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.

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award and The Home Place, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.

"Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work –which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves—Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel 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 ...

The reader of this rollicking novel, first published in 1962, accompanies forty-seven-year-old Professor Arnold Soby (regarded by his girl students as safe and acceptable, but also good fun) on a sabbatical voyage to Italy and Greece. Among Soby's shipboard companions are Miss Winifred Throop, retired head mistress of the Winnetka Country Day School; her companion and colleague, Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, teacher of French and German; and Miss Thropp's seventeen-year-old niece, Cynthia Pomero...

"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."—New York Times Book Review

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

"Laying sure hands on the daily is Wright Morris's forte. What the rest of us may have accepted too casually he sets upon with his own highly specialized focus. In this novel, more than ever, the texture of the day and hour, the fabric of speech, the pattern of action are used to show forth the humor of objects, people, places, lives, and in their deeper, more mysterious interrelations is disclosed the larger shape of tragedy."—Eudora WeltyFriday, November 22, 1963, in Escondido, C...

Best known for his novels, including the National Book Award winners The Field of Vision and Plains Song, Nebraska-born author Wright Morris has long been regarded as one of America’s most gifted writers. This volume, culling work from the photo-text books, criticism, and numerous short stories frequently overlooked among his oeuvre, reflects the true breadth of this quintessentially American artist’s talents. As such, it offers a fascinating overview of Morris’s inspirin...

"When I was a boy of eight in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, my father made the first of the many moves that would prove to be of interest to a future writer of fiction. They were east to Chicago, the point on the map where all the lines pointed. Almost twenty years would pass before I would seek to recapture the past that I had experienced.The Works of Loveis the first fruit of that effort, and the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains. The reader who has read

My Uncle Dudley is Wright Morris's first novel, originally published in 1942.

Wright Morris's "Nebraska Trilogy" (1946-49) embodies his attempt to capture and come to terms with his past. According to David Madden, in his study Wright Morris, "In The Inhabitants [a picture collection] the emphasis is on the artifacts inhabited and on the land; in The Home Place [narrative and pictures], on the inhabitants themselves; and in The World in the Attic, on what the land and the people signify to one man, Clyde Muncy, writer and self-exi...

When it first appeared in 1945, this novel disconcerted a good many critics: Agee Ward, "the man who was there" of the title, ostensibly is the man who is not there--a member of the armed forces in World War II, he has been reported missing in action. Yet as we are shown various views of Agee and how he continues to affect the lives of others—among them Grandma Herkimer and Private Reagan, who knew him in boyhood; Peter Spavic and Mrs. Krickbaum, who refuse to believe that he is m...