Wright Morris
Morris, Wright (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).
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Wright Morris
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Works by Wright Morris
(1910-1998)
| 1942 | My Uncle Dudley. Morris's first novel is a picaresque story of a Californian who returns home to Chicago. Morris was a Nebraska native who would draw on his Midwestern background for many of his works. |
| 1945 | The Man Who Was There. Morris's second novel reinterprets America's frontier myth from the perspective of protagonist Agee Ward, whose travels put the American heartland into a wider context. |
| 1946 | The Inhabitants. The first of a projected series of photo-text books, commissioned by Charles Scribner's Sons, is based on a tour of the United States undertaken by the author in 1940-1941. The Home Place would follow in 1948, and The World in the Attic (without photographs) would conclude the series in 1949. |
| 1951 | Man and Boy. Morris provides a satirical character study of a selfish, controlling woman. |
| 1952 | The Works of Love. Dedicated to Sherwood Anderson, Morris's novel offers a life story of an Anderson-like "grotesque," Will Brady of Nebraska, a victim of his environment and needs, which force him into a progressively more desperate search for love and relief. It is generally considered the most personal of Morris's books, with the protagonist based on the author's father. |
| 1953 | The Deep Sleep. Morris's novel details the life and character of a judge as viewed by those who knew him. Set in the affluent Main Line of Philadelphia, the novel anatomizes the lack of fulfillment among those who have achieved the American dream of material success. |
| 1954 | The Huge Season. Morris's treatment of the 1920s and the American Dream in this novel has been described as his most "literary" work, with allusions to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce. |
| 1956 | The Field of Vision. Morris wins the National Book Award for this innovative novel, which looks at the lives of a group of Nebraskan tourists at a Mexican bullfight. It is Morris's most complex and successful work. |
| 1957 | Love Among the Cannibals. Two Hollywood songwriters pick up two young women and take them to Acapulco for an encounter with the primitive. A departure for Morris, the novel employs a cynical first-person narrator to focus on contemporary life. |
| 1960 | Ceremony in Lone Tree. Revisiting characters from The Field of Vision (1956), Morris dramatizes the ninetieth birthday celebration of Tom Scanlon, the last resident of a Nebraska ghost town. The novel is generally regarded as one of Morris's best. |
| 1965 | One Day. Morris juxtaposes the discovery of an unwanted baby with the backdrop of the Kennedy assassination to form a group character study of a San Francisco community. |
| 1967 | In Orbit. Morris offers a meditation on contemporary American life across the generational divide in this novel about a high school dropout and draft dodger on a crime spree in a small Indiana town, which is also hit by a tornado. |
| 1971 | Fire Sermon. Morris continues his examination of the contemporary social scene in this novel about a hippie couple's encounter with an old man and a boy. A sequel, A Life, would appear in 1973. |
| 1980 | Plains Song, for Female Voices. Winner of the American Book Award and hailed as the "best feminist novel by an American"--a remarkable accolade for an author otherwise attacked for not doing women justice in his fiction--the novel is a panoramic exploration of several generations of women in Nebraska. |
| 1981 | Will's Boy. Morris provides an innovative memoir of his first twenty years, with passages from his novels, short stories, and essays included to emphasize how fused his life and work have been. The book is thus the product of his imagination and a sourcebook that relates events in his life that went into the making of his fiction. |
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Wright Morris
Wright Marion Morris (January 6, 1910 – April 25, 1998) was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms. Wright Morris died April 25, 1998 at the age of 88 years. He is buried in the Chapman Cemetery. [1]
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Early life
Morris was born in Central City, Nebraska; his boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places.[2] His mother, Grace Osborn Morris, died six days after he was born. His father, William Henry Morris, worked for the Union Pacific Railroad. After Grace's death, Wright was cared for by a nanny, until his father made a trip to Omaha and returned with a young wife, Gertrude. In Will's Boy, Morris states, "Gertrude was closer to my age than to my father's".[3] Gertrude hated small-town life, but got along famously with Wright, as they shared many of the same childish tastes (both loved games, movies, and ice cream). In 1919, the family moved to Omaha, where they resided until 1924.
During that interlude, Morris spent two summers on his uncle's farm near Norfolk, Nebraska. [4] Photographs of the farm, as well as the real-life characters of Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara, appear in Morris's books.
