Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Summer 1999
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 218-19.
Abstract
A major American writer, author of thirty novels, Wright Morris is highly regarded by critics, but some readers find his work difficult. Morris himself felt that a full understanding of any of his novels required a thorough reading of them all. His style, too, is sometimes deliberately enigmatic; he did not believe in a tidy closure to the problems he introduced. Joseph J. Wydeven discusses these and other perplexities in Wright Morris Revisited, aptly titled, as the last Twayne study of Morris was published in 1964.
A number of Morris's books are set in Nebraska, where he was born. He often transformed "autobiographical facts into fictions" drawn from his youth. A major influence on him was his mother's absence; she died shortly after his birth. Describing himself as "halforphan," he mythologized her early life, bonding to a woman he could never know. His interest in the mythic past contributed to his feeling of being "both in and out of this world."
Quite a different contribution to this feeling developed through his work with photography. Wydeven points out that Morris's scenes are written as if seen through the eye of the camera. The photographs included in Wydeven's study offer evidence for his contention that Morris's deliberate placement of artifacts, his concern for light and shadow, and the sometimes subtle effects of the photos can also be seen throughout his writing.
Morris's characters often deal with happenings of the contemporary world (the atomic bomb, a serial killer in Nebraska, a current war). Morris would examine those events and their meaning over and over in his novels. During his fifty year career his attitudes sometimes changed as he reevaluated their significance to the people involved, as, for instance, in his depiction of women. In his early books his women were often intransigent termagants. They fit a popular psychological concept of the time-dominant women who intimidated their husbands and tied their sons to their apron strings. By his last novel, Plains Song for Female Voices (1980), he showed a much more sympathetic view of three generations of N ebraska women.
Comments
Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln