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).

Morris’s pioneering work with images and text

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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.

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Wright Morris

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