This book was written to explore the contribution of Revolutionary War veterans to the founding of the American republic. By veterans, we mean all those who served in the Continental and state forces, on land or sea. Twenty three of those veterans were among the men who signed the Constitution in Philadelphia on 17 September 1787. That document, as the eminent American historian Samuel Eliot Morison put it, is "a work of genius, since it set up what every earlier political scientist had thought impossible, a sovereign union of sovereign states. This reconciling of unity with diversity, this practical application of the federal principle, is undoubtedly the most original contribution of the United States to the history and technique of human liberty."

Reproduced from the 1948 edition of "The Home Place," the Bison Book edition brings back into print an important early work by one of the most highly regarded of contemporary American Writers.

This account in first-person narrative and photographs of the one-day visit of Clyde Muncy to "the home place" at Lone Tree, Nebraska, has been called "as near to a new fiction form as you could get." Both prose and pictures are homely: worn linoleum, an old man's shoes, well-used kitchen utensils, and weathered siding. Muncy's journey of discovery takes the measure of the man he has become and of what he has left behind.

The second edition of "The Complete Roadside Guide to Nebraska" represents a major enlargement and revision of the first edition, making this the most comprehensive guide to the state ever written. The book covers over twelve thousand miles in all ninety-three counties of the "state where the West begins." Here readers can become acquainted with numerous folklore tales and discover the locations of thousands of historical sites, burials, pioneer roads, museums, and other wonders of the Cornhusker State.

When Warren Howe, middle-aged TV script writer, receives an invitation to the funeral of Monsieur Dulac, he attempts to round up all the people who were guests with him three decades ago in Riva. Dulac's castle in the Austrian Alps. Neither Uncle Fremont, who 'invented the dust bowl' nor an old college friend cares to re-experience the good old days. But Sol Spiegel, a junk collector who salvages the past, is eager to return. To escape a world firmly anchored in space and bound to clock time, to re-experience the unbelievable, they go back to Riva--an imaginative creation fixed in neither time nor space, but like its master, both in and out of the world.--Saturday Review of Literature. Wright Morris has an uncommon facility for constantly shifting from past to present without confusion or annoyance to the reader. In Cause for Wonder the time shifts are faster than in The Field of Vision--and all to good purpose. They make of this novel a ghost story that needs no bed sheets and white-paint props, though a few are used.--Newsweek.One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

"In the space of one day, Jubal E. Gainer, high school dropout and draft dodger, manages to rack up an impressive array of crimes...He steals a friend's motorcycle, rapes a simple-minded spinster, mugs a pixyish professor, and stabs an obese visionary who runs a surplus store. He then waits out an Indiana twister and goes his way, leaving as much wreckage in his path as the twister itself."--Library Journal. "In Orbit is a short novel, full of action, and the seriousness can mostly be found between the lines. [There] one can see against what Jubal Gainer's rebellion, thoughtless and aimless as it seems, is directed. One might say that he is, like millions of his contemporaries, a Huck Finn without a Mississippi."-- Granville Hicks, Saturday Review. "Here is another of Wright Morris's craftsmanly novels--terse, colloquial, restrained, fragmented, deliberately shadowy. Above all, small; not slight, not inconsequential, but a miniature...All readers will surely appreciate the quality of the prose style one has come to expect in a Wright Morris novel...There is also a muscular quality to Mr. Morris's writing that makes it a suitable instrument for conveying harsher things; and there is his sense of the comic, which springs up constantly. In all, this is a quiet but rich performance."--New York Times Book Review. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Best known for his novels, including the National Book Award winners "The Field of Vision" and "Plains Song," Nebraska-born author Wright Morris has long been regarded as one of America's most gifted writers. This volume, culling work from the photo-text books, criticism, and numerous short stories frequently overlooked among his oeuvre, reflects the true breadth of this quintessentially American artist's talents. As such, it offers a fascinating overview of Morris's inspiring accomplishments in multiple genres.
While embracing the prose for which Morris is justly famous, this treasury of work also highlights his photography and other literary genres, including hard-to-find stories first published in magazines, some of which were early drafts of future novels.
Edited by Morris's long-time friend David Madden, this one-of-a-kind collection captures a man of multifarious genius. Replete with interviews, photography, a biographical sketch, suggestions for further reading, and Morris's inimitable writing, this compendium is an indispensable resource for those who wish to understand and appreciate the brilliance and virtuosity of one of America's true talents.

