Best known as a novelist and photographer, Wright Morris published fewer than forty short stories in his half-century career. Yet, from the start of his artistic life, Morris experimented with short fiction in a variety of ways, and when his strengths as a novelist gave way in the early 1980s, he wrote first-rate stories, some of which were included in The Best American Short Stories and O. Henry Award anthologies. His work as a photographer had an enormous impact on his fiction, making for an emphatically visual style and a subtle version of literary minimalism. Morris's best short stories require close attention from readers because of their frequent compilation of cumulative effects, narrative elusiveness, and occasional indeterminacy, all supporting Morris's view that human beings are complex and their experiences mysterious. Although there continues to be good criticism written on Morris's novels, photographs, and photo-texts, little commentary has been...