Career
Selected works
- My Uncle Dudley (1942)
- The Man Who Was There (1945)
- The Inhabitants (photo-text) (1946)
- The Home Place (photo-text) (1948)
- The World in the Attic (1949)
- Man and Boy (1951)
- The Works of Love (1952)
- The Deep Sleep (1953)
- The Huge Season (1954) — finalist for the National Book Award[5]
- The Field of Vision (1956) — National Book Award for Fiction[6]
- Love Among the Cannibals (1957) — finalist for the National Book Award[7]
- Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960) — finalist for National Book Award[8]
- One Day 1965)
- A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods (essays) (1968)
- God's Country and My People (photo-text) (1968)
- In Orbit (1971)
- Fire Sermon (1971)
- A Life (1973)
- "Template:Real Losses, Imaginary Gains" (Short Stories) (1976)
- The Fork River Space Project (1977)
- Plains Song: For Female Voices (1980) — National Book Award for Fiction[9][a]
- Will's Boy (1981)
- "Victrola" (1982) (short story in The New Yorker; O. Henry Award third prize)[10]
- Solo (1983)
- A Cloak of Light (1985)
- "Glimpse Into Another Country" (1985) (short story in The New Yorker; O. Henry Award)[10]
- Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory (1989)
Awards and honors
Morris received numerous honors in addition to the National Book Awards for The Field of Vision[6] and Plains Song.[9][a] He was granted Guggenheim Fellowships[11] in 1942, 1946, and 1954. In 1975, he won the Mari Sandoz Award recognizing "significant, enduring contribution to the Nebraska book world".[12] In 1979, he received the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award. In 1981, he won the Los Angeles Times' Book Prize Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement.[13] In 1982, a jury of Modern Language Association members selected him for the Common Wealth Award for distinguished service in literature.[14] In 1986, he was honored with a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.[15]
Archives
The full archive of Wright Morris photographs is located at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona in Tucson, which also manages the copyright of these photographs.[16]
The Lincoln City Libraries of Lincoln, NE, houses some Morris correspondence and taped interviews in The Gale E. Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials and The Wright Morris-Victor Musselman Correspondence collection.
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries houses a collection of Wright Morris papers, including material donated by Josephine Morris (1927-2002), widow of Wright Morris.
Notes
- ^ a b Plains Song won the 1981 award for hardcover Fiction.
From 1980 to 1983 in National Book Awards history there were dual hardcover and paperback awards in most categories. Most of the paperback award-winners were reprints, including the 1981 Fiction.
References
- ^ "Who Is Wright Morris". Lone Tree Literary Society www.wrightmorris.org
- ^ "Nebraska National Register Sites in Merrick County". Nebraska State Historical Society. Retrieved 2009-11-06.
- ^ Morris, Wright (1981). Will's Boy. New York: Harper & Row.
- ^ "Wright Morris Biography". Center for Great Plains Studies. University of Nebraska-Lincoln. http://www.unl.edu/plains/publications/resource/morris.shtml. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "National Book Awards – 1955". NBF. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
- ^ a b "National Book Awards - 1957". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
(With essay by Harold Augenbraum from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ "National Book Awards – 1958". NBF. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
- ^ "National Book Awards – 1961". NBF. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
- ^ a b "National Book Awards - 1981". National Book Foundation. Retrieved 2012-03-15.
(With essay by Patricia Smith from the Awards 60-year anniversary blog.) - ^ a b "The O. Henry Prize Stories". Random House Publishing. http://www.randomhouse.com/anchor/ohenry/winners/past.html. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation". Archived from the original on 2007-02-05. http://web.archive.org/web/20070205012934/http://www.gf.org/fellist.html. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "Nebraska Library Association Handbook". http://www.nebraskalibraries.org/awards.html. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "Los Angeles Times Book Prizes". http://www.latimes.com/extras/bookprizes/winners.html. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "Wright Morris Honored on Service in Literature". NY Times. 1982-10-03. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D03E0DA1F38F930A35753C1A964948260. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ "National Endowment for the Arts". http://www.nea.gov/about/Facts/Litfellows.html. Retrieved 2007-03-15.
- ^ CCP's "Conditions for Publication of Photographs by Wright Morris" (PDF file). Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona Libraries.[dead link]
External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Wright Morris |
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Wright Morris |
- Official sites
- Works by or about Wright Morris in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- Guide to the Wright Morris Papers at The Bancroft Library
- Olga Carlisle, Jody Ireland (Fall 1991). "Wright Morris, The Art of Fiction No. 125". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2164/the-art-of-fiction-no-125-wright-morris.
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Columbia Encyclopedia
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature
The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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