Floyd Warner, eighty-two, has driven from California to his childhood home in Nebraska in his antique Maxwell coupe. There he confronts the smoldering remains of this late sister's house and the realization that he is now completely alone. As though in a trance, he sets out once again, this time to find his first adult home, a dusty sheep farm in the southwest, preparing to meet the fate that ultimately awaits him. Of such deceptively simple ingredients is this brilliant portrait of the last hours of an old man's life composed. Floyd Warner, who first appeared in Fire Sermon, is perhaps the ultimate characterization in the career of a writer who has been called quite simply the best novelist now writing in America (John W. Aldridge). One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

The reader of this rollicking novel, first published in 1962, accompanies forty-seven-year-old Professor Arnold Soby (regarded by his girl students as safe and acceptable, but also good fun) on a sabbatical voyage to Italy and Greece. Among Soby's shipboard companions are Miss Winifred Throop, retired head mistress of the Winnetka Country Day School; her companion and colleague, Miss Mathilde Kollwitz, teacher of French and German; and Miss Thropp's seventeen-year-old niece, Cynthia Pomeroy, beautiful, scatterbrained, and studiously vulgar. Standing off the challenges of Italian and Swiss rivals, Soby pursues Cynthia through the waterways and plazas of Venice, the hills of Corfu, the ruins of Athens, and aboard the tiny, rolling, pitching tub "Hephaistos" in Greek waters. As is characteristic of Wright Morris's fiction, the real story develops beneath the surface of the brilliantly entertaining narrative.

"A radiant expression of the art [Wright Morris] has developed through thirty years and fourteen earlier novels. Although it is anything but preachy it will stick in the minds of the congregation for a long time. . . . On the one hand, this is a novel of alienation and on the other, a novel about the discovery of identity. The author's overall concern . . . is the destiny of man. In this novel--perhaps more clearly and movingly than ever before--he carries the reader with him, until astonishment, awe, compassion, laughter, and exultation mingle in a tragic sense of life."--Granville Hicks, "New York Times Book Review"

The ceremony of the old giving way to the new, the young breaking away from what is old, may well be the one constant in the ceaseless flux of American life. "Fire Sermon" reenacts this ceremony in the entangled lives of three young people and one old man. A chance meeting on the highway links a hippie couple to the eastward journey of an old man and a boy. For the boy it is a daily drama testing and questioning his allegiance. To which world does he belong? To the familiar ties and affections of the old or the disturbing and alluring charms of the new?

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including "The Field of Vision," which won the National Book Award.

Written twenty years before it was first published in 1972, War Games features both black and charcoal-gray humor, whose characters and events are as unpredictable as they are absorbing--a book, in the author's words, where the extremity of the bizarre is seen as the ultimate effort to change oneself, if not the world. At the center of the novel is the developing relationship between the protagonist, a fifty-three-year-old army colonel, and a Viennese immigrant whom he first knows as Mrs. Tabori and whose story he has learned through a dying amputee, Human Kopfman. Themes and characters that first appear in War Games reappear in The Field of Vision and Ceremony in Lone Tree. In the preface to this edition, Wright Morris describes the genesis of the book in 1951 and comments on its connections with his late work: War Games may well prove to be the seedbed of much more in my fiction than I am aware, since it was the first turning of earth more than twenty years buried. My novels are linked in this manner, but sometimes at odds with the chronology of publication. In the absence of War Games, many clues to the fiction that followed were missing... This novel] seems to me darkly somber, a book of interiors, dimly lighted streets, hallways and lobbies, with glimpses of objects and colors that emerge in subdued lighting. I'd like to think that my readers, both new and old, will find the world of the Colonel and Mrs. Tabori relevant to the one in which they are living. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

