Wright Morris

Hardcover,  592 pages ISBN: 0-87685-991-0 1995, $31.95 Softcover,  592 pages ISBN: 0-87685-990-2 1995, $18.95   The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer by Wright Morris “He 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. He may be the only guide we have.” —Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, Chicago Tribune Book World The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer brings together two of Wright Morris’s best-known novels, The Works of Love (1951) and The Huge Season (1954). The Works of Love tells the story of Will Brady, a kind-hearted man who builds a successful egg business, willfully loses it, then lives on the road as a migrant worker. Brady is self-destructively drawn to a series of hardened women, and his failed relationship with each progressively wears away his resiliency but not the core of his inexplicable hopefulness. The Huge Season presents scenes from the life of Peter Foley, a middle-aged professor of classics. As one of his old friends testifies before McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Foley recalls their shared college years and the political education they received from their charismatic, wealthy, and doomed classmate Charles Lawrence. Through its juxtaposition of the two unsettled periods in Foley’s otherwise staid life, Morris explores themes of collective response and personal responsibility, of calculated deference to authority and unexpected, private epiphanies, of public misconstruction and personal regret. “The Huge Season . . . seems to me his best novel. [Its] remarkable quality is the way in which the feel of the Twenties is captured and the way in which it dominates the characters into the Fifties . . . One has the sense here not only of the rich young man as sacrificial hero but also of the enacting of a ritual of exorcism to which all associated with the hero must submit.” —Walter Allen, The Modern Novel   Hardcover,  310 pages ISBN: 0-87685-945-7 1994, $26.95 Softcover,  310 pages ISBN: 0-87685-944-9 1994, $14.95   Two for the Road: Two Short Novels by Wright Morris Two for the Road brings 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. Man and Boy is the story of a woman, Mrs. Violet Ames Ormsby, whose overbearing personality permits only two responses from the men in her life – acquiescence or rebellion. Although her husband self-effacingly defers to her, her son, Virgil, acts out against her; indeed, he frustrates her grand intentions for him by dying heroically in the Second World War. In In Orbit, a small Indiana town is struck by an uncontrollable force of nature: a delinquent draft-dodger named Jubal Gainer. Gainer rides into town “his arms high and wide, his ass light in the saddle of a stolen motorcycle,” and within twenty-four hours has raped a half-witted woman and stabbed a storeowner, not with any premeditation, but because they happened to cross his path. Each taking his own turn, the stunned townspeople tell the story of “the day the tornado hit” as if they were members of an ancient Greek chorus. Softcover, 332 pages ISBN: 0-87685-923-6 1993, $14.95   Three Easy Pieces: Three Short Novels by Wright Morris Here are three of Wright Morris’s most memorable explorations of old age: The Fork River Space Project (1977), Fire Sermon (1971), and A Life (1973). Fork River, Kansas, was established in the 1870s by a railroad tycoon as a gift for his young bride. Never populous, it is now, in 1977, a ghost town––or it would be if it weren’t for the presence of Kelcey, an elderly writer, Alice, his young wife, and Dahlberg, the independent contractor who keeps their water running, their porch painted, and their married life unpredictable. In town, the shops have closed one by one, their proprietors disappearing, as it were, into thin air. Did they find better prospects elsewhere? Or were they abducted by space aliens? Kelcey thinks the latter, but what does the old man know? He can’t even see that Alice is being abducted from him by the hired help... In Fire Sermon, Morris returns with a more mature sensibility to the premise of his first novel, My Uncle Dudley (1942). A ten-year-old boy named Kermit accompanies his eighty-two-year-old guardian, Uncle Floyd, from their trailer home in California to a small town in Nebraska for the funeral of Floyd’s only surviving sibling, Viola. Along the way, Floyd picks up a hitchhiking hippie couple named Stanley and Joy, and is disturbed by the realization that his nephew has more in common with them than with him. After Viola’s old house, a storehouse of family artifacts, burns to the ground, Floyd, cut free from his past and ready for death, abandons Kermit to an uncertain future with Stanley and Joy. “Morris's unique ability to explore human destiny in a subtle, self-effacing style is as strong as ever in this poignant and amusing little book.” —Newsweek A Life (1973) is the sequel to Fire Sermon, revealing what lies in store for Floyd after he has disappeared into the open, empty spaces of Nebraska. The aging, uprooted Floyd, now unmoored in time, indulges in an unhurried but intensely nostalgic reconstruction of his family’s and his own past. When he befriends Mr. Blackbird, a transient Indian, Floyd is doomed by his inability (or his unwillingness) to focus on the present and to contemplate a future for himself. Or has he introduced himself to Blackbird as a way of speeding along his own wished-for demise?   Softcover,  488 pages ISBN: 0-87685-908-2 1993, $17.95 Writing My Life: An Autobiography by Wright Morris “Nothing in my experience of such memoirs is quite like it.” —David Madden “It is written with such verve and zest that I bow down.” —Wallace Stegner Writing My Life brings together in one volume the acclaimed memoirs of the National Book Award-winning writer Wright Morris. Will’s Boy (1981) is Morris’s account of his early-twentieth-century Nebraska childhood, a world of lampglow and shadow through which he is steered by his widower father, a ne’er-do-well, womanizer, and man in a hurry (“He always took his meals with his hat on”). Starting out from urban Central City, the inarticulate pair travel to Texas to work a Dust Bowl farm, and then to California, where young Wright is educated in YMCA camps, department store stockrooms, and at a hammer-and-tongs evangelical school. “Morris is very much alive to the comic possibilities in his father's life and his own childhood — but like a good Westerner, he prefers to tell the story with a straight face. He is even more aware of the serious possibilities of life, but what really interests him is the growth of awareness. The book begins in a kind of imagism — the random impressions of a small boy — and gradually becomes clear and narrative and orderly as the boy grows up. Despite the very different kind of childhood described, the book has much in common with Henry James's Notes of a Son and Brother and much with Wordsworth's Prelude.” —Noel Perrin, New York Times Solo (1983) is subtitled “An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933-34,” and tells the tale of a provincial, 23-year-old tramp abroad, hungry and penniless, riding the rails across the continent and generally having a crummy time of it. “Why do we read with such relish if the author doesn’t grow or even react to his experiences all that dramatically? Because of the details. A washer attached to a pipestem, "green as the bit in the mouth of a horse," that enables a train conductor to talk without removing his pipe from his mouth; the bright red earmuffs worn by the chauffeur of the Austrian castle’s master; an acquaintance's suit worn so thin at the knees that his underwear shows through when he is seated — such details, recalled from half a century ago, are set down as in an intricate still life composed with deadpan humor. The more you look the more you see, and the more you see the more you delight.” —Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times A Cloak of Light (1985) is one writer’s meditation on the relation between art and life – his own art, his own life. It is “a droll, delightful, and richly quotable book Mr. Morris -- one of the most persistent, tenacious, crafty, and craftsmanlike of contemporary American writers -- recounts his own pilgrimage along the open yellow road of American optimism. Rather than describe in detail his career as a writer he concentrates on the essential self-shaping of his life, with quotations from his many novels and essays serving as commentary on the personal history. Through writing he strives to make sense of his own life and of American lives in general, and to save and recapture what might otherwise be forgotten.” —Edward Abbey, New York Times