The South today: 100 years after Appomattox

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007EKAOU/?tag=prabook0b-20

1966

The Last of the Southern Girls Hardcover

(Carol Hollywell, a Scarlett O'Hara of the 1950s, sets Was...)

Carol Hollywell, a Scarlett O'Hara of the 1950s, sets Washington, D.C., on its ear. Willie Morris's cleverly executed novel (loosely based on a real-life figure) paints a devastatingly accurate portrait, not only of a power-hungry woman, but also of the society that feeds such hunger. Morris is the author of several books, including North Toward Home and New York Days.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B010EVC6NI/?tag=prabook0b-20

1973

James Jones: A Friendship

("Willie Morris gives us a finely tuned, funny, and heartr...)

"Willie Morris gives us a finely tuned, funny, and heartrending elegy to his friend, James Jones, whose novels "From Here to Eternity" and "The Thin Red Line" immortalized the experiences of a whole generation of World War II victims and survivors. Morris, a former editor of Harper's and a prolific author in his own right, crafts a moving portrait that captures Jones's integrity, strength, and lust for life. Interwoven with recollections by Jones's colleagues, such as Irwin Shaw and William Styron, and his editors, Maxwell Perkins and Burroughs Mitchell, Morris sketches the pivotal events of Jones's life as well as small but defining moments of intimacy and compassion. Morris spins out Jones's experiences in the wartime Pacific, his storybook marriage, his self-imposed exile in Paris, and his return to East Hampton, Long Island. He also recounts Jones's race against the clock to finish Whistle, the culmination of his World War II trilogy, which Morris himself completed after his friend's death in 1977. An exquisite and lyrical rendering of an artist and his work, "James Jones: A Friendship" celebrates a rare bond that transcends both the vicissitudes of life and the finality of death."

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385144326/?tag=prabook0b-20

1978

Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home

(A collection of 21 distinguished biographical essays by o...)

A collection of 21 distinguished biographical essays by one of America's most revered authors; arranged chronologically as Willie Morris moved across America from New York City to Bridgehampton, in eastern Long Island, to Washington, D.C., as journalist in residence at the Washington Star newspaper; and finally, his return in 1980 to his native Mississippi to serve as writer in residence at Ole Miss.

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1981

Always Stand in Against the Curve, and Other Sports Stories

(Willie Morris's collection of sports stories, Always Stan...)

Willie Morris's collection of sports stories, Always Stand In Against The Curve, is a book for those of us lucky enough to have shot baskets under a driveway or shagged fly balls in open fields until it was too dark to see the hoop or the ball against the sky. In Morris's soulful point of view, sports is about growing up in America, radio broadcasts of the Brooklyn Dodgers in a Mississippi country store, girls with double names, practical jokes, small town coaches, the hold the past has on us, about running effortlessly in the sun. The novella, "The Fumble," is a sports classic about high school football in the Deep South. Set in the 1950s it describes a confrontation of mythic proportions between a small town football team from the "Delta" and the omnipotent Central High Tigers of Jackson, Mississippi. Each of the six autobiographical essays in this book form chapters of a Great American boyhood, beginning with Morris's farewells to high school and to American legion baseball, a road trip to Notre Dame with "Bevo," the University of Texas longhorn steer mascot, Rhodes scholars playing basketball in England, a writers-and-artists softball game in East Hampton, New York, in which the author admits he is too old to run the bases, and finally a journey back to Austin, Texas, in search of the past. To Willie Morris, sports are a gentle center in the eye of the storm, a clean world of instinct and action where one can work out the bruises of living, where the rituals of youth teach valuable lessons about winning and losing, about heroes and disillusionment, about finding a way to face the world.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0916242250/?tag=prabook0b-20

1983

The Courting of Marcus Dupree

(At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South rac...)

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called "southern." Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since "the Troubles" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0878055851/?tag=prabook0b-20

1992

The Last of the Southern Girls

(Carol Hollywell, a Scarlett O'Hara of the 1950s, sets Was...)

Carol Hollywell, a Scarlett O'Hara of the 1950s, sets Washington, D.C., on its ear. Willie Morris's cleverly executed novel (loosely based on a real-life figure) paints a devastatingly accurate portrait, not only of a power-hungry woman, but also of the society that feeds such hunger. Morris is the author of several books, including North Toward Home and New York Days.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807119563/?tag=prabook0b-20

1994

New York Days

(In New York Days, the long-awaited sequel to the prize-wi...)

In New York Days, the long-awaited sequel to the prize-winning North Toward Home, Willie Morris recalls his triumphant, exciting, and ultimately devastating years as the youngest ever editor-in-chief of Harper's, America's oldest magazine, when he was at the center of the nation's stunning cosmos of writing, publishing, politics, and the arts. It was the 1960s, when New York City was a place "throbbing with possibility" and "in which everyone seemed to know everyone else and where everything of importance seemed to happen first". These were Willie Morris's New York days - with William Styron, David Halberstam, Woody Allen, Bobby Kennedy, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, George Plimpton, Leonard Bernstein, and the other leading figures of the time. For he knew them all: the writers, the poets, the intellectuals, the editors, the actresses, the tycoons, the detectives, the athletes, and not a few fakirs and charlatans.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316583987/?tag=prabook0b-20

1994

My Dog Skip

(Now a major motion picture form Warner Brothers, starring...)

Now a major motion picture form Warner Brothers, starring Kevin Bacon, Diane Lane, Luke Wilson, Frankie Muniz, and "Eddie" from the TV show Frasier (as Skip), and produced by Mark Johnson (Rain Man). In 1943 in a sleepy town on the banks of the Yazoo River, a boy fell in love with a puppy with a lively gait and an intelligent way of listening. The two grew up together having the most wonderful adventures. A classic story of a boy, a dog, and small-town America, My Dog Skip belongs on the same shelf as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Russell Baker's Growing Up. It will enchant readers of all ages for years to come.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0679767223/?tag=prabook0b-20

1996

Good Old Boy and the Witch of Yazoo

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1998

Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood

(Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood is a novel for young reader...)

Good Old Boy: A Delta Boyhood is a novel for young readers about a boy's adventures growing up in post-WWII Mississippi. Author Willie Morris, then editor of Harper's Magazine in New York, wrote Good Old Boy when his son David, age ten, asked, What was it like to grow up in the South? Morris s response turned into a timeless story of growing up in a small Southern town, Yazoo City in the early 1950s, roaming the town with his friends and playing practical jokes and having adventures. Good Old Boy is supplemental reading at many schools for sixth through ninth grade.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0916242684/?tag=prabook0b-20

2000