SOURCE: “The Two Worlds in the Fiction of Wright Morris,” in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXV, 1957, pp. 375-99.

In the following essay, Booth examines the roles and the meanings of heroism, imagination, and love in Morris's novels.

Wright Morris has published ten books, all of them critical successes. Many would agree with Mark Schorer that he is “probably the most original young novelist writing in the United States.” Yet nothing seems to happen, nothing, that is, of the kind that ought to happen. His books have never been taken up by “the wider public”—assuming that there is still such a thing for serious literature—and critics have left his praise almost entirely to isolated, and frequently misleading, reviews.¹

There is perhaps little point in fussing about the popular neglect; though he provides no murders, rapes, or bedroom scenes, his great gift for evoking the recent American past...