Wright Morris Books In Order

My Uncle Dudley

My Uncle Dudley is Wright Morris’s first novel, originally published in 1942.

The Man Who Was There

When it first appeared in 1945, this novel disconcerted a good many critics: Agee Ward, ‘The Man Who Was There‘ of the title, ostensibly is the man who is not there a member of the armed forces in World War II, he has been reported missing in action. Yet as we are shown various views of Agee and how he continues to affect the lives of others among them Grandma Herkimer and Private Reagan, who knew him in boyhood; Peter Spavic and Mrs. Krickbaum, who refuse to believe that he is missing; Miss Gussie Newcomb, his landlady and to her surprise his heir we come to perceive what Agee had in mind when he said ‘that anything really alive just went on and on.’

The World in the Attic

Wright Morris’s ‘Nebraska Trilogy’ 1946 49 embodies his attempt to capture and come to terms with his past. According to David Madden, in his study Wright Morris, ‘In The Inhabitants a picture collection the emphasis is on the artifacts inhabited and on the land; in The Home Place narrative and pictures , on the inhabitants themselves; and in The World in the Attic, on what the land and the people signify to one man, Clyde Muncy, writer and self exiled Nebraskan…
. What was only suggested to Muncy in The Home Place is further developed, although not entirely resolved, in The World in the Attic…
. In it , Morris achieves the kind of objective conceptualization that is characteristic of his best novels. The first half of the book is impressionistic, a series of reminiscences like The Home Place; but the second half has a novelist narrative line. In The Home Place, the past, saturated in the immediate present, is merely alluded to. In The World in the Attic, however, the past is specifically and dramatically related to the present.’

Man and Boy

‘I have read and admired all of Morris’s books, and there is no doubt in my mind that he is one of the most truly original of contemporary writers. His originality, his absolutely individual way of seeing and feeling, permeates Man and Boy, giving it its humor and wisdom.’ Granville Hicks. ‘For a long time I have not read a novel that gave me so much pleasure in original talent. Morris speaks completely in his own voice, a fascinating voice. He conveys the quality of the American gothic as no other writer I know has done.’ Mark Schorer. ‘Mother, Mr. Morris seems to say in Man and Boy , is unbeatable. Well, so in a way, is Mr. Morris. He writes with the skill of a master satirist; his eye is sharp and his vision is clairvoyant.’ New York Herald Tribune Books. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award and The Home Place, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.

The Deep Sleep

”Judge’ Howard Potter, one of the most respected and influential citizens of a suburban town outside of Philadelphia, lies dead after a long and wearying illness. He is survived by the five people who knew him best and whose lives were deeply influenced by him…
. Through the thoughts and reminiscences of these five very different people Mr. Morris tells his story…
. His writing is occasionally obscure but always absorbing. He does not, like so many writers, hover omnisciently over his characters. He prefers to project himself into their innermost and very human thoughts and emotions, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions…
. Mr. Morris writes with wit, taste, and refreshing originality.’ William Murray, Saturday Review. ‘Mr. Morris is a master of the exact phrase, the homely illuminating detail, and it is no accident that he is an excellent photographer…
. His writing is simple, but his method is as complete as his subject matter, so he uses the multiple flashback, the melting of past into present.’ E.M. Scott, New York Herald Tribune Book Review. ‘A thoroughly satisfying novel’ Commonweal. ‘A most rewarding book’ Kirkus. ‘His finest novel to date’ San Francisco Chronicle. ‘With this novel he has clearly, and for the first time, ascended into literature’ New York Times Book Review. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

The Huge Season

In this novel, set in 1952 but intermingling the past and present, the protagonist reviews the effects of the Jazz Age on himself and a friend, recalling their exploits in college, in Paris, and in love. The result is the picture of a generation.

The Field of Vision

Winner of the National Book Award ‘Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time.’ John W. Aldridge One of America’s most distinguished authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books.

