[The Morris novels] are not in the fashionable mode. Morris is less interested in an event, a happening, than he is in its implications. Lots of exciting events occur in his stories—tornadoes strike, bombs threaten to explode, old men die, young men assert their manhood—but we are not asked to participate in them. We are invited to search them for meaning. (p. ix)

The modern American novel is urban and peopled with sophisticated city types. Morris writes characteristically of westerners, small communities, open areas. Frequently very funny indeed, his novels are closer to the frontier tall tale than to the wisecracking anecdote of the standup comedian…. The stories suggest something of the epic sweep of the West; and like the talk of frontiersmen, the comedy and tragedy are both deadpan. Its subtlety can be missed by those whose ears are deafened by the screaming headlines of an insistent present. (p. x)

When the novels are viewed in conjunction, even as they retain their integrity they are seen to be interrelated. The Morris world is not fragmented, discontinuous, or rootless. It is of a piece. It has an overarching unity of imaginative vision.

In addition to lyric intensity and epic unity, the Morris fiction has several classic qualities. Morris considers and reconsiders only a selected number of human relationships: an old man and a boy, a middle-aged man and his old friends, a husband and his remote wife. He reuses a single situation until he has extracted its full implications. He deliberately repeats himself, for some situations seem inexhaustible to him. Like Degas, who found the ballet dancer inexhaustible as an artistic subject, Morris repeatedly returns to the dream of the American West. (pp. x-xi)

Morris is a classical writer in another sense. His novels are not judgmental. He presents his characters in their situations, but he does so without designs either on our emotions or on our convictions. The author stands dispassionately aside from his people, simply exhibiting them. We exist and they exist and together we share an imagined, created landscape. (p. xi)