Wright Morris

American

1910, Central City, Nebraska
1998, Mill Valley, Bay Area

American novelist, photographer, and essayist Wright Morris reads prose poem accompaniments to selected photographs from his works The Home Place (1948), The Inhabitants (1946), and God's Country and My People (1968).

Audio Stories

Morris’s pioneering work with images and text

Show TranscriptHide Transcript

transcripts

NARRATOR:

Wright Morris was, in many ways, an artist ahead of his time—a published photographer who was also an award-winning writer. For Morris, these images, spare and seemingly uninhabited, called forth a people who had disappeared. He evoked these people in a rich and textured prose. Morris’s two pioneering photo-text books, The Inhabitants and The Home Place, predated the rise of the Web by fifty years. But he lived to see computers effortlessly fuse image, text, and sound, and to proclaim:

MORRIS:

If anyone was ever invented for this ridiculous piece of machinery, I’m the one.

Read MoreCollapse

Works in the Collection

See All

Please note that artwork locations are subject to change, and not all works are on view at all times.

Only a portion of SFMOMA's collection is currently online, and the information presented here is subject to revision. Please contact us at collections@sfmoma.org to verify collection holdings and artwork information. If you are interested in receiving a high resolution image of an artwork for educational, scholarly, or publication purposes, please contact us at copyright@sfmoma.org.

This resource is for educational use and its contents may not be reproduced without permission. Please review our Terms of Use for more information.