SOURCE: “The Outsider as Sexual Center: Wright Morris and the Integrated Imagination,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. XVIII, No. 1, Spring, 1986, pp. 66-73.

In the following essay on Morris's novel In Orbit, Bredahl examines “the outsider” as a sexual force infusing creative energy into the lives of Indiana townspeople who have become static in their habits.

When the narrator of Wright Morris' In Orbit tells us that his joyfully named protagonist, Jubal E. Gainer, “makes old things new,”¹ he places Jubal in what to Morris is a mainstream of American life: “Pound may have been the first to give the thrust of doctrine to the American instinct to make it new. In so doing he gave official sanction to what came naturally to the natives. In the new world where so much had to be made, or remade, making it new was both an aptitude and a necessity...