Born near the ninety-eighth meridian, the borderline between short grass and tall, Midwest and West, Wright Morris can be considered the quintessential mid-twentieth-century novelist of the American Dream. In a career that spanned more than fifty years he continued inquiries begun by his fellow Midwesterners Sherwood Anderson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. His prose reflects a concern for the necessity of breaking free from nostalgia, his photographs a reverence for the meanings of American artifacts.

Wright Marion Morris was born in Central City, Nebraska, on 6 January 1910. A brother, Fayette, had died before Morris was born; his mother, Grace Osborn Morris, died within a week of his birth. His father, Will, was a wanderer who often neglected his son. In The Territory Ahead (1958) Morris says of his childhood, spent in small towns along the Platte River: “I had led, or rather been led by, half a dozen separate lives. Each...