Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Morris, Wright - Reginald Dyck (essay date 1990)

Reginald Dyck (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: “Revisiting and Revising the West: Willa Cather's My Ántonia and Wright Morris's Plains Song,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 25-38.

[In the following essay, Dyck discusses attitudes towards the pioneer experience of the American west as depicted in Willa Cather's My Antonia and Morris's Plains Song.]

The best days are the first to flee.

—Willa Cather

Is the past a story we are persuaded to believe, in the teeth of the life we endure in the present?

—Wright Morris¹

Revisionist Historian Patricia Limerick opens The Legacy of Conquest with a photograph, quotation, and commentary about tin cans, hardly a heroic entrance into the history of the West. From these apparently ubiquitous artifacts of the frontier she draws this conclusion: the past,...

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