, who has not developed pioneer hardihood because it is not needed in the modern world. The male Ormsby with courage has been the rebellious son Virgil, killed in combat with the Japanese. Virgil's career as hunter and man with a gun places him in a long line of American heroes, including Natty Bumppo, Robert Jordan, and Dudley, but Morris implies that such heroes are really more like Huck on the run from Aunt Sally, little boys who duck the less glamorous but more mature demands of settled family life. Their heroics, in evading commitment to daily life, lead to war and death. The Works of Love traces an analogous evasion of commitment by Will Brady, a kind of American everyman loosely based on Morris's father. Because of the protestant cliché of the pure woman, Brady cannot satisfy both spiritual and sexual needs in a single relationship. During his life, his modes of love become more and more impersonal–progressing from sexual love for several women, to platonic love for his adopted son, to a mystic love for all mankind. But mystic love proves impossible in this material world. Brady drowns trying to embrace an abstraction, the abstraction humanity, symbolized by the stench of sewage from the Chicago River. His fate is ambiguous. From a realistic point of view, he fails in all his relations with particular human beings and dies reaching for a love which requires that he transcend his world. This yearning for transcendence is a cosmic version of Virgil's destructive evasion of commitment. On the other hand, in the course of his failure, the unsophisticated Brady acquires remarkable insight into the human heart.

The Deep Sleep recasts many of the same materials of Man and Boy, abandoning the comic tone of the earlier book for a more serious tone and employing five centers of narrative consciousness instead of two. The novel moves from one character's perspective on the action to another's, returning to each several times. The focus of interest, the Porter marriage, has been shaped by the same protestant attitudes found in Man and Boy, and shaped in similar ways, but the new structure in The Deep Sleep makes for an enormous increase in the complexities of judgment possible for Morris and in the richness of the drama. He was to employ the same structure in several of his best novels. (The novel War Games, published in 1971 but written in 1951–52, examines subjective consciousness as a theme. The treatment is tentative, which probably accounts for the delayed publication, but War Games sharpened the author's thinking about consciousness.)

The Huge Season turns away from love as a subject back toward the nature of American heroism and the effect of heroics on the imaginations of those who witness them. The disastrous personal and aesthetic results of trying to repeat a heroic gesture from the past are also portrayed. Charles Lawrence's romantic fatalism, typical of the disillusioned twenties, expresses the inevitable disenchantment which results when the desire for the impossible fulfillment promised by the American dream runs up against the facts of finite existence. Like Brady's mystic love, Lawrence's "habit of perfection" leads him out of this imperfect world to suicide, and his heroic gestures, symbolic of the spell which the art and life of the 1920s threw over subsequent decades, cripple his witnesses, who try unsuccessfully to continue his heroism into the 1950s. Morris also uses the novel to attack the faith in technological progress as a destructive manifestation of the American dream. Both technology and Lawrence's example are unfavorably contrasted with "creative evolution" (that is, growth in the realm of the possible) as a successful mode of life.

The Field of Vision is a virtual compendium of Morris subjects–heroism, vision, the nature of the creative act, married love in America, the effects of the pioneer myth, creative evolution, the hero's relation to his witnesses, the natural and the supernatural, and more. The five characters who serve as centers of consciousness all attend the same bullfight; but, with varying degrees of distortion, each projects his own vision of reality upon events. The focus, then, is on the inner counterpoint of memory, fantasy, and perception. McKee, one of the best portraits of the average American in fiction, is a conventional success, but his memories are dominated by his fiftyyear friendship with the failed artist and onetime bad boy, Gordon Boyd, without whom McKee's past would be drab and colorless. In these two, Morris dissects our public faith in material success, our private romance with hopeless and doomed Gatsbys. Lois is the protestant female, once almost liberated from icebound prudishness by Boyd but forty years the wife of McKee. Her father, Tom Scanlon, illustrates once again that the fascination with a mythic western past is an evasion of reality and a refusal to engage the present. The psychiatrist Lehmann achieves such engagement by using the past as a guide to enlarged understanding rather than being trapped in it, by remaining in a state of becoming, and by retaining the link with physical nature and the evolutionary past denied by his patient Paul. In The Field of Vision, the halting, unsure Morris of the early books has disappeared; he achieves final clarity about what he has to say and full control of the technical means to say it.

