Morris, Wright - The Times Literary Supplement (review date 1954)

The Times Literary Supplement (review date 1954)

SOURCE: A review of The Crossroads, in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 2737, July 16, 1954, p. 453.

[In the following excerpt, the unnamed reviewer notes the importance of the American landscape and “the terrible American female” in Morris's fiction.]

To read an American novel after several English ones is to rediscover with a sort of surprise the sense of place. While our own writers for the most part develop personal relationships or states of mind in a vacuum, the Americans present their vivid background almost as a deus ex machina moulding and controlling their characters' lives. Thus Mr. Wright Morris, one of the most interesting and personal of American novelists, far indeed from being simply a descriptive reporter like many of his countrymen, yet seems to suggest that the American landscape and social organization are the prime factors in his people's...

[The entire page is 381 words long]

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