Writing My Life brings together in one volume the acclaimed memoirs of the National Book Award-winning writer Wright Morris.
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Will's Boy (1981) is Morris's account of his early-twentieth-century Nebraska childhood, a world of lampglow and shadow through which he is steered by his widower father, a ne'er-do-well, womanizer, and man in a hurry ("He always took his meals with his hat on"). Starting out from urban Central City, the inarticulate pair travel to Texas to work a Dust Bowl farm, and then to California, where young Wright is educated in YMCA camps, department store stockrooms, and at a hammer-and-tongs evangelical school. "Morris is very much alive to the comic possibilities in his father's life and his own childhood - but like a good Westerner, he prefers to tell the story with a straight face. He is even more aware of the serious possibilities of life, but what really interests him is the growth of awareness. The book begins in a kind of imagism - the random impressions of a small boy - and gradually becomes clear and narrative and orderly as the boy grows up. Despite the very different kind of childhood described, the book has much in common with Henry James's Notes of a Son and Brother and much with Wordsworth's Prelude." --Noel Perrin, New York Times
Solo (1983) is subtitled "An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933-34," and tells the tale of a provincial, 23-year-old tramp abroad, hungry and penniless, riding the rails across the continent and generally having a crummy time of it. "Why do we read with such relish if the author doesn't grow or even react to his experiences all that dramatically? Because of the details. A washer attached to a pipestem, "green as the bit in the mouth of a horse," that enables a train conductor to talk without removing his pipe from his mouth; the bright red earmuffs worn by the chauffeur of the Austrian castle's master; an acquaintance's suit worn so thin at the knees that his underwear shows through when he is seated - such details, recalled from half a century ago, are set down as in an intricate still life composed with deadpan humor. The more you look the more you see, and the more you see the more you delight." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
A Cloak of Light (1985) is one writer's meditation on the relation between art and life his own art, his own life. It is "a droll, delightful, and richly quotable book Mr. Morris - one of the most persistent, tenacious, crafty, and craftsmanlike of contemporary American writers - recounts his own pilgrimage along the open yellow road of American optimism. Rather than describe in detail his career as a writer he concentrates on the essential self-shaping of his life, with quotations from his many novels and essays serving as commentary on the personal history. Through writing he strives to make sense of his own life and of American lives in general, and to save and recapture what might otherwise be forgotten." --Edward Abbey, New York Times
Solo (1983) is subtitled "An American Dreamer in Europe, 1933-34," and tells the tale of a provincial, 23-year-old tramp abroad, hungry and penniless, riding the rails across the continent and generally having a crummy time of it. "Why do we read with such relish if the author doesn't grow or even react to his experiences all that dramatically? Because of the details. A washer attached to a pipestem, "green as the bit in the mouth of a horse," that enables a train conductor to talk without removing his pipe from his mouth; the bright red earmuffs worn by the chauffeur of the Austrian castle's master; an acquaintance's suit worn so thin at the knees that his underwear shows through when he is seated - such details, recalled from half a century ago, are set down as in an intricate still life composed with deadpan humor. The more you look the more you see, and the more you see the more you delight." --Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
A Cloak of Light (1985) is one writer's meditation on the relation between art and life his own art, his own life. It is "a droll, delightful, and richly quotable book Mr. Morris - one of the most persistent, tenacious, crafty, and craftsmanlike of contemporary American writers - recounts his own pilgrimage along the open yellow road of American optimism. Rather than describe in detail his career as a writer he concentrates on the essential self-shaping of his life, with quotations from his many novels and essays serving as commentary on the personal history. Through writing he strives to make sense of his own life and of American lives in general, and to save and recapture what might otherwise be forgotten." --Edward Abbey, New York Times
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Through a glass clearly,
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This review is from: Writing My Life: An Autobiography (Paperback)
This nice volume combines three of Wright Morris" autobiographical endeavors, and gives a fine description of life in Nebraska, Chicago, California, Europe and the east coast from 1910 through ca. WWII. Wright presents places and events in a straight-forward and lucid account, with some indications of having considered the personal and social undercurrents of what went on. His is a detailed account, a glance in a rear-view mirror with attention to detail and the human scenes of his growing up. It kept me turning pages and looking at the world in this period through his eyes.
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