Wright Morris Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Reginald Dyck

Critical Essay by Reginald Dyck

SOURCE: “Revisiting and Revising the West: Willa Cather's My Ántonia and Wright Morris's Plains Song,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 25-38.

In the following essay, Dyck discusses attitudes towards the pioneer experience of the American west as depicted in Willa Cather's My Antonia and Morris's Plains Song.

The best days are the first to flee.

—Willa Cather

Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?

—Wright Morris¹

Revisionist Historian Patricia Limerick opens The Legacy of Conquest with a photograph, quotation, and commentary about tin cans, hardly a heroic entrance into the history of the West. From these apparently ubiquitous artifacts of the frontier she draws this conclusion: the past, like tin cans where there are no garbage collectors, remains to affect the present; the Old West is connected with rather than...
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