Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Morris, Wright - Albert J. Guerard (review date 1952)

Albert J. Guerard (review date 1952)

SOURCE: A review of The Works of Love, in Perspectives USA, No. 1, Fall, 1952, pp. 169-70.

[In the following excerpt, Guerard praises The Works of Love as a “vision of American loneliness.”]

The America of Wright Morris might seem, at a glance, as remote from a European consciousness: the Midwest and West of the early twentieth century, the baked plains and lost towns and snowy wastes of Nebraska. How explain to this European consciousness the romance of a freight train seen thirty kilometers away? Or the glamour attached to even the smallest restaurant and hotel? Or the very fact that a distant cloud of dust may mean a small town, other human beings? The Works of Love is (like Lewis' Babbitt, Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and West's Miss Lonelyhearts) a vision of American loneliness. Yet the loneliness is as depersonalized as that of Ivan Ilyích. Will...

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