Photographs & words
/ Wright Morris edited and with an introduction by James Alinder
- Carmel, CA : Published by the Friends of Photography , 1982
- 120 p. : illus. ; 31 cm
- Untitled ; 29 .
Early in his career, Wright Morris was called by Mark Schorer "probably the most original young novelist writing in the United States." In 1968 Leon Howard wrote: "Wright Morris has been the most consistently original of American novelists for a quarter of a century." Since then, the University of Nebraska Press has brought out new editions of his first 17 novels. Although both critical and popular appreciation of his work continues to grow slowly, there is a general consensus that he ranks high among contemporary American novelists. Born in Central City, Nebraska, the Lone Tree of his fiction, Morris attended Pomona College in California and had an academic career chiefly at San Francisco State University until his retirement in 1975. Nebraska and California have provided the main settings for his work, but he has traveled widely here and abroad, and some of his best novels relate the picaresque odysseys made by engaging characters. He wrote novels and photo-text books, which juxtapose photographs with fictional text. He won numerous awards including the 1956 National Book Award for The Field of Vision and the 1981 American Book Award for Fiction for Plains Song: For Female Voices. He died on April 25, 1998.