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).