The Field of Vision offers a theoretical analysis of "immanence" or creative living in the present with one's finitude. It entails recognition of one's part in creative evolution, commitment to the possible, an existential acceptance of the responsibility for choosing one's essence in a contingent world, and rejection of outworn patterns from the past. The Greek, in Love Among the Cannibals, personifies a state of immanence; her spontaneous sexuality confirms her tie to biological forces and makes her a carrier of physical life. Her reliance on instinct in responding to others constitutes a democracy of soul first evident in Dudley and characteristically American. Morris credits the Greek with an authenticity not found in the artificial, imaginatively sterile present of Hollywood and uses her behavior as a metaphor for art which is genuinely creative and free of the clichés of contemporary culture. Ceremony in Lone Tree reexamines Boyd, Scanlon, and the McKees in light of the Greek's organic spontaneity (here embodied in Lois's niece Etoile). The novel makes Morris's steadily darkening view of the impulse motivating the cowboy figure strikingly apparent. He depicts it as deriving from childish fears of adult sexual relationships and resulting in murderous violence by boy-men like Lee Roy Momeyer, Calvin McKee, or mass murderer Charles Starkweather, who inspired the novel. When threatened by female civilization, the historical cowboy and hunter could get away to the territory, but deprived of wilderness, these contemporary neurotics can only explode in violence. Five years later Morris was inspired by the Kennedy assassination to look at violence again: in One Day, he sees a more metaphysical frustration (at time, chance, death, and finitude) as the source of the impulse to get away. The two novels, among Morris's best, are companion pieces–the first analyzing the influences from the past which cause failure of feeling and violence, and the second the influences from the present.

The gathering gloom of Ceremony in Lone Tree and One Day is dispelled in a trio of works in which Morris accepts life's terrible limitations and affirms the joy and majesty of being in the face of them. The comic novella In Orbit focuses on the ambiguous creative and destructive forces at work in a culture and a world ruled by time and process. Jubal Gainer is an archetype reflecting a range of American heroic figures from cowboy to astronaut. He speeds through a universe ruled by the random conjunction of material forces, epitomized by a tornado, but the element of motion aligns him with time and turns his flight into existential engagement with the present. Morris's positive interpretation of Jubal's urge to get away is in keeping with the book's concluding affirmation of life in all its tormenting contraries. The theme of resignation to life as process is more movingly developed in two of Morris's finest works–the novella Fire Sermon and its sequel A Life (1973). The protagonist Floyd Warner is another Dudley figure, but this time his trek from the West Coast across the plains is not a Huck Finn adventure of escape from a corrupt modern California, although Warner initially intends it to be. Rather, the journey brings home to him the individual's subjection to time, change, and death, to the transpersonal forces of the living cosmos. Warner's eventual resignation to these forces makes his death seem like the fulfillment of life, not (like Brady's death) the frustration of it. It is not an end but an apotheosis, Warner's merging with the everlasting cosmos and his achievement of final transcendental insight.

Two late critical books illustrate Morris's preoccupation with the effects of voice, particularly the vernacular, on fiction. Although About Fiction presents a strong case for a fiction which takes its inspiration from objective reality, the concluding essay of Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (on Hieronymous Bosch) reaffirms that art is after all vision and the most bizarre visions will seem real if the artist's craft is equal to his task. The limitless potentialities of vision form the central theme of The Fork River Space Project, where the possibility of a U.F.O.'s landing on the prairie alters the consciousness of all who entertain that possibility, even though it may have no basis in fact. While The Fork River Space Project uses the prairie as a setting for a timeless, unearthly vision, Plains Song deals with the other pole of Morris's interest–physical life in time and on earth. Although Cora Atkins's pioneer existence on a Nebraska farm has the austerity Morris first criticized in The World in the Attic, the thrust of the novel is to show how inadequate and reductive are the judgments passed on Cora's life by her granddaughter, whose pragmatic materialism leads her to equate value with use. Cora's life has the sense captured in Morris's photographs that what is homely and crude can be at the same time richly moving; to paraphrase About Fiction, in Plains Song the commonplace is made uncommon. Morris's affinity with Twain is once more illustrated by Will's Boy (1981), an autobiographical memoir about his childhood and adolescence, but by adopting a matter-of-fact tone and crowding a highly eventful narrative into a relatively small space, Morris seeks to avoid the obvious sentimentalizing of boyhood found in Twain. The effect is that Morris wants to get the facts about his youth (a portion of his life highly significant to his fiction) on the record once and for all.

Plains Song illustrates once more Wright Morris's sympathetic treatment of middle American types, and his ability to find meaning and worth in the most unpromising lives. That these and other unusual gifts have still not won for Morris the wide audience he deserves is finally attributable to the fact that he does not fit into any convenient category. He is both traditional and original, a chronicler of the commonplace and the bizarre, the material and the immaterial. He is a local colorist at home in a meta, physical landscape of ideas, a realist fascinated by the fictive and by characters who live a dream, a poet of the American backwaters immersed in the main currents of contemporary consciousness. Fittingly, Morris's recent, almost complementary novels–The Fork River Space Project and Plains Song–offer final examples of his paradoxical concern with both the supernatural and the natural, and demonstrate again why he eludes categorization.

