Wright Morris

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Wright Marion Morris (born January 6, 1910 in Central City , Nebraska , † April 25, 1998 in Mill Valley , California ) was an American photographer and writer of novels , short stories and essays .

Life

Wright Morris was born on January 6, 1910 to William Henry and Grace Osborn Morris. She died a few days after the birth of her son. He moved frequently with his father and lived in cities like Schuyler and Kearney . Often in the care of neighbors or nannies, Morris moved to Omaha in 1919 with his father and stepmother Gertrude , where they lived until 1924. During this time he spent two summers with his uncle and aunt on their farm in Norfolk . Photographs of the farm and the figures that correspond to their real relatives can be found in his later works The Home Place (1948) and The World in the Attic (1949). In 1924 he moved to Chicago with his family . Later, a short stay in California, which he spent with his father, should inspire his work My Uncle Dudley (1942). After briefly attending the Adventist- run Pacific Union College , he went to Texas to work on his uncle Dwight Osborn's farm. Back in California, he attended Pomona College until 1933 . However, he dropped out of this course without a degree. In 1934, after returning from a trip to Europe, during which his money was stolen in Paris and he was arrested in Italy, he married his first wife, Mary Ellen Finfrock , with whom he was married until 1961. His second marriage to Josephine Kantor (1927–2002) lasted until his death. Wright Morris died on April 25, 1998 at the age of 88.

Career

In the mid-1930s, Morris began to take a serious look at photography and writing. In 1936, so-called Photo-Texts were created for the first time, i.e. a combination of photographs with short accompanying prose texts . Travels across the United States and overseas visits inspired these works. He had his first exhibition at the New School for Social Research in 1941 and the first published photo-text The Inhabitants appeared in 1946. In the same year Wright Morris received the second Guggenheim Fellowship for photography after 1942 , the financial support of which made it possible for him to continue traveling around the country. Between 1944 and 1954 he lived in Pennsylvania , then again in California and overseas, especially in Mexico , Greece and Venice . Between 1963 and 1975 he took on a teaching position at San Francisco State University . During this time, his writing activity increased and many novels were written that are among his main works.

Criticism of his works

In the United States, it is primarily his work that describes life in the Midwest that he is known for. Travels of more than 15,000 miles across the United States were his source of inspiration. He himself said: "I am not a regional writer, but the characteristics of this region have conditioned what I see, what I look for, and what I find in the world to write about." In spite of its extensive list of publications and its awards, literary reviews are rather rare. John W. Aldridge suspected in his work Devil in the Fire that it was precisely the subject of the Midwest that was too out of date to attract much attention. Or as the publicist Henry L. Mencken put it, referring to the work of Willa Cather , who used a topic comparable to that of Morris: “I don't care how well she writes, I don't give a damn what happens in Nebraska “(In German: I don't care how well she writes, I don't give a damn what happens in Nebraska. ). Morris' works are not, however, a mere description of life in the Great Plains. Rather, he proves in his works that he has a good gift for observation of American culture. The Midwest is the linchpin of his self-created microcosm. As a "center" of the United States, under the influence of East and West, are the Great Plains , however, small towns and large cities such as Omaha or Chicago the ideal Handlungsort for his literary works are in this -. - also figuratively mid- act the " Midwesterners "as average Americans and their families become" the type of the American family par excellence ". Morris uses existing "raw material" - a central term in the criticism of his works, which he also liked to use himself - refines it, "but leaves it raw enough to look real". Under this premise, the statements made about the place of action can be transferred to the larger context, the USA. Even the works, the actions of which are not directly located in the Midwest, show a connection to the latter through certain characters and storylines (cf. Zirkel, 1977, p. 36 ff). Gail Bruce Crump also recognizes a close interweaving between the characters, the plot and this very cultural observation. But, he argues, the focus of Morris' work is partly on too fine details of human consciousness that it is too difficult to put into words. This is another possible reason for the below-average reception of his works. But it is precisely this preoccupation with topics such as time , consciousness , cliché and myth that gives Wright Morris' literary work an overarching cohesion.