In Love Among the Cannibals, Wright Morris is concerned with primitive energies and his book is a genial, often very funny short novel such as D. H. Lawrence might have written if he could have been influence by John Steinbeck.--Yale Review. The narrator, Earl Horter, is a lyric writer of juke box songs. He and his partner Mac (the 'poor man's Rodgers and Hart') are in Hollywood to work on a musical. They each pick up a girl--Mac's is a Memphis belle and Earl's is a Greek goddess--and the four take a trip to Acapulco where the primitive atmosphere reveals the true worth of each.--Kirkus. A brutal comment on the wasteland of our culture, it is social criticism of the most vivid sort...Morris is more poetic in his analysis of Southern California mores than James M. Cain ever was, and is certainly funnier than Nathanael West in the classic The Day of the Locust.--. It can be debated whether in the novel--which is, by the way, highly readable, with some quite funny scenes--Mr.Morris has produced a parable of force and quality or just taken a rest from serious writing; but either way Love Among the Cannibals should have considerable interest for those who have so far constituted his audience, and a stronger appeal for those to whom he is an unfamiliar writer.--Saturday Review. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

When it first appeared in 1945, this novel disconcerted a good many critics: Agee Ward, the man who was there of the title, ostensibly is the man who is not there--a member of the armed forces in World War II, he has been reported missing in action. Yet as we are shown various views of Agee and how he continues to affect the lives of others--among them Grandma Herkimer and Private Reagan, who knew him in boyhood; Peter Spavic and Mrs. Krickbaum, who refuse to believe that he is missing; Miss Gussie Newcomb, his landlady and (to her surprise) his heir--we come to perceive what Agee had in mind when he said that anything really alive just went on and on. An odd blend of impressionistic treatment, and realism, down to a photographic accuracy of minutiae--and phonographic record of sound. The man can write.--Kirkus Reviews. Reading this book gives one the same sort of pleasure and excitement and annoyance that leafing through an album of snapshots and sketches would provide if the album were a joint production of Daguerre, Braque, Grant Wood, Mathew Brady, and the Fresno News staff photographer.--Saturday Review of Literature.One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

"Laying sure hands on the daily is Wright Morris's forte. What the rest of us may have accepted too casually he sets upon with his own highly specialized focus. In this novel, more than ever, the texture of the day and hour, the fabric of speech, the pattern of action are used to show forth the humor of objects, people, places, lives, and in their deeper, more mysterious interrelations is disclosed the larger shape of tragedy."-Eudora Welty Friday, November 22, 1963, in Escondido, California, begins with the discovery of an infant in the adoption basket at the local animal pound. This calculated effort to shock the natives is silenced by the news from Dallas of an event calculated to shock the world. One Day is concerned with the way these two events are related and with the time that begins when conventional time seems to have stopped. The events of this day, both comical and horrifying, make the commonplace seem strange, and the strange familiar. To accommodate the present, the past must be reshuffled, and events accounted for defy accounting. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

"A wryly humorous chronicle of an odyssey which The Kid--the unnamed adolescent narrator--and his Uncle Dudley make across the country in an old Marmon touring car with seven men who share expenses. The events occur in the mid-1920s, 'the Homeric phase of the gas buggy era.' . . . In the context of American fictional heritage, the passengers float down the Big Muddy on the raft, refugees from the world of Aunt Sally. Dudley and The Kid, and even the car, are archetypes--the Uncle one had, or wishes on had had; the Huck Finn some were and all would like to have been; and the car one would most like to have 'tooled' down the open road."--David Madden, Wright Morris. "A brashly picaresque novel. . . . Fast-paced, delightfully humorous, sometimes Rabelaisian."--The Nation. My Uncle Dudley is Wright Morris's first novel, originally published in 1942. One of the most distinguished American authors, Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award. Both books area available from the University of Nebraska Press.

"'Judge' Howard Potter, one of the most respected and influential citizens of a suburban town outside of Philadelphia, lies dead after a long and wearying illness. He is survived by the five people who knew him best and whose lives were deeply influenced by him...Through the thoughts and reminiscences of these five very different people Mr. Morris tells his story...[His] writing is occasionally obscure but always absorbing. He does not, like so many writers, hover omnisciently over his characters. He prefers to project himself into their innermost and very human thoughts and emotions, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions...Mr. Morris writes with wit, taste, and refreshing originality."--William Murray, Saturday Review. "Mr. Morris is a master of the exact phrase, the homely illuminating detail, and it is no accident that he is an excellent photographer...His writing is simple, but his method is as complete as his subject matter, so he uses the multiple flashback, the melting of past into present."--E.M. Scott, New York Herald-Tribune Book Review. "A thoroughly satisfying novel"--Commonweal. "A most rewarding book"--Kirkus. "His finest novel to date"--San Francisco Chronicle. "With this novel he has clearly, and for the first time, ascended into literature"--New York Times Book Review. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

In this novel, set in 1952 but intermingling the past and present, the protagonist reviews the effects of the Jazz Age on himself and a friend, recalling their exploits in college, in Paris, and in love. The result is the picture of a generation.

