SOURCE: A review of The Crossroads, in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 2737, July 16, 1954, p. 453.

In the following excerpt, the unnamed reviewer notes the importance of the American landscape and “the terrible American female” in Morris's fiction.

To read an American novel after several English ones is to rediscover with a sort of surprise the sense of place. While our own writers for the most part develop personal relationships or states of mind in a vacuum, the Americans present their vivid background almost as a deus ex machina moulding and controlling their characters' lives. Thus Mr. Wright Morris, one of the most interesting and personal of American novelists, far indeed from being simply a descriptive reporter like many of his countrymen, yet seems to suggest that the American landscape and social organization are the prime factors in his people's fate.

[In The Crossroads] scene is the household of a...