Wright Morris

Reproduced from the 1948 edition of The Home Place, the Bison Book edition brings back into print an important early work by one of the most highly regarded of contemporary American Writers. This account in first-person narrative and photographs of the one-day visit of Clyde Muncy to "the home place" at Lone Tree, Nebraska, has been called "as near to a new fiction form as you could get." Both prose and pictures are homely: worn linoleum, an old man?s shoes, well-used kitchen utensils, and weathered siding. Muncy?s journey of discovery takes the measure of the man he has become and of what he has left behind.

The Home Place

Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, his ninetieth birthday becomes the occasion for a family gathering in the Midwestern town of Lone Tree. The unlikely celebrants take this opportunity to reconceive their visions of past, future, and family in their own grotesque and ultimately liberating ways. Ceremony in Lone Tree is a spare and beautiful work by one of America's great postwar authors.

Ceremony in Lone Tree

"A radiant expression of the art [Wright Morris] has developed through thirty years and fourteen earlier novels. Although it is anything but preachy it will stick in the minds of the congregation for a long time. . . . On the one hand, this is a novel of alienation and on the other, a novel about the discovery of identity. The author's overall concern . . . is the destiny of man. In this novel?perhaps more clearly and movingly than ever before?he carries the reader with him, until astonishment, awe, compassion, laughter, and exultation mingle in a tragic sense of life."?Granville Hicks, New York Times Book Review The ceremony of the old giving way to the new, the young breaking away from what is old, may well be the one constant in the ceaseless flux of American life. Fire Sermon reenacts this ceremony in the entangled lives of three young people and one old man. A chance meeting on the highway links a hippie couple to the eastward journey of an old man and a boy. For the boy it is a daily drama testing and questioning his allegiance. To which world does he belong? To the familiar ties and affections of the old or the disturbing and alluring charms of the new? One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Fire Sermon

"This narrative, which on its surface is an account of three generations of women (and a few of their men) living on the plains of Nebraska ... only gets more strange and beautiful the more you look at it, like a photograph that slowly reveals its truth under very close inspection."--Introduction, p. [v].

Plains Song for Female Voices

The reader of this rollicking novel, first published in 1962, accompanies forty-seven-year-old Professor Arnold Soby (regarded by his girl students as safe and acceptable, but also good fun) on a sabbatical voyage to Italy and Greece. Among Soby's shipboard companions are Miss Winifred Throop, retired head mistress of the Winnetka Country Day School; her companion and colleague, Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, teacher of French and German; and Miss Thropp's seventeen-year-old niece, Cynthia Pomeroy, beautiful, scatterbrained, and studiously vulgar. Standing off the challenges of Italian and Swiss rivals, Soby pursues Cynthia through the waterways and plazas of Venice, the hills of Corfu, the ruins of Athens, and aboard the tiny, rolling, pitching tub Hephaistos in Greek waters. As is characteristic of Wright Morris's fiction, the real story develops beneath the surface of the brilliantly entertaining narrative.

What a Way to Go

Speaking of this 1957 novel, the author has said it ended his obsession with the reconstruction of the immediate past and moved him into the contemporary scene. The narrator, Earl Horter, is a lyric writer who is in Hollywood with Mac, his partner, to write a musical. With two girls they have picked up and gone to Acapulco.

Love Among the Cannibals

My Uncle Dudley is Wright Morris's first novel, originally published in 1942.

My Uncle Dudley

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Cause for Wonder

The story unfolds by views of events through the voices of different characters. A group of Nebraskans find themselves in a bullfight arena in Mexico City.

The Field of Vision

The Mississippi River Reader

A Novel

The Fork River Space Project

Two for the Roadbrings together a pair of thematically related novels, Man and Boy (1951) and In Orbit (1967), each of which concerns a rural American community's response to petty tyranny.

Two for the Road

The story of a Californian who returns home to Chicago, My Uncle Dudley was Wright Morris's first novel.

In this novel, set in 1952 but intermingling the past and present, the protagonist reviews the effects of the Jazz Age on himself and a friend, recalling their exploits in college, in Paris, and in love. The result is the picture of a generation.

The Huge Season

Les terres ingrates du Nebraska, glacées en hiver, caniculaires en été, soumises à de violentes tempêtes. Des voix féminines y résonnent et s’entremêlent, défiant le temps perdu tout autant que l’avenir. Il y a Cora, qui épouse un fermier au début du XXe siècle. Il y a Madge, leur fille, et Sharon Rose, élevées comme des sœurs. Madge qui devient une femme de la campagne dure à la tâche, désireuse de se marier. Et Sharon Rose qui part étudier à Chicago, observant de loin la vie de la famille et de la ferme qui continue sans elle. C’est l’époque où arrivent le téléphone, le réfrigérateur et la télévision – la modernité. C’est l’époque où le monde, leur monde, change. Paru en 1980, Chant des plaines n’avait jamais été traduit dans notre langue. Les lecteurs français pourront dorénavant découvrir l’écriture éblouissante de Wright Morris, capable d’embrasser l’immensité des paysages comme l’intimité sensible de ces femmes fortes.

Chant des plaines

"When I was a boy of eight in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, my father made the first of the many moves that would prove to be of interest to a future writer of fiction. They were east to Chicago, the point on the map where all the lines pointed. Almost twenty years would pass before I would seek to recapture the past that I had experienced. The Works of Loveis the first fruit of that effort, and the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains. The reader who has read The Home Place or The Field of Vision will find in this novel the crux of an experience I frequently return to but never exhaust."?Wright Morris

The Works of Love

Best known for his novels, including the National Book Award winners The Field of Vision and Plains Song, Nebraska-born author Wright Morris has long been regarded as one of America?s most gifted writers. This volume, culling work from the photo-text books, criticism, and numerous short stories frequently overlooked among his oeuvre, reflects the true breadth of this quintessentially American artist?s talents. As such, it offers a fascinating overview of Morris?s inspiring accomplishments in multiple genres. While embracing the prose for which Morris is justly famous, this treasury of work also highlights his photography and other literary genres, including hard-to-find stories first published in magazines, some of which were early drafts of future novels. Edited by Morris?s long-time friend David Madden, this one-of-a-kind collection captures a man of multifarious genius. Replete with interviews, photography, a biographical sketch, suggestions for further reading, and Morris?s inimitable writing, this compendium is an indispensable resource for those who wish to understand and appreciate the brilliance and virtuosity of one of America?s true talents.

A Treasury of Work

Wright Morris Territory

Nowhere in [Morris's] fiction does emotion emerge from detail so beautifully as in this precise and vivid book. . . . The triumph of the book, in terms of craft, is that we experience the sense of the slow passage of time so necessary to such a story. . . . The heart of the book is its tactful rendering of the emotional history of several women. . . . Precise, satisfying, and complete.OCo"New York Times Book Review""

Wright Morris

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