Love Among Cannibals

Speaking of this 1957 novel, the author has said it ended his obsession with the reconstruction of the immediate past and moved him into the contemporary scene. The narrator, Earl Horter, is a lyric writer who is in Hollywood with Mac, his partner, to write a musical. With two girls they have picked up and gone to Acapulco.

Ceremony in Lone Tree

Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, his ninetieth birthday becomes the occasion for a family gathering in the Midwestern town of Lone Tree. The unlikely celebrants take this opportunity to reconceive their visions of past, future, and family in their own grotesque and ultimately liberating ways. Ceremony in Lone Tree is a spare and beautiful work by one of America’s great postwar authors.

Cause for Wonder

‘When Warren Howe, middle aged TV script writer, receives an invitation to the funeral of Monsieur Dulac, he attempts to round up all the people who were guests with him three decades ago in Riva. Dulac’s castle in the Austrian Alps. Neither Uncle Fremont, who ‘invented the dust bowl’ nor an old college friend cares to re experience the good old days. But Sol Spiegel, a junk collector who salvages the past, is eager to return. To escape a world firmly anchored in space and bound to clock time, to re experience the unbelievable, they go back to Riva an imaginative creation fixed in neither time nor space, but like its master, both in and out of the world.’ Saturday Review of Literature. ‘Wright Morris has an uncommon facility for constantly shifting from past to present without confusion or annoyance to the reader. In Cause for Wonder the time shifts are faster than in The Field of Vision and all to good purpose. They make of this novel a ghost story that needs no bed sheets and white paint props, though a few are used.’ Newsweek. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

One Day

‘Laying sure hands on the daily is Wright Morris’s forte. What the rest of us may have accepted too casually he sets upon with his own highly specialized focus. In this novel, more than ever, the texture of the day and hour, the fabric of speech, the pattern of action are used to show forth the humor of objects, people, places, lives, and in their deeper, more mysterious interrelations is disclosed the larger shape of tragedy.’ Eudora Welty Friday, November 22, 1963, in Escondido, California, begins with the discovery of an infant in the adoption basket at the local animal pound. This calculated effort to shock the natives is silenced by the news from Dallas of an event calculated to shock the world. One Day is concerned with the way these two events are related and with the time that begins when conventional time seems to have stopped. The events of this day, both comical and horrifying, make the commonplace seem strange, and the strange familiar. To accommodate the present, the past must be reshuffled, and events accounted for defy accounting. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

In Orbit

‘In the space of one day, Jubal E. Gainer, high school dropout and draft dodger, manages to rack up an impressive array of crimes…
. He steals a friend’s motorcycle, rapes a simple minded spinster, mugs a pixyish professor, and stabs an obese visionary who runs a surplus store. He then waits out an Indiana twister and goes his way, leaving as much wreckage in his path as the twister itself.’ Library Journal. ‘In Orbit is a short novel, full of action, and the seriousness can mostly be found between the lines. There one can see against what Jubal Gainer’s rebellion, thoughtless and aimless as it seems, is directed. One might say that he is, like millions of his contemporaries, a Huck Finn without a Mississippi.’ Granville Hicks, Saturday Review. ‘Here is another of Wright Morris’s craftsmanly novels terse, colloquial, restrained, fragmented, deliberately shadowy. Above all, small; not slight, not inconsequential, but a miniature…
. All readers will surely appreciate the quality of the prose style one has come to expect in a Wright Morris novel…
. There is also a muscular quality to Mr. Morris’s writing that makes it a suitable instrument for conveying harsher things; and there is his sense of the comic, which springs up constantly. In all, this is a quiet but rich performance.’ New York Times Book Review. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Fire Sermon

‘A radiant expression of the art Wright Morris has developed through thirty years and fourteen earlier novels. Although it is anything but preachy it will stick in the minds of the congregation for a long time…
. On the one hand, this is a novel of alienation and on the other, a novel about the discovery of identity. The author’s overall concern…
is the destiny of man. In this novel perhaps more clearly and movingly than ever before he carries the reader with him, until astonishment, awe, compassion, laughter, and exultation mingle in a tragic sense of life.’ Granville Hicks, New York Times Book ReviewThe ceremony of the old giving way to the new, the young breaking away from what is old, may well be the one constant in the ceaseless flux of American life. Fire Sermon reenacts this ceremony in the entangled lives of three young people and one old man. A chance meeting on the highway links a hippie couple to the eastward journey of an old man and a boy. For the boy it is a daily drama testing and questioning his allegiance. To which world does he belong? To the familiar ties and affections of the old or the disturbing and alluring charms of the new?One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris 1910 1988 wrote thirty three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

