Wright Morris

Wright Morris (Wright Marion Morris), 1910-98, American writer, b. Central City, Nebr. He was for many years professor of English at San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State Univ.). His fiction treats the relationship of the burden of American history to the present, and the evolution and continuity of the American character. His novels include The World in the Attic (1949), Love among the Cannibals (1957), Fire Sermon (1971), and Plains Song (1980). The Territory Ahead (1958) is a study of American literary tradition, and About Fiction (1975) is a critical work. Morris was also a photographer, noted particularly for his images of the Great Plains and for his combinations of text and photographs.

Bibliography: See his memoirs Will's Boy (1981), Solo (1983), and A Cloak of Light (1985). See studies by L. Howard (1968) and G. B. Crump (1978).

Morris, Wright (1910– ),Nebraska‐born author, has set much of his fiction in the Midwest although he attended Pomona College and moved to California in 1961. His numerous finely crafted novels present acute observations of characters, often in an oblique fashion, as they make relations or undergo cleavages with other people. Sometimes these concentrate on one situation diversely affecting the different people involved in it. His novels are My Uncle Dudley (1942); The Man Who Was There (1945); The World in the Attic (1949); Man and Boy (1951), a brief but pungent view of a search for a meaningful life, just as another book, The Works of Love (1952), treats another basic theme of Morris's, the quest for significant loving relationships; The Deep Sleep (1953); The Huge Season (1954), a longer book than usual in its revelation of the ethos of the 1920s; The Field of Vision (1956, National Book Award), presenting recollections of significant experiences evoked in a group of Americans as they view a bullfight in Mexico; Love Among the Cannibals (1957); Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), portraying family members isolated from one another as they assemble in a Nebraska ghost town to celebrate the ninetieth birthday of one of them; What a Way To Go (1962) and Cause for Wonder (1963), more broadly comic and with a different setting—Europe—than his other novels; One Day (1965), depicting the reactions of diverse Californians to the assassination of President Kennedy; In Orbit (1967), concerning the aimless rebellion of a high‐school dropout of the time; Fire Sermon (1971) and its sequel, A Life (1973), further insights into generational relations; Here Is Einbaum (1973); The Fork River Space Project (1977); and Plains Song: For Female Voices (1980), about three generations of lonely Midwestern women. Stories are collected in Real Losses, Imaginary Gains (1976) and Collected Stories1948–86 (1986). He has created special memoirs: Will's Boy (1981) and Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe (1983), the first on his youth, the second on his young manhood, continued in A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life (1985). Morris is a distinguished as well as a sensitive and sharp‐eyed photographer who has created books in which prose and pictures reinforce one another: The Inhabitants (1946), The Home Place (1948), God's Country and My People (1968), Love Affair (1972), about Venice, and Photographs and Words (1982). The Territory Ahead (1958) is a critical study of American literature and the native tradition, further investigated in books of essays: A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods (1968), About Fiction (1975), and Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (1978).

Noble Savage (1960–62), magazine issued twice a year from New York in paperback book format, described by “Arias,” an anonymous contributor to each issue, as having “no case to make for natural goodness,” since “the man of nature is gone from this earth,” but “we ourselves must pray to attach some nobility to our savagery.” Saul Bellow was one of the three editors and contributing editors included Ralph Ellison, Herbert Gold, Arthur Miller, Wright Morris, and Harvey Swados, but other writers also contributed poetry, fiction, and essays, and each issue had an “Ancestors” section with texts by Samuel Butler, Lawrence, Pushkin, etc.