Morris, Wright - Delmore Schwartz (review date 1952)

Delmore Schwartz (review date 1952)

SOURCE: A review of The Works of Love, in Partisan Review, Vol. XIX, No. 3, May-June, 1952, pp. 357-58.

[In the following excerpt, Schwartz argues that The Works of Love is an incompletely realized novel.]

Innocence is the theme of Wright Morris' new novel, The Works Of Love. The hero is the truly good and truly pure man who is doomed to give all that he has and to love all that he can without receiving gift or love in return. Morris has a beautiful sympathy for this kind of human being, and he masters more and more, in each new book, the gift of a colloquial poetic style. Unlike Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein, who often wrote from the point of view which Morris has adopted in this book, he is always vivid and concrete (he has a wonderful eye for the purely American detail) where they tended to become increasingly vague or abstract or private. But something goes wrong in the...

[The entire page is 391 words long]

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