A Life

Floyd Warner, eighty two, has driven from California to his childhood home in Nebraska in his antique Maxwell coupe. There he confronts the smoldering remains of this late sister’s house and the realization that he is now completely alone. As though in a trance, he sets out once again, this time to find his first adult home, a dusty sheep farm in the southwest, preparing to meet the fate that ultimately awaits him. Of such deceptively simple ingredients is this brilliant portrait of the last hours of an old man’s life composed. Floyd Warner, who first appeared in Fire Sermon, is perhaps the ultimate characterization in the career of a writer who has been called ‘quite simply the best novelist now writing in America’ John W. Aldridge.

War Games

Written twenty years before it was first published in 1972, War Games features both black and charcoal gray humor, whose characters and events are as unpredictable as they are absorbing a book, in the author’s words, ‘where the extremity of the bizarre is seen as the ultimate effort to change oneself, if not the world.’ At the center of the novel is the developing relationship between the protagonist, a fifty three year old army colonel, and a Viennese immigrant whom he first knows as Mrs. Tabori and whose story he has learned through a dying amputee, Human Kopfman. Themes and characters that first appear in War Games reappear in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree. In the preface to this edition, Wright Morris describes the genesis of the book in 1951 and comments on its connections with his late work: ‘War Games may well prove to be the seedbed of much more in my fiction than I am aware, since it was the first turning of earth more than twenty years buried. My novels are linked in this manner, but sometimes at odds with the chronology of publication. In the absence of War Games, many clues to the fiction that followed were missing…
.’ This novel seems to me darkly somber, a book of interiors, dimly lighted streets, hallways and lobbies, with glimpses of objects and colors that emerge in subdued lighting. I’d like to think that my readers, both new and old, will find the world of the Colonel and Mrs. Tabori relevant to the one in which they are living.’

What a Way to Go

The reader of this rollicking novel, first published in 1962, accompanies forty seven year old Professor Arnold Soby regarded by his girl students as safe and acceptable, but also good fun on a sabbatical voyage to Italy and Greece. Among Soby’s shipboard companions are Miss Winifred Throop, retired head mistress of the Winnetka Country Day School; her companion and colleague, Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, teacher of French and German; and Miss Thropp’s seventeen year old niece, Cynthia Pomeroy, beautiful, scatterbrained, and studiously vulgar. Standing off the challenges of Italian and Swiss rivals, Soby pursues Cynthia through the waterways and plazas of Venice, the hills of Corfu, the ruins of Athens, and aboard the tiny, rolling, pitching tub Hephaistos in Greek waters. As is characteristic of Wright Morris’s fiction, the real story develops beneath the surface of the brilliantly entertaining narrative.

Plains Song

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.

Two for the Road

Two for the Road brings together a pair of thematically related novels, Man and Boy 1951 and In Orbit 1967, each of which concerns a rural American community’s response to petty tyranny. Man and Boy is the story of a woman, Mrs. Violet Ames Ormsby, whose overbearing personality permits only two responses from the men in her life acquiescence or rebellion. Although her husband self effacingly defers to her, her son, Virgil, acts out against her; indeed, he frustrates her grand intentions for him by dying heroically in the Second World War. In In Orbit, a small Indiana town is struck by an uncontrollable force of nature: a delinquent draft dodger named Jubal Gainer. Gainer rides into town ‘his arms high and wide, his ass light in the saddle of a stolen motorcycle,’ and within twenty four hours has raped a half witted woman and stabbed a storeowner, not with any premeditation, but because they happened to cross his path. Each taking his own turn, the stunned townspeople tell the story of ‘the day the tornado hit’ as if they were members of an ancient Greek chorus.

