Conversations with Wright Morris


Book Description

This book is an attempt to approach the work of a leading American novelist from both sides of the looking-glass?from the opposite, but not necessarily opposing, points of view of the writer/creator and the reader/critic. In 1975, while the author was visiting professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, several scholar-critics (among them John W. Aldridge, Wayne C. Booth, and David Madden) were invited to speak about his craft and artistic aims and principles and to record conversations with him about issues growing from their addresses. Since Morris is also an important photographer, facets of his achievement in this field were considered by Peter C. Bunnell. In addition to four conversations, three lectures, and a portfolio of twelve photographs, this volume includes an essay by Wright Morris and a bibliography compiled by Robert L. Boyce.




Wright Morris Territory


Book Description

Best known for his novels, including the National Book Award winners The Field of Vision and Plains Song, Nebraska-born author Wright Morris has long been regarded as one of America's most gifted writers. This volume, culling work from the photo-text books, criticism, and numerous short stories frequently overlooked among his oeuvre, reflects the true breadth of this quintessentially American artist's talents. As such, it offers a fascinating overview of Morris's inspiring accomplishments in multiple genres. While embracing the prose for which Morris is justly famous, this treasury of work also highlights his photography and other literary genres, including hard-to-find stories first published in magazines, some of which were early drafts of future novels. Edited by Morris's long-time friend David Madden, this one-of-a-kind collection captures a man of multifarious genius. Replete with interviews, photography, a biographical sketch, suggestions for further reading, and Morris's inimitable writing, this compendium is an indispensable resource for those who wish to understand and appreciate the brilliance and virtuosity of one of America's true talents.




The Works of Love


Book Description

"When I was a boy of eight in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, my father made the first of the many moves that would prove to be of interest to a future writer of fiction. They were east to Chicago, the point on the map where all the lines pointed. Almost twenty years would pass before I would seek to recapture the past that I had experienced. The Works of Loveis the first fruit of that effort, and the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains. The reader who has read The Home Place or The Field of Vision will find in this novel the crux of an experience I frequently return to but never exhaust."?Wright Morris




Plains Song for Female Voices


Book Description

"This narrative, which on its surface is an account of three generations of women (and a few of their men) living on the plains of Nebraska ... only gets more strange and beautiful the more you look at it, like a photograph that slowly reveals its truth under very close inspection."--Introduction, p. [v].




The Cost of Knowing


Book Description

Dear Martin meets They Both Die at the End in this gripping, evocative novel about a Black teen who has the power to see into the future, whose life turns upside down when he foresees his younger brother’s imminent death, from the acclaimed author of SLAY. Sixteen-year-old Alex Rufus is trying his best. He tries to be the best employee he can be at the local ice cream shop; the best boyfriend he can be to his amazing girlfriend, Talia; the best protector he can be over his little brother, Isaiah. But as much as Alex tries, he often comes up short. It’s hard to for him to be present when every time he touches an object or person, Alex sees into its future. When he touches a scoop, he has a vision of him using it to scoop ice cream. When he touches his car, he sees it years from now, totaled and underwater. When he touches Talia, he sees them at the precipice of breaking up, and that terrifies him. Alex feels these visions are a curse, distracting him, making him anxious and unable to live an ordinary life. And when Alex touches a photo that gives him a vision of his brother’s imminent death, everything changes. With Alex now in a race against time, death, and circumstances, he and Isaiah must grapple with their past, their future, and what it means to be a young Black man in America in the present.




The Field of Vision


Book Description

"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




Ceremony in Lone Tree


Book Description

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.




Fanny Wright


Book Description

Frances Wright dared to take Thomas Jefferson seriously when he wrote, ' All men are created equal, ' and to assume that 'men' meant 'women' as well. Born in Scotland in 1795, she came to the United States in 1818, and spent half her adult life here, she died in Ohio in 1852, ending a lifetime devoted to promoting equality among the races and the sexes. The Marquis de Lafayette called her his adored Fanny and paid court so openly that he scandalized even his own family. The first woman to act publicly to oppose slavery. The pampered daughter of a highly stratified class society, she cast her lot with the working people, risking her health, her fortune, and her good name to realize the promise of the Declaration of Independence. With a boldness rare in women of her day, she attacked in print and in lecture halls throughout the country an economic system that allowed not only black slavery in the South but what she called wage slavery in the North. With the exception perhaps of Walt Whitman, she wrote more powerfully of sexual experience than any other American the nineteenth century.




The Huge Season


Book Description

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.




Plains Song


Book Description

Nowhere in [Morris's] fiction does emotion emerge from detail so beautifully as in this precise and vivid book. . . . The triumph of the book, in terms of craft, is that we experience the sense of the slow passage of time so necessary to such a story. . . . The heart of the book is its tactful rendering of the emotional history of several women. . . . Precise, satisfying, and complete.OCo"New York Times Book Review""