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Summary
Summary
Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books, including The Home Place, also available in a Bison Books edition, and Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award. Charles Baxter is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of numerous works, including The Feast of Love.
Author Notes
Early in his career, Wright Morris was called by Mark Schorer "probably the most original young novelist writing in the United States." In 1968 Leon Howard wrote: "Wright Morris has been the most consistently original of American novelists for a quarter of a century." Since then, the University of Nebraska Press has brought out new editions of his first 17 novels. Although both critical and popular appreciation of his work continues to grow slowly, there is a general consensus that he ranks high among contemporary American novelists. Born in Central City, Nebraska, the Lone Tree of his fiction, Morris attended Pomona College in California and had an academic career chiefly at San Francisco State University until his retirement in 1975. Nebraska and California have provided the main settings for his work, but he has traveled widely here and abroad, and some of his best novels relate the picaresque odysseys made by engaging characters. For instance, his first novel, My Uncle Dudley (1942), is a fictionalized account of a trip to California with his father that motherless Morris made as a youth. When almost 30 years later Morris wrote about another east-to-west journey in Fire Sermon (1971), in which an old man and a boy encounter three young hippies, Granville Hicks called the book "simon-pure, dyed-in-the-wool honest-to-God Wright Morris of the very highest grade" (N.Y. Times). The Field of Vision (1956), which deals with "innocents abroad in Mexico," won the National Book Award for fiction in 1957 and ranks behind only Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960) as his most successful novel.Ceremony involves four generations at a family reunion as Morris ingeniously reconciles the past, present, and future in a story that avoids both nostalgia and the disillusionment of the you-can't-go-home-again theme that appears quite often in his other fiction. Critics attempting to define Morris's originality have emphasized his distinctive style---a Faulkner-like ability to draw characters that come alive as individuals, his cross-country Americanness, and a strong sense of place that may owe something to Morris's considerable gifts as a photographer.
Morris's fine feeling for the conjunction of time and place is evident in his several books of photographs with text: The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), God's Country and My People (1968), Photographs and Words, and Picture America (1982). Other nonfiction includes a collection of essays on contemporary social and political problems---A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods (1967)---and two widely praised volumes of criticism---The Territory Ahead: Critical Iinterpretations in American Literature (1958) and Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments: American Writers as Image Makers. Two volumes of personal memoirs are Will's Boy (1981) and Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933--1934 (1983).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Throughout this austere montage of three generations of Nebraska women, Morris' photographic dissolves of ageless landscapes and beautifully desolate figures sift through like acrid prairie winds. Newlywed pioneer-woman Cora walks confidently with her husband Emerson through the high grasses on their way from Ohio to the early 1900s Nebraska homestead shared with Emerson's flighty brother Orion. Husband and wife, like yoked beasts, feelings locked tight, make their gains on the land: for Cora, each day's worth is exactly the sum of chores accomplished. Moreover, along with her own child, cheerful and complaisant Madge, Cora raises Orion's daughter Sharon, whose mother--bright, tatty, gypsyish Belle--dies giving birth to plain Fayrene. So it is through the eyes of Sharon, a musician who leaves home and never marries, that the paradox of change and changelessness is illuminated: the vast sweep of time, the withering-away of a strength that seems to be diluted with generations; but, all the same, the realization that one can never really leave ""the trauma of birth or burial, or mindless attachments of persons and places, kinships, longings, crossing bells, the arc of streetlights or the featureless faces on station platforms."" And one generation later, Madge's daughter Caroline, now herself a mother, will show Sharon the site of Cora's farm--vanished, with Cora's life, into thin air--and will bitterly contemplate Cora's blank acceptance of a life of dogged toil unlit by self-knowledge. (When elderly Cora had her picture taken, ""it changed the substance of her life. She was no longer the person she had been, but something more or less."") Morris ponders the evolving consciousness of women here through his favorite juxtapositions--past and present, primitive and civilized, dinosaur bones and football fields: ""the future of man in a world of women. . . the males were gathered in one of their primitive ceremonies, blind as the dinosaurs to what was happening."" So his females, his slumbering giants, are not free-standing beings, but rather caryatids beneath a monument to the American land and its ghosts. Meditative rather than intimate, then, yet a moving and lyrical work nonetheless. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Morris snagged a National Book Award for this 1980 novel. LJ's reviewer observed that it "is at once a song of the Plains and plainsong melody which illuminates the beauty and complexity of human life." The plot follows the female members of a family living in Nebraska from the late 1800s to modern times. It remains "rich in sensory detail, controlled in style, and powerful in impact" (LJ 1/1/80). (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
