SOURCE: “Focus and Frame in Wright Morris's The Works of Love,” in Western American Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 99-112.

In the following essay, Wydeven offers a “photographic reading” of, and shows the operation of “photographic strategies” in Morris's novel The Works of Love.

Through the dusty lace curtains at my hotel room window I spied on passersby I secretly envied, as Sherwood Anderson spied on his neighbors in Winesburg. They were dream-drugged, these people, and I envied the depth of their addiction.—

Wright Morris

The passage above, from Photographs and Words (28), might well serve as a critical epigraph to The Works of Love, a novel which has given readers and critics considerable difficulty. That Morris called this work “the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains” is appropriate, not so much because The Works of Love encapsulated his themes, but because the novel developed the...