(The 52 full-page photographs and accompanying text of thi...)
The 52 full-page photographs and accompanying text of this volume make up one of the most unusual,effective and graphic treatments of the American scene and folkways ever published. "The Inhabitants" achieves a startling and remarkable fusion of photographs and words. The pictures in this volume are arresting and brilliant examples of the photographic art.
(Reproduced from the 1948 edition of The Home Place, the B...)
Reproduced from the 1948 edition of The Home Place, the Bison Book edition brings back into print an important early work by one of the most highly regarded of contemporary American Writers. This account in first-person narrative and photographs of the one-day visit of Clyde Muncy to "the home place" at Lone Tree, Nebraska, has been called "as near to a new fiction form as you could get."
(The narrator, Earl Horter, is a lyric writer who is in Ho...)
The narrator, Earl Horter, is a lyric writer who is in Hollywood with Mac, his partner, to write a musical. With two girls they have picked up and gone to Acapulco. Speaking of this 1957 novel, the author has said it ended his obsession with the reconstruction of the immediate past and moved him into the contemporary scene. The narrator, Earl Horter, is a lyric writer who is in Hollywood with Mac, his partner, to write a musical. With two girls they have picked up and gone to Acapulco.
(Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, h...)
Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, his ninetieth birthday becomes the occasion for a family gathering in the Midwestern town of Lone Tree. The unlikely celebrants take this opportunity to reconceive their visions of past, future, and family in their own grotesque and ultimately liberating ways.
(The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly ...)
The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time.
(Friday, November 22, 1963, in Escondido, California, begi...)
Friday, November 22, 1963, in Escondido, California, begins with the discovery of an infant in the adoption basket at the local animal pound. This calculated effort to shock the natives is silenced by the news from Dallas of an event calculated to shock the world. One Day is concerned with the way these two events are related and with the time that begins when conventional time seems to have stopped.
(The story of three generations of women from the Atkins f...)
The story of three generations of women from the Atkins family who settle, and farm on the middle western plains from the early years of the twentieth century to the 1970s.
(In Time Pieces, award-winning novelist and photographer W...)
In Time Pieces, award-winning novelist and photographer Wright Morris provides an introspective investigation into the relationships between photographs and text. This seminal collection of essays, on subjects ranging from portraits of pioneers in the American West to writings by Susan Sontag and Henry James, provides a kaleidoscope of "time pieces" that serve to illuminate a complex, expressive, and evolving art form.
(This volume is the first to give emphasis to Morris' cont...)
This volume is the first to give emphasis to Morris' contribution to the visual arts with matchless laser-scan reproductions of his images. They represent with elegance, clarity and precision what the camera eye, and the photographer's eye, perceive in the visible world around us.
(Edited by Morris’s long-time friend David Madden, this on...)
Edited by Morris’s long-time friend David Madden, this one-of-a-kind collection captures a man of multifarious genius. Replete with interviews, photography, a biographical sketch, suggestions for further reading, and Morris’s inimitable writing, this compendium is an indispensable resource for those who wish to understand and appreciate the brilliance and virtuosity of one of America’s true talents.
Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and photographer who often wrote about the Midwestern prairie where he grew up. Pairing photographs with his own writing, Morris pioneered a new tradition of “photo-texts” in the 1940s that proved highly influential to future photographers.
Background
Wright Morris was born on January 6, 1910, in Central City, Nebraska, and the Nebraska plains are the setting for much of his work. His mother, Grace Osborn Morris, died within days of his birth, leaving Morris "half an orphan." His father, Will Morris, was a traveler and "wanderer" who often left Morris in the care of neighbors. During Morris's childhood the family lived in several Nebraskan towns finally settling in Omaha from 1919 to 1924. While he lived in Omaha, Morris spent two summers on his Uncle Harry and Aunt Clara's farm near Norfolk, Nebraska. Both his Uncle Harry and his Aunt Clara appear in his writing.
Education
Morris briefly attended the Adventist-run Pacific Union College in California. He later attended Pomona College in California, graduating in 1933.
After graduation Wright Morris traveled throughout Europe, purchasing his first camera in Vienna. Morris returned to California in 1934 determined to become a writer, but also continued to photograph. In 1935, he bought a Rolleiflex camera and began photographing extensively. Morris first exhibited his photo-texts in 1940, at the New School for Social Research in New York. That same year the Museum of Modern Art purchased prints for their collection and New Directions published images that would become his first book.
In 1942, Morris received the first of his three Guggenheim Fellowships, funding the completion of The Inhabitants. Published by Scribners, The Inhabitants (1946) documented domestic scenes of the South, Midwest, and Southwest and although visually influential enjoyed little financial success. His second photo-text book, The Home Place (1948) was a visual novel, with short fictional prose accompanying each photograph. Although groundbreaking, it remained unmarketable and after its publication Morris invested in his more successful career as a writer. Morris continued to write and publish while teaching English and creative writing from 1962 - 1974 at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, California.
The Museum of Modern Art proved supportive of Morris throughout his career, both exhibiting and purchasing his work. MoMA curator John Szarkowski prompted a reconsideration of Wright Morris with the publication of God’s Country and My People (1968), widely considered Morris’s most successful photo-text book. Morris’s exhibition career burgeoned in his later years with many shows including Wright Morris: Origin of a Species, a 1992 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and following his death, Distinctly American: The Photography of Wright Morris at Stanford’s Cantor Center of Art in 2002.
The Wright Morris archive contains 357 vintage prints (printed by Morris and under his supervision); a portfolio of 12 modern prints published by the Witkin Gallery in 1981; about 500 work prints; and photographic materials including black and white film negatives in a variety of formats, color 35mm slides, videotapes, and a small selection of portraits of Morris and his wife, Josephine Kantor.
Morris continued writing after he retired from teaching. In his final novel, Plains Song: For Female Voices, Morris returned to his Nebraskan roots, tracing three generations of a Nebraska farm family. Morris lived with his second wife Josephine Mary Kantor in Mill Vallery, California, until he died in 1998.
Achievements
Wright Morris 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. Morris won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision in 1956. His final novel, Plains Song won the American Book Award in 1981. His short stories have been cited by the O. Henry Awards and are regularly included in the Best American Short Stories anthologies.
In his writings Wright Morris sought to recapture the American past and portray the frustrations of contemporary life. Morris’s poetic images exist in a fictional narrative, but reference documentary style. All his fiction is imbued with a strong sense of place. In most of Morris's fiction a hero figure attracts witnesses to his antic behavior, activating elements of a time and place that cause the witnesses to release suppressed emotions and to make connections between people and objects that help them define their identity.
Quotations:
“We make to ourselves pictures of facts. The picture is a model of reality.”
Membership
National Institute of Arts and Letters
American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Connections
Wright Morris was married to Mary E. Finfrock since 1934 but the couple divorced in 1961. After that he married Josephine Kantor in 1961.
