The Deep Sleep
A Novel

" '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

One Day
A Novel

"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.

My Uncle Dudley
A Novel

"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 one 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

"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.

Man and Boy
A Novel

"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

In Orbit
A Novel

"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

The Home Place
A Novel and Photographs

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.

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