Wright Morris Summary

Wright Morris has had one of the most productive and enduring careers of any American novelist, winning wide praise for his nineteen novels over the past thirty-five years. His work became progressive... Read more

Best known as a novelist and photographer, Wright Morris published fewer than forty short stories in his half-century career. Yet, from the start of his artistic life, Morris experimented with short f... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert D. Harper Ceremony finds its thematic material in a past much deeper than that of the pioneer West and traditions much older than those of the local color novel. It fuses thr... Read more

Critical Essay by William H. Pritchard [Plains Song is] as solid and clever a piece of work as [Morris has] produced in the last twenty years since Ceremony In Lone Tree…. Morris is a tease, i... Read more

Critical Essay by George Garrett Each of the thirteen stories in Real Losses, Imaginary Gains has the refined and beautiful simplicity that only a master artist can achieve. Nothing is wasted. In art... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert E. Knoll [The Morris novels] are not in the fashionable mode. Morris is less interested in an event, a happening, than he is in its implications. Lots of exciting events occu... Read more

Critical Essay by Laurence B. Holland Wright Morris's Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments turns, in a backward glance that he deftly links to Whitman's, to survey glancingly but sure... Read more

Critical Essay by Larry Mcmurtry A mature and steady craftsman, [Wright Morris] never writes badly; but in order to write compellingly he has to return to the plains. No landscape moves him so deeply... Read more

In the following review, Seaver finds Morris's first novel My Uncle Dudley lacking in depth. American is the word which emerges immediately from this story of a young man's trip acros... Read more

In the following excerpt, Flint dismisses The Field of Vision as overblown and empty. Wright Morris, says John W. Aldridge, is “the most important novelist of the American middle generation&... Read more

In the following review, West uses Morris's The Field of Vision as a touchstone for evaluating several other novels published contemporaneously with it. Reading as many as six novels at a ti... Read more

In the following excerpt, DeMott praises Morris for showing the “quality of life” of mid-twentieth-century mid-western America. The Nebraska plains and towns where much of his [Morris... Read more

In the following excerpt, Levine praises Morris's novel What A Way to Go as “shrewd, funny, and beautifully written.” Twenty years separates Wright Morris' first novel, ... Read more

In the following essay, Crump discusses the conflict between the ideal and the actual, the relationship of time, memory, and imagination to each other, and the influence of Henry James and D. H. Lawre... Read more

In the following essay, Albers examines the way Morris treats the conflict between desire and repression in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree. They came in covered wagons, in buckboards... Read more

In the following essay, Madden argues that Morris's “manipulation of clichés” is at the root of his power to render “the sensibilities of articulate and inarticulate... Read more

In the following essay on Morris's novel In Orbit, Bredahl examines “the outsider” as a sexual force infusing creative energy into the lives of Indiana townspeople who have become... Read more

In the following essay, Wydeven offers a “photographic reading” of, and shows the operation of “photographic strategies” in Morris's novel The Works of Love. Thro... Read more

In the essay, Crump analyzes the significance of Morris's image, in his memoir, Will's Boy, of himself hiding under a porch as a psychological key to Morris's work as a photograph... Read more

In the following review, Schwartz focuses on Morris's treatment of the domineering and indomitable mother figure in Man & Boy. The attack on the American Mother attains a new intensit... Read more

In the following interview, Morris discusses his books, his method of composition, and the work of other writers. Morris lives with his wife Josephine in Mill Valley, California, in a small contemp... Read more

In the following essay, Wydeven discusses the use of the doppelganger in Morris's fiction, and especially its use in his novel War Games. [Colonel Foss] slept, … and he dreamt that he... Read more

In the following essay, Hollander discusses the relation of the visual to the verbal in Morris's photo-text The Home Place. Ecphrastic treatments of photographs in modern literary verse and ... Read more

In the following essay, Hall discusses the three varieties of consciousness he sees represented in Morris's work. Wright Morris's forty-year career as a novelist has been haunted by t... Read more

In the following excerpt from the introductory chapter of Wright Morris Revisited, Wydeven offers a thumbnail summation of Morris's major themes and techniques. Throughout his active career,... Read more

In the following excerpt, Schwartz argues that The Works of Love is an incompletely realized novel. Innocence is the theme of Wright Morris' new novel, The Works Of Love. The hero is the tru... Read more

In the following review, Coxe argues The Huge Season is a failure. Mr. Morris' new novel begins auspiciously with a strong evocation of atmosphere and a promise of exciting events to come. T... Read more

In the following essay, Booth examines the roles and the meanings of heroism, imagination, and love in Morris's novels. Wright Morris has published ten books, all of them critical successes.... Read more