[In the following review, Franck praises a collection of Morris's Nebraska photographs.]

The pull of things past is felt at surprising times and in unexpected ways. The act of dipping a small, sweet cake in a cup of herb tea elicited volumes of prose from Proust; the smell of pickling beets coming from a Nebraska kitchen released a powerful longing in the American novelist and photographer Wright Morris, which he spent years transforming into images and words. Mr. Morris has attempted before, not always successfully, to use his photographs to complement his writing, as another way of evoking the rural life he remembers from his Nebraska boyhood. In editing Photographs & Words, James Alinder, a photographer and a frequent collaborator with Mr. Morris, has reproduced the photographs in rich black-and-white tones, thereby revealing strengths that earlier publications obscured through cropping and mediocre printing. Mr. Morris briefly recounts his years as a photographer and describes a momentous visit to his aunt and uncle's Nebraska farm in the 1940's. Awakened by his “beet-pickled emotions” Mr. Morris dedicated himself to “a pact with the bygone” and to recording the symbols of a passing way of life. Of the images included here, only the first portrays a living person—his uncle, shown from the back as he wheels his tools into the barn. Mr. Morris searches for human presence in weathered farm buildings, bureau tops and barber chairs. Some of the images show farmhouse interiors with old photographs of family members. Mr. Morris's yearning for a past impossible to recover, and his good eye for revealing detail, are what animate these photos and make them compelling.