SOURCE: “Wright Morris: Living in the World,” in New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon, The University of North Carolina Press, 1989, pp. 126-34.

In the following essay, Bredahl examines how Morris “establishes contact with the energy of living processes” in his novels.

Poststructuralist criticism responds to the modernist sense of alienation by rejecting the assumption of essential individuality. Replacing the belief in essences has been the assertion of codes and texts with and within which man operates. From that perspective, the effort of Ernest Hemingway or Harvey Fergusson to place the individual within a world of creative force is both invalid and naive.

However, … not all American imaginations operate on the basis of eastern assumptions. In the West and the Midwest, where land and life in a physical world are central, individuals seek to align the patterns of their lives to complement the patterns within the...