SOURCE: A review of The Field of Vision, in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 2896, August 30, 1957, p. 517.

In the following review of The Field of Vision, the uncredited writer criticizes Morris for the novel's diction and “elaborate symbolism.”

Mr. Wright Morris's The Field of Vision won the 1957 American National Book Award, whose judges wrote, “he is the voice and conscience of provincial America.” If undistinguished prose and jargon constitute their provincial voice and conscience, they are right. Or it may be that American and English writing are now so far removed from one another that an Englishman cannot appreciate American provincial life, when described in thousands of sentences of this kind, “… you would think in a town of twelve hundred people what kids there were would all know each other, but they didn't and that was the thing about Polk …”; or, “what he felt was, when he began to...