In the following essay, exploring the interplay of words and pictures, and of fact and fiction in Morris's Nebraska novels, Neinstein argues that Morris's characters taint the perception of the actual with a dreamlike vision.

In the following essay, Hall discusses the three varieties of consciousness he sees represented in Morris's work.

In the following essay, Barrett examines the vicissitudes of photographic reality according to Morris, and how Morris uses photography to influence our understanding of the actual world.

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. Lawrence in Morris's fiction.

In the following essay, Booth examines the roles and the meanings of heroism, imagination, and love in Morris's novels.

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.

In the following interview, Morris discusses his books, his method of composition, and the work of other writers.

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.

In the following essay, Trachtenberg argues that Morris's work as a photographer informed his technique as a writer.

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.

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 characters” effectively.

In the following interview, Morris discusses his place in mid-twentieth-century fiction.

In the following essay, Lewis discusses Morris's treatment of women and feminism in his last novel.

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 photographer, and to his narrative strategies as a novelist.

In the following essay, Wydeven discusses the use of the doppelganger in Morris's fiction, and especially its use in his novel War Games.

In the following essay, Arnold discusses Morris's depiction of gender roles and gender conflicts in his novel, Plains Song.

In the following essay, Hall offers an allegorical interpretation by using a character's story in Morris's novel The Field of Vision.

In the following review, West uses Morris's The Field of Vision as a touchstone for evaluating several other novels published contemporaneously with it.

In the following essay, Bredahl examines how Morris “establishes contact with the energy of living processes” in his novels.

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 static in their habits.

In the following essay, Trachtenberg attempts to derive the significations of Morris's photo-texts through comparisons with photos by Walker Evans and a poem by Donald Justice.

In the following essay, Hollander discusses the relation of the visual to the verbal in Morris's photo-text The Home Place.

In the following letter, originally published in 1957, Morris talks of his own work, and of other writers.

In the following essay, Price interprets two of Morris's photographs in the context of his writing.

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 three major elements that can be traced back to the very first American fiction and that loom large in the work of both serious and popular novelists of the early nineteenth century. The title of the novel and its general setting would suggest that it belongs with the literature of the American frontier…. But a closer look at the town of Lone...

In the following essay, Davis reports on a symposium discussing the writer's role in mid-twentieth-century America, in which Morris was one of the participants.

In the following excerpt, DeMott praises Morris for showing the “quality of life” of mid-twentieth-century mid-western America.

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

Wright Morris may well be the last of our novelists to write with a sense of the whole of America in his blood and bones, to possess a vision of the country as both a physical place and a metaphysical condition. The literary tradition from which he seems most directly to descend—and it is a tradition shared with some incongruity by James, Twain, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson—may have passed on to him the materials of this vision, and it may be said to have been reconstituted in his work...

In the following essay, Breit reports on a conversation in which Morris distinguishes between the processes of revealing and exposing.

[Plains Song for Female Voices] is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to fiction. Funny and moving, realistic and visionary, symbolic and factual, it shows the hand of the practiced master. Readers get two views of reality in Morris's novels. On the one hand they get a transcription of appearance, an almost naturalistic fidelity to physical detail…. On the other hand readers of Morris are repeatedly caught up in a vision which transmogrifies ordinary life….

In the following excerpt, Levine praises Morris's novel What A Way to Go as “shrewd, funny, and beautifully written.”

In the following review, Schwartz focuses on Morris's treatment of the domineering and indomitable mother figure in Man & Boy.

You might call [the writing in "Plains Song"] linoleum nostalgia. It is something like going through your grandmother's family album and trying to imagine what was not photographed. While you read it, you wonder whether this era of our history can have been quite as stark as Mr. Morris makes it sound, or whether he is not practicing something like Minimalist art or the theater of poverty. Were people so really unconscious? There is always a temptation to think that the author failed to ...

In the following review, Coxe argues The Huge Season is a failure.

Wright Morris's Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments turns, in a backward glance that he deftly links to Whitman's, to survey glancingly but surely his own career and the course of American writing in the context of a popular culture that threatens the life of the imagination. Morris's procedure, as often as not, is to present a telling though seemingly unexceptional quotation, without identifying the work or the author until casually mentioning it later, so as to fix attention on the...

[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 occur in his stories—tornadoes strike, bombs threaten to explode, old men die, young men assert their manhood—but we are not asked to participate in them. We are invited to search them for meaning. (p. ix) The modern American novel is urban and peopled with sophisticated city types. Morris writes characteristically of westerners, small...

In the following excerpt, the unnamed reviewer notes the importance of the American landscape and “the terrible American female” in Morris's fiction.

In the following excerpt, Schwartz argues that The Works of Love is an incompletely realized novel.

A summary description of [Plains Song: For Female Voices] suggests that this sophisticated "regionalist" has forsaken the impressionistic visual emphases that distinguish his best fiction (The Works of Love, The Field of Vision, Ceremony in Lone Tree), for a more conventionally narrative picturing of life in Nebraska's "middle Western plains"; the method, let's say, of Conrad Richter or Willa Cather…. We infer that this new tide of "womanly independenc...

In the following excerpt, Guerard praises The Works of Love as a “vision of American loneliness.”

In the following excerpt, Flint dismisses The Field of Vision as overblown and empty.

In the following review of The Field of Vision, the uncredited writer criticizes Morris for the novel's diction and “elaborate symbolism.”

In the following unfavorable review of The Huge Season, the reviewer concludes that Morris's “pretentiously cultivated climate contains more air than imagination.”

In the following review, Franck praises a collection of Morris's Nebraska photographs.

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 as the somber, muted plains country: for nowhere else is his depth of reference so nearly absolute. And nowhere in his fiction does emotion emerge from detail so beautifully as in this precise and vivid book. Though "Plains Song" is comparatively short, it is very much a story of generations—specifically, generations of wo...

[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, is both fond of his people, of their circumstances, and appalled by them; as in Empsonian pastoral, in one way he's better—at least smarter—than they are, but in another way not so good. This doubleness plays around under a perfectly cool surface on which the deadpan narrator operates…. Morris' vice has always been, ...

Kelcey [the narrator of The Fork River Space Project] enters a world imagined by others…. These overlapping imaginations, overlapping realities, give Kelcey the distance to see the world, to see life, to see time, whole and perfect—just a glimpse, of course, the glimpse of art, the lasting brief experience of the imagination. What he sees, tornadoes or hovering space ships, he sees truly at long last, alone and lost, alive and living for the first real time. I imagine Wright Morris sitting dow...

Until we get to know them, the characters in [Plains Song] are about as flat as their setting. The first generation settlers in particular seem "less persons than pieces of nature, closely related to cows and chickens."… To Sharon Rose, the first woman in the family to flee to Chicago for a wider life, this world comes to represent an incredible oppression…. To the characters who stay, it is a world entirely self-contained and self-sufficient, in which endless unfinished chores p...

In the following review, Seaver finds Morris's first novel My Uncle Dudley lacking in depth.

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 there is no such thing as perfection, but it is the peculiar magic of art that the fully realized work cannot be imagined as other than it is. That sleight of hand is the equivalent of perfection. These stories are magic. There is a glorious American variety of form and content here, a handbook in the ancient and persistent possibilities of sh...