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Writer brings together two of Wright Morris’s best known novels, The Works of Love 1951 and The Huge Season 1954. The Works of Love tells the story of Will Brady, a kind hearted man who builds a successful egg business, willfully loses it, then lives on the road as a migrant worker. Brady is self destructively drawn to a series of hardened women, and his failed relationship with each progressively wears away his resiliency but not the core of his inexplicable hopefulness. The Huge Season presents scenes from the life of Peter Foley, a middle aged professor of classics. As one of his old friends testifies before McCarthy and the House Un American Activities Committee, Foley recalls their shared college years and the political education they received from their charismatic, wealthy, and doomed classmate Charles Lawrence. Through its juxtaposition of the two unsettled periods in Foley’s otherwise staid life, Morris explores themes of collective response and personal responsibility, of calculated deference to authority and unexpected, private epiphanies, of public misconstruction and personal regret.

Three Easy Pieces

Three of Wright Morris’s most memorable explorations of old age: The Fork River Space Project 1977, Fire Sermon 1971, and A Life 1973. Fork River, Kansas, was established in the 1870s by a railroad tycoon as a gift for his young bride. Never populous, it is now, in 1977, a ghost town or it would be if it weren’t for the presence of Kelcey, an elderly writer, Alice, his young wife, and Dahlberg, the independent contractor who keeps their water running, their porch painted, and their married life unpredictable. In town, the shops have closed one by one, their proprietors disappearing, as it were, into thin air. Did they find better prospects elsewhere? Or were they abducted by space aliens? Kelcey thinks the latter, but what does the old man know? He can’t even see that Alice is being abducted from him by the hired help…
In Fire Sermon, Morris returns with a more mature sensibility to the premise of his first novel, My Uncle Dudley 1942. A ten year old boy named Kermit accompanies his eighty two year old guardian, Uncle Floyd, from their trailer home in California to a small town in Nebraska for the funeral of Floyd’s only surviving sibling, Viola. Along the way, Floyd picks up a hitchhiking hippie couple named Stanley and Joy, and is disturbed by the realization that his nephew has more in common with them than with him. After Viola’s old house, a storehouse of family artifacts, burns to the ground, Floyd, cut free from his past and ready for death, abandons Kermit to an uncertain future with Stanley and Joy.A Life 1973 is the sequel to Fire Sermon, revealing what lies in store for Floyd after he has disappeared into the open, empty spaces of Nebraska. The aging, uprooted Floyd, now unmoored in time, indulges in an unhurried but intensely nostalgic reconstruction of his family’s and his own past. When he befriends Mr. Blackbird, a transient Indian, Floyd is doomed by his inability or his unwillingness to focus on the present and to contemplate a future for himself. Or has he introduced himself to Blackbird as a way of speeding along his own wished for demise?

The Home Place

Reproduced from the 1948 edition of The Home Place, the Bison Book edition brings back into print an important early work by one of the most highly regarded of contemporary American Writers.

This account in first person narrative and photographs of the one day visit of Clyde Muncy to ‘The Home Place‘ at Lone Tree, Nebraska, has been called ‘as near to a new fiction form as you could get.’ Both prose and pictures are homely: worn linoleum, an old man’s shoes, well used kitchen utensils, and weathered siding. Muncy s journey of discovery takes the measure of the man he has become and of what he has left behind.

Time Pieces

In Time Pieces, award winning novelist and photographer Wright Morris provides an introspective investigation into the relationships between photographs and text. This seminal collection of essays, on subjects ranging from portraits of pioneers in the American West to writings by Susan Sontag and Henry James, provides a kaleidoscope of ‘Time Pieces‘ that serve to illuminate a complex, expressive, and evolving art form. It is Morris’s singular gift that he is able to bring out such a rich and vibrant dialogue between the world of photography and the world of literature.

Writing My Life

Writing My Life brings together in one volume the acclaimed memoirs of the National Book Award winning writer Wright Morris.