Wright Morris may well be the last of our novelists to write with a sense of the whole of America in his blood and bones, to possess a vision of the country as both a physical place and a metaphysical condition. The literary tradition from which he seems most directly to descend—and it is a tradition shared with some incongruity by James, Twain, Edith Wharton, and Sherwood Anderson—may have passed on to him the materials of this vision, and it may be said to have been reconstituted in his work with very little likelihood that it will survive beyond his work. (p. 3)

Morris alone among these writers has had the distinction of preserving a creative connection with a larger and essential America. Yet even for him it is evident that the supply of nourishments has diminished; the social fabric has thinned; and his fiction has had...