A Life

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A Life

Wright Morris

152 pages

Paperback

June 1980

978-0-8032-8106-6

$15.00 Add to Cart
eBook (EPUB)
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October 2017

978-1-4962-0261-1

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about author bio praise table of contents media awards

About the Book

Floyd Warner, eighty-two, has driven from California to his childhood home in Nebraska in his antique Maxwell coupe. There he confronts the smoldering remains of this late sister's house and the realization that he is now completely alone. As though in a trance, he sets out once again, this time to find his first adult home, a dusty sheep farm in the southwest, preparing to meet the fate that ultimately awaits him.

Of such deceptively simple ingredients is this brilliant portrait of the last hours of an old man's life composed. Floyd Warner, who first appeared in Fire Sermon, is perhaps the ultimate characterization in the career of a writer who has been called "quite simply the best novelist now writing in America" (John W. Aldridge).

Author Bio

One of the most distinguished American authors, Wright Morris (1910-1998) wrote thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, which won the National Book Award.

Praise

"More than any of Morris's seventeen previous novels, the story takes off from the workaday world in search of the ineffable. . . . The question is never deemed worth asking, whether this life was worth living. There is nothing here of the noble Willa Cather nostalgia for a Nebraska full of giants, or the facile Hemingway nostalgia for a Michigan of pliant girls and truly good trout. By the time Floyd is murdered for his watch, he has swollen into a huge and lonely figure. His death can stand for that of the white man's America, or of the whole human race."—Time

Also of Interest

Ceremony in Lone Tree

Plains Song

Wright Morris
Introduction by Charles Baxter

In Orbit

The Field of Vision