Books by Wright Morris

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.

"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.