The Photos of Wright Morris
Photos Presented Courtesy of the Gorgen Family
“Life, raw life, the kind we lead every day, whether it leads us into the past or the future, has the curious property of not seeming real enough. We have a need, however illusive, for a life that is more real than life. It lies in the imagination. Fiction would seem to be the way it is processed into reality. If this were not so we should have little excuse for art. Life, raw life, would be more than satisfactory in itself. But it seems to be the nature of man to transform—himself, if possible, and then the world around him—and the technique of this transformation is what we call art.”
― Wright Morris, The Territory Ahead
Straightback Chair
The Home Place - 1947
"to sit on a straight-backed chair I have to lean forward, on my knees, and look at my hands or something on the floor. On the floor was a pieces of worn linoleum. The center of the pattern had been worn off, and Clara had daubed on one of her own..."
Quote from The Home Place
Gano Grain Elevator
Time Pieces, Western Kansas - 1940
"That's the way these elevators, these Great Plains monoliths, strike me. There's a simple reason, the reason for the reason, is the land and the sky. There's too much sky out there, for one thing, too much horizontal, too may lines without stops, so that the exclamation, the perpendicular, had to come."
Quote from The Home Place
Reflection in Oval Mirror
The Home Place - 1947
"Two of my mother's sisters, Winona and Violet, with Violet's husband, met me at the station in Boise. He drew me to him to look at me closely, his hands firmly gripping my shoulders. He remembered my mother but he seemed to have forgotten she had had a son. I could see in the looks they gave me that they all doubted my existence until they saw me, and I saw them. The sisters agreed that I resembled my mother. My impression of them all--the old men already dozing, the sisters with their open affectionate faces, the warmth I felt to be accepted as one of their number--restored to my mind an image of the good life that I had once glimpsed and put behind me."
Quote from Will's Boy: A Memoir
Uncle Harry
The Home Place, Norfolk, Nebraska - 1947
"Nothing Happens to a man overnight but sometimes what has been happening for years, everyday of his life, happens suddenly. You open a door, or maybe you close it, and the thing is done. It happens..."
Quote from The Home Place
Porch
God's Country and My People, Central City, Nebraska - 1947
"What made the house a home was the run-around porch, a screen that stuck or slammed, a wire basket of dead ferns, a swing that scuffed the paint off the clapboards, a rail to lean on when you threw up, a stoop to sit on when you watered the grass."
Quote from God's Country and My People