SOURCE: “Wright Morris: The Metaphysics of Home,” in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 53, No. 2, Summer, 1979, pp. 121-54.

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.

They say that “home is where the heart is.” I think it is where the house is, and the adjacent buildings.

—Emily Dickinson, Letters

Repeatedly, in the course of Wright Morris's large work (at last count, eighteen novels, three collections of short stories, four photo-text books, and four volumes of essays and criticism), there is a return to the territory of his birth, “the navel of the world,” as he calls it, the plains of Nebraska. Morris is not the first writer to try to come to terms with that region in literature; Willa Cather is his most...