Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Morris, Wright - Joseph J. Wydeven (essay date 1988)

Joseph J. Wydeven (essay date 1988)

SOURCE: “Focus and Frame in Wright Morris's The Works of Love,” in Western American Literature, Vol. XXIII, No. 2, Summer, 1988, pp. 99-112.

[In the following essay, Wydeven offers a “photographic reading” of, and shows the operation of “photographic strategies” in Morris's novel The Works of Love.]

Through the dusty lace curtains at my hotel room window I spied on passersby I secretly envied, as Sherwood Anderson spied on his neighbors in Winesburg. They were dream-drugged, these people, and I envied the depth of their addiction.—

Wright Morris

The passage above, from Photographs and Words (28), might well serve as a critical epigraph to The Works of Love, a novel which has given readers and critics considerable difficulty. That Morris called this work “the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains” is...

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