Wright Morris, an acclaimed writer and photographer, was born in 1910 in Central City, Nebraska, and the Nebraska plains are the setting for much of his work. Wright was the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships in 1942 and 1946, which led to the publication of his first two photo-texts, The Inhabitants (1946) and The Home Place (1948). In 1956 he published The Field of Vision, about a group of Nebraskans who find themselves in a bullfight arena in Mexico City, which went on to win the National Book Award. Ceremony in Lone Tree, published in 1960, returns to many of the characters in The Field of Vision, and is an accessible but intricate slice of Midwestern life. In his final novel, Plains Song: For Female Voices (1980), winner of the American Book Award, Morris returned to his Nebraskan roots, tracing three generations of a Nebraska farm family. His honors include the Mari Sandoz Award, the Robert Kirsch Award, the Mark Twain Award, the Life Achievement Award from the National Endowment of the Arts, a Whiting Award in Fiction and Nonfiction, and the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature. Morris lived with his second wife Josephine Mary Kantor in Mill Vallery, California, until he died in 1998.
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Plains SongFor Female Voices
Orion shot rabbits, but to tell the truth, it almost sickened Cora to clean and cook them. Stripped of its pelt, the taut body glistened. The small legs put her in mind of fingers. On her plate all she could think of was the pleading eyes. Somehow this did not trouble her about chickens, which she took the pains to behead herself, sometimes chasing the headless flapping bird around the chopping block. Orion plucked the bird for her, and the feathers were saved for a sleeping crib for Madge.
Plains Song:For Female Voices -
Plains SongFor Female Voices
Cora was troubled at night by the thought of the child lying in the cold earth. Had they put it in a box? Or had they merely wrapped it in the flour and sugar sacks used for dishcloths? She wanted to know, but she dreaded to hear what Belle might say. She was shocked too deeply to speak about it, yet she understood in her soul what had happened. Belle had not liked the child. She wanted to forget that it had ever existed.
Plains Song:For Female Voices -
Plains SongFor Female Voices
What would her husband think if he knew that she enjoyed it? Her pains to deceive him relaxed when it seemed clear that it hardly mattered. She had assumed it would end with her pregnancy and was part of a new bride’s remarkable sensations, but with the child born she had felt desire for her husband. That she concealed, of course, scarcely admitting it to herself. She had no way of knowing if Ned was aware of her reluctant-willing collaboration. She feared what might happen if she took the initiative. Now that she was pregnant again he turned on his side and was usually snoring while she brushed her hair. She liked his snoring. What would it be like to have a man who lay snoreless and awake?
Plains Song:For Female Voices
"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." —The New York Times Book Review [on Plains Song]
"More than any of Morris's seventeen previous novels, the story takes off from the workaday world in search of the ineffable . . . The question is never deemed worth asking, whether this life was worth living. There is nothing here of the noble Willa Cather nostalgia for a Nebraska full of giants, or the facile Hemingway nostalgia for a Michigan of pliant girls and truly good trout. By the time Floyd is murdered for his watch, he has swollen into a huge and lonely figure. His death can stand for that of the white man's America, or of the whole human race." —Time [on A Life]
"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, The New York Times Book Review [on Fire Sermon]
“[Morris] is a writer of truly astonishing beauty and power . . . Not to know Wright Morris is not to know the silent, often lovely, stretches of ourselves. In these trackless, silent landscapes of the mind, we could have no better guide than Wright Morris.” —Chicago Tribune Book World [on Wright Morris Territory]
Selected Works
- Print Books
- Powell's
- Barnes & Noble
- Alibris
- Abe Books