G. B. CRUMP, Central Missouri State University

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

1. Books

About Fiction: Reverent Reflections on the Nature of Fiction with Irreverent Observations on Writers, Readers, & Other Abuses. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.
A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods. New York. New American Library, 1968.
The Cat's Meow. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1975.
Cause for Wonder. New York: Atheneum, 1963.
Ceremony in Lone Tree. New York: Atheneum, 1960.
A Cloak of Light. New York: Harper & Row, 1985.
The Deep Sleep. New York: Scribner's, 1953.
Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments: American Writers as Image-Makers. New York: Harper & Row, 1978.
The Field of Vision. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956.
Fire Sermon. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.
The Fork River Space Project. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.
God's Country and My People. New York: Harper & Row, 1968.
Green Grass, Blue Sky, White House. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1970.
Here Is Einbaum. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1973.
The Home Place. New York: Scribner's, 1948.
The Huge Season. New York: Viking, 1954.
In Orbit. New York: New American Library, 1967.
The Inhabitants. New York: Scribner's, 1946.
A Life. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.
Love Affair: A Venetian Journal. New York: Harper & Row, 1972.
Love Among the Cannibals. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1957.
Man and Boy. New York: Knopf, 1951.
The Man Who Was There. New York: Scribner's, 1945.
My Uncle Dudley. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. One Day. New York: Atheneum, 1965.
Picture America. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1982.
Plains Song: For Female Voices. New York: Harper & Row, 1980.
Real Losses, Imaginary Gains. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.
Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933–34. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.
The Territory Ahead. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1958.
War Games. Los Angeles: Black Sparrow, 1972.
What a Way to Go. New York: Atheneum, 1962.
Will's Boy. New York: Harper & Row, 1981.
The Works of Love. New York: Knopf, 1952.
The World in the Attic. New York: Scribner's, 1949.

2. Selected Essays

"Letter to a Young Critic." The Massachusetts Review 6 (Autumn–Winter 1965): 93–100.
"The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet." The Kenyon Review 27 (Autumn 1965): 727–37.
"Made in U.S.A." The American Scholar 29 (Autumn 1960): 483–94.
"National Book Award Address, March 12, 1957." Critique 4 (Winter 1961–62): 72–75.
"Nature Since Darwin." Esquire, Nov. 1959, pp. 64–70.
"One Day: November 22, 1963–November 22, 1967." In Afterwords, edited by Thomas McCormack, pp. 10–27. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
"The Origin of a Species, 1942–1957." The Massachusetts Review 7 (Winter 1966): 121–35.
"Privacy as a Subject for Photography." Magazine of Art, Feb. 1951, pp. 51–55.
"Where the West Begins." Prairie Schooner 54 (Summer 1980): 5–14.

Secondary Sources

Baumbach, Jonathan. "Wake Before Bomb: Ceremony in Lone Tree." Critique 4 (Winter 1961–62): 56–71. This essay offers a close reading of Ceremony in Lone Tree, especially focusing on Morris's treatment of sexual frustration in the novel. In Baumbach's account, Morris's fiction is more concerned with concrete social phenomena than the conflict of temporal and timeless worlds.

Bleufarb, Sam. "Point of View: An Interview with Wright Morris, July 1958." Accent 19 (Winter 1959): 34–46. This wide-ranging interview contains valuable comments by Morris on his themes, his influences, his individual works, and the overall shape of his career.

Booth, Wayne C. "The Two Worlds in the Fiction of Wright Morris." The Sewanee Review 65 (Summer 1957): 375–99. This very significant early essay distinguishes two worlds in Morris's fiction–the temporal world of everyday reality and a "platonic" world which is timeless and more real. Morris's heroes try to build a "bridge" from the temporal to the timeless using heroism, imagination, or love. This essay especially influenced Madden, Klein, and Crump.

Carabine, Keith. "Some Observations on Wright Morris's Treatment of `My Kind of People, Self-sufficient, Self-deprived, Self-unknowing.'" MidAmerica VIII: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (1981): 115–34. Carabine argues that Morris's command of the vernacular style and of voice makes possible the characteristic mixture of sympathy and ironic detachment with which he treats his middle American characters. To illustrate his thesis, Carabine analyzes the style of several passages dealing with the father figure and with Bud Momeyer, of Ceremony in Lone Tree.

Crump, G. B. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1978. Crump traces Morris's career through A Life, distinguishing between immanent and transcendent heroes and between the "still point" and "open road" structures in some of the novels. Crump ties the theme of nostalgia in Morris to heroes who try to escape from time, and further argues that, even in his early novels, Morris wanted to discover a style of heroism which remains in time and engages the real world, rather than a style of heroism which attains a platonic timelessness.

Howard, Leon. Wright Morris. Univ. of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, no. 69. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1968. Howard, a former teacher of Morris's, traces his works through A Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods. Howard examines Morris's view of man as fallen, especially in his relations with women, and his comedy, while giving an overview of his career. This is an excellent brief introduction to Morris.

Hunt, John W., Jr. "The Journey Back: The Early Novels of Wright Morris." Critique 5 (Spring–Summer 1962): 41–60. Hunt analyzes the novels through The World in the Attic, focusing especially on how Morris, in these early novels, seeks a sense of connection with his past. His characters try to recover meaning from the past by transforming it and thus making it available in the present.

Klein, Marcus. "Wright Morris: The American Territory." In his After Alienation: American Novels in Mid-Century, pp. 196–246. Cleveland: World Publishers, 1964. Klein surveys Morris's novels through Cause for Wonder. He argues that Morris's fiction up to The Works of Love embodied a quest for a kind of platonic reality. In The Works of Love, Morris finally learned that the logical end of such a quest was death. In subsequent novels Morris abandons his quest and turns to "accommodation" to the nature of things, as manifested in the multiple point-of-view technique and the theme of sexual vitalism.

Knoll, Robert E., ed. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977. This collection contains essays by John W. Aldridge on the general qualities of Morris's works, by Wayne C. Booth on The Works of Love, and by Peter C. Bunnell on Morris's photographs. It also contains a primary and secondary bibliography on Morris through 1975, four interviews with Morris, and one essay by Morris on the roles of memory and imagination in his work. This is a very useful collection.

Madden, David. "The Great Plains in the Novels of Wright Morris." Critique 4 (Winter 1961–62): 5–23. This essay examines the depiction of the plains in Morris's novels as the meeting point of realistic and romantic aspects of the American temperament. The plains locale is also a source of mystical creative power for the hero.

. "The Hero and the Witness in Wright Morris' Field of Vision." Prairie Schooner 34 (Fall 1960): 263–78. This important early essay argues that Morris's works are focused on a relationship between a hero who reaches out of this world through "audacity," "improvisation," and "transformation" and witnesses who are enthralled and liberated by the hero's example.

. Wright Morris. Twayne United States Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1964. This book surveys all the novels through Cause for Wonder, incorporating the concepts from Madden's essays on the hero-witness relationship and the plains. There are also general chapters on Morris's character types and his narrative technique, and some attention is given to Morris's debt to Henry James. This is still one of the best works on Morris.

. "Wright Morris' In Orbit: An Unbroken Series of Poetic Gestures." Critique 10 (Fall 1968): 102–19. Madden analyzes the "tissue" of images in In Orbit, finally focusing on the central image of the tornado which embodies the typical impulses of American culture. Like the tornado, our culture is in unpredictable motion and exists only in the present.

Miller, Ralph N. "The Fiction of Wright Morris: The Sense of Ending." Mid-America III: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature (1976): 56–76. Miller argues that Morris's novels display a sense of entropy, a fascination with death and a general stress on the ends of things. His novels also focus so much on needlessly complicated form and on idea that a feeling for characters as people is lost, and the endings of the novels are inconclusive. Though generally critical, this essay is valuable in being highly thoughtprovoking.

Neinstein, Raymond L. "Wright Morris: The Metaphysics of Home." Prairie Schooner 53 (Summer 1979): 121–54. The essay argues that Morris is a "neo-regionalist" who has used the plains setting to dramatize the various ways Americans have felt about "home." Morris moves from associating the plains with destructive nostalgia to associating them with a consciousness that embodies the values of the past. The essay is especially good on the tension between photos and text in the early photo-text books and on Warner's development in A Life.

Pfeil, Fred. "Querencias, and a Lot Else: An Interview with Wright Morris." Place 3 (June 1973): 53–63. In this interview Morris comments on the sense of place in his photographs and his fiction and provides some biographical information about his early years.

Trachtenberg, Alan. "The Craft of Vision." Critique 4 (Winter 1961–62): 41–55. Trachtenberg traces the gradual development of Morris's fictional technique, showing how his experiments with photos and text influenced his narrative point of view, especially his use of multiple narrators in The Field of Vision.

Waterman, Arthur E. "The Novels of Wright Morris: An Escape from Nostalgia." Critique 4 (Winter 1961–62): 24–40. Waterman's essay is the standard treatment of the theme of nostalgia in Morris's novels through Ceremony in Lone Tree. For Waterman, as for some other critics, the crippling effects of nostalgia for a personal past or collective pioneer past is the major theme in Morris, and his career chronicles his own gradual liberation from the spell of his Nebraska boyhood.

Wydeven, Joseph J. "Consciousness Refracted: Photography and the Imagination in the Works of Wright Morris." MidAmerica VIII: The Yearbook of the Society for the Study of MidwesternLiterature (1981): 92–114. Wydeven examines several Morris photographs from the perspective of three conceptual categories– the thing itself, the photograph as equivalent of emotion, and metaphotography–tracing the history of the categories among American photographers. Much remains to be done with Morris's photography, but this essay is a good start.