Wright Morris was one of the great American novelists of the mid-twentieth century and, along with Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner, one of the great writers of the American Midwestern experience. Even though most of his books are forgotten now he won two National Book Awards, one for Plains Song and the other for The Field of Vision. He wrote more than 30 books of fiction and non-fiction, including The Home Place, a fiction/documentary illustrated with his own photographs. 

“Nothing happens to a man overnight but sometimes what has been happening for years, every day of his life, happens suddenly. You open a door or maybe you close it, and the thing is done. It happens. That’s the important thing. I watched the old man in his nautical hat cross the yard like one on his harrows, the parts, unhinged, the joints creaking under a mat of yellow grass. He stopped near the planter to suck on his pipe, tap the bowl on the seat. On the spring handle of the gear was a white cotton glove, with the fingers spread, thrust up in the air like the gloved hand of a traffic cop. The leather palm was gone, worn away, but the crabbed fingers and the reinforced stitching, the bib pattern, was still there.