SOURCE: “‘A Pact with the Bygone’,” in The New York Times, November 24, 1991, p. 20.

In the following review, Franck praises a collection of Morris's Nebraska photographs.

The pull of things past is felt at surprising times and in unexpected ways. The act of dipping a small, sweet cake in a cup of herb tea elicited volumes of prose from Proust; the smell of pickling beets coming from a Nebraska kitchen released a powerful longing in the American novelist and photographer Wright Morris, which he spent years transforming into images and words. Mr. Morris has attempted before, not always successfully, to use his photographs to complement his writing, as another way of evoking the rural life he remembers from his Nebraska boyhood. In editing Photographs & Words, James Alinder, a photographer and a frequent collaborator with Mr. Morris, has reproduced the photographs in rich black-and-white tones, thereby revealing strengths that earlier...