Wright Morris's Earthly Delights, Unearthly Adornments turns, in a backward glance that he deftly links to Whitman's, to survey glancingly but surely his own career and the course of American writing in the context of a popular culture that threatens the life of the imagination.

Morris's procedure, as often as not, is to present a telling though seemingly unexceptional quotation, without identifying the work or the author until casually mentioning it later, so as to fix attention on the language at work, and the aptness of the countless quotations is one of the book's striking features. If he runs the dangers of the nostalgia tempting American writers that he warned against in his earlier The Territory Ahead, he nevertheless minimizes its risks and manages to celebrate the possibilities for American writing that he thinks persist into his own time. (p. 283)

Morris is chiefly interested in a process that...