In some cases, strong autobiographical elements are evident. The older works in particular play in the past and deal with traditional habits, which, however, are anachronistic and can therefore only exist as clichés in the “present” world. The “mythical” way of looking at the Midwest also plays a role here. The heroic past at the time of the conquest and the development of the continent in the second half of the 19th century contrasts with the uneventful life of the people (and the characters in Morris' novels) on the farms and small towns. However, these different developments overlap and “time is spatially experienced by the characters” (Zirkel, 1977, p. 151). For Morris, the cliché arises from the fact that these outdated ideas, including the values ​​that go with them, are transferred into the present without reflection and unchanged. He therefore advocates a change from a static concept of life to a dynamic one.

GB Crump explains that Morris did not achieve the recognition it should be in US literary history:

"That these and other unusual gifts have still not won for Morris the wide audience he deserves is finally attributable to the fact that he does not fit into any convenient category. He is both traditional and original, a chronicler of the commonplace and the bizarre, the material and the immaterial. He is a local colorist at home in a meta, physical landscape of ideas, a realist fascinated by the fictive and by characters who live a dream, a poet of the American backwaters immersed in the main currents of contemporary consciousness. "

- GB Crump

Works (selection)

Novels

  • 1942: My Uncle Dudley
  • 1951: Man and Boy
  • 1956: The Field of Vision
  • 1957: Love Among the Cannibals
  • 1960: Ceremony in Lone Tree
  • 1971: In orbit
  • 1977: The Fork River Space Project
  • 1980: Plains Song: For Female Voices

Photo texts

  • 1946: The Inhabitants
  • 1975: Structures and Artifacts: Photographs 1933-1954
  • 1989: Time Pieces: Photographs, Writing, and Memory

Autobiographies

  • 1981: Will's Boy
  • 1983: Solo: An American Dreamer in Europe
  • 1993: Writing My Life: An Autobiography

Volumes of short stories

  • 1970: Green Grass, Blue Sky
  • 1975: The Cat's Meow
  • 1984: The Origin of Sadness
  • 1986: Collected Short Stories, 1948–1986

Collections of essays

  • 1968: A Bill of Rites, a Bill of Wrongs, a Bill of Goods
  • 1975: About Fiction: Reverent Reflections on the Nature of Fiction with Irreverent Observations on Writers, Readers and other Abuses
  • 1978: Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments: American Writers as Image Makers

Prizes and awards

literature

  • Gail Bruce Crump: The Novels of Wright Morris , 1978, University of Nebraska Press, ISBN 978-0-8032-0962-6
  • Manfred Zirkel: Man and Myth. The Midwest in Wright Morris ' novels , 1977, from the series: Armin Arnold; Alois M. Haas (Ed.): Studies in German, English and Comparative Studies Volume 60, Bouvier Verlag, Bonn, ISBN 3-416-01339-5
  • Wright Morris: The Territory Ahead: Critical Interpretations in American Literature , 1978, Atheneum, New York, ISBN 978-0-8032-8100-4
  • David Madden: Wright Morris , 1964, Twayne Publishers, New York, ISBN 978-0-8084-0336-4

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wright Morris on the website of the University of Creighton ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / mockingbird.creighton.edu
  2. ^ John W. Aldridge: The Devil in the Fire. Retrospective Essays on American Literature and Culture 1951–1971 , 1972, Harper's, New York <, ISBN 978-0-06-120201-8
  3. ↑ a b c Gail Bruce Crump: Wright Morris ( Memento of the original from July 20, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www2.tcu.edu
  4. ^ Ralph Blumenthal: Wright Morris, a Novelist of the Nebraska Prairie, Dies at 88 . In: The New York Times, April 29, 1998
  5. ↑ Manfred Zirkel: Man and Myth. The Midwest in Wright Morris ' novels , 1977, from the series: Armin Arnold; Alois M. Haas (Ed.): Studies on German, English and Comparative Studies , Volume 60, Bouvier Verlag, Bonn, ISBN 3-416-01339-5
  6. ^ Leon Howard: Wright Morris from the series: University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers, No. 69, 1968, p. 6, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, ISBN 978-0-19-615478-7
  7. ^ Members: Wright Morris. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 16, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Morris, Wright
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Morris, Wright Marion (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American photographer and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 6, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Central City, Nebraska
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1998
Place of death Mill Valley , California