"I have read and admired all of Morris's books, and there is no doubt in my mind that he is one of the most truly original of contemporary writers. His originality, his absolutely individual way of seeing and feeling, permeates Man and Boy, giving it its humor and wisdom."--Granville Hicks. "For a long time I have not read a novel that gave me so much pleasure in original talent. [Morris] speaks completely in his own voice, a fascinating voice. He conveys the quality of the American gothic as no other writer I know has done."--Mark Schorer. "Mother, Mr. Morris seems to say [in Man and Boy], is unbeatable. Well, so in a way, is Mr. Morris. He writes with the skill of a master satirist; his eye is sharp and his vision is clairvoyant."--New York Herald Tribune Books. One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award and The Home Place, both available from the University of Nebraska Press.

"When I was a boy of eight in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, my father made the first of the many moves that would prove to be of interest to a future writer of fiction. They were east to Chicago, the point on the map where all the lines pointed. Almost twenty years would pass before I would seek to recapture the past that I had experienced. The Works of Loveis the first fruit of that effort, and the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains. The reader who has read The Home Place or The Field of Vision will find in this novel the crux of an experience I frequently return to but never exhaust."--Wright Morris One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Wright Morris's "Nebraska Trilogy" (1946-49) embodies his attempt to capture and come to terms with his past. According to David Madden, in his study Wright Morris, "In The Inhabitants a picture collection] the emphasis is on the artifacts inhabited and on the land; in The Home Place narrative and pictures], on the inhabitants themselves; and in The World in the Attic, on what the land and the people signify to one man, Clyde Muncy, writer and self-exiled Nebraskan. . . . What was only suggested to Muncy in The Home Place is further developed, although not entirely resolved, in The World in the Attic. . . . In it], Morris achieves the kind of objective conceptualization that is characteristic of his best novels. The first half of the book is impressionistic, a series of reminiscences like The Home Place; but the second half has a novelist narrative line. In The Home Place, the past, saturated in the immediate present, is merely alluded to. In The World in the Attic, however, the past is specifically and dramatically related to the present." One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Reproduced from the 1948 edition of The Home Place, the Bison Book edition brings back into print an important early work by one of the most highly regarded of contemporary American Writers. This account in first-person narrative and photographs of the one-day visit of Clyde Muncy to "the home place" at Lone Tree, Nebraska, has been called "as near to a new fiction form as you could get." Both prose and pictures are homely: worn linoleum, an old man's shoes, well-used kitchen utensils, and weathered siding. Muncy's journey of discovery takes the measure of the man he has become and of what he has left behind.

Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books, including The Home Place, also available in a Bison Books edition, and Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award. Charles Baxter is a professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of numerous works, including The Feast of Love.

Winner of the National Book Award "Wright Morris seems to me the most important novelist of the American middle generation. Through a large body of work --which, unaccountably, has yet to receive the wide attention it deserves--Mr. Morris has adhered to standards which we have come to identify as those of the most serious literary art. His novel The Field of Vision brilliantly climaxes his most richly creative period. It is a work of permanent significance and relevance to those who cannot be content with less than a full effort to cope with the symbolic possibilities of the human condition at the present time."--John W. Aldridge One of America's most distinguished authors, Wright Morris (1910-1988) wrote thirty-three books.

Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, his ninetieth birthday becomes the occasion for a family gathering in the Midwestern town of Lone Tree. The unlikely celebrants take this opportunity to reconceive their visions of past, future, and family in their own grotesque and ultimately liberating ways. "Ceremony in Lone Tree" is a spare and beautiful work by one of America's great postwar authors.