Morris, Wright

Wright Morris, in full Wright Marion Morris, (born January 6, 1910, Central City, Nebraska, U.S.—died April 25, 1998, Mill Valley, California), American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and photographer who often wrote about the Midwestern prairie where he grew up. In his writings he sought to recapture the American past and portray the frustrations of contemporary life.

Morris grew up in Nebraska. His mother died within a week of his birth, and his father was often absent. Morris roamed across the United States as a young man and then traveled in Europe, where he became interested in literature. He returned to the United States shortly before World War II started and began experimenting with both photography and prose, an effort that gained expression in works combining photographs and text. An excellent example of these is The Inhabitants (1946), which has Morris’s running commentary on Henry David Thoreau juxtaposed with his photographs of buildings expressive of history and character.

Morris’s wanderings across America in the 1920s and ’30s led to his first novel, My Uncle Dudley (1942), in which a group of people travel cross-country by car. He went on to write 19 more novels, among them The Works of Love (1951), The Field of Vision (1956), Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments (1978), and Plains Song (1980). An acute observer of American character, Morris used sharp details, subtle irony, and multiple perspectives to explore obliquely the idiosyncracies and failed lives of people from small Midwestern towns. One of his best-known books is the memoir Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe (1983), which chronicles his youthful travels in Europe. He also published essay collections and several volumes of photographs of the rural Midwest. His Collected Stories: 1948–1986 appeared in 1986, and he published Writing My Life: An Autobiography in 1993.