The Inhabitants by Wright Morris

First published: 1946; revised, 1971

Type of work: Cultural anthropology

Time of work: The early 1940’s

Form and Content

Wright Morris has had a lengthy, productive career as an American novelist. Beginning with My Uncle Dudley (1942), he has shown the often-comic struggle of Americans, mostly Midwesterners and Californians, to understand the complexities of a bewildering, ever-changing, hostile world. Among the many awards Morris’ fiction has received are the National Book Award, for The Field of Vision (1956), and the American Book Award, for Plains Song: For Female Voices (1980). Morris has also written an extensive amount of nonfiction, including autobiography and essays about literature, culture, and society. His most unusual books are his “photo-texts,” works combining short passages of impressionistic prose with photographs.

Morris, as he recounts in A Cloak of Light: Writing My Life (1985), became seriously interested in photography in the mid-1930’s, at the same time he began trying to write fiction. He writes in the preface to the revised edition of The Inhabitants that he wanted to use his camera to salvage what he valued of a rapidly disappearing America. His original plan was to combine words and pictures in a series of five books dealing with the movement of American life from the farm to the small town to the city. The first of these, as he explains in Photographs and Words (1982), was to be “a survey of the state of the union in terms of its threatened symbols.”

In the fall of 1940, Morris set out to photograph as much of the United States as he could with his limited funds. He experienced numerous adventures on his journey, including being arrested as a vagrant and possible spy in Greenville, South Carolina, and being shot at on a farm in Pike County, Alabama, before returning home to select the photographs he wanted to publish and to write the appropriate prose. He completed the project in 1942, but World War II restrictions prohibited any publisher’s consideration of such an expensive undertaking. In the meantime, Morris published his first two novels and, at the end of the war, approached Maxwell Perkins, a legendary editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, with his photo-text project. Perkins was skeptical but amused by Morris’ enthusiasm, and the young writer hung his photographs on the walls of the editor’s office, asking him to keep them there two weeks and see how his visitors responded.

Scribner’s agreed to published The Inhabitants, but neither it nor Morris’ subsequent photo-text, The Home Place (1948), sold well since reviewers, booksellers, and the general reading public were puzzled by the format. As a result of the failure of these books, Morris waited twenty years before producing his next photo-text. By that time, such experimentation was more commonplace, and God’s Country and My People (1968), which employed the same format and some of the same photographs as The Inhabitants, was better received. Morris’ first photo-text using color photographs, Love Affair: A Venetian Journal (1972), soon followed.

The Inhabitants consists of fifty-two unnumbered pages of black-and-white photographs of houses, barns, stores, churches, and related artifacts. These photographs, taken all over the country, are of varying sizes, with most covering half to three-quarters of a page. Facing each photograph is a prose passage of half a page or less. Each passage after the first has a heading, and many of these headings form a unified series linking the passages. The prose is sometimes a description of a character or a scene, sometimes dialogue (without quotation marks) spoken by voices representing the regional and ethnic diversity of the United States. The words are not intended to explain the pictures and the photographs do not illustrate the text, though the media seem to match in a few instances. Morris merely intends the two to complement each other.

Morris’ purpose is stated in his dedication: “For the Inhabitants, who know what it is to be an American.” There are epigraphs from Henry David Thoreau and Rainer Maria Rilke. Thoreau provides the book’s title in his description, from Walden (1854), of the connection between the “architectural beauty” of buildings and “the life of the inhabitants whose shells they are.” Rilke explains how love consists of two solitudes protecting, touching, and greeting each other. The Rilke quotation applies both to the relationship between Americans and their dwellings and to that between Morris’ words and his photographs.

Critical Context

Because the photographs in The Inhabitants were taken at the end of the Depression and show the physical effects of economic disaster, including the ravages of the Dust Bowl, the book might be expected to be little more than a document of its time. Because of the emphasis on style, both verbal and pictorial, however, that is not the case. Morris, nevertheless, admits being influenced by Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), the classic study of the era with text by James Agee and photographs by Walker Evans. He named Agee Ward, the protagonist of The Man Who Was There, after Agee, and his photographs have often been compared with those of Evans—as well as with those of Eugene Atget, Russell Lee, Paul Strand, Diane Arbus, Robert Adams, and Minor White. Morris’ goal in The Inhabitants goes beyond his era to encompass a timeless sense of a country. He attempts to emulate, on a smaller scale, Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Democratie en Amerique (1835-1840; Democracy in America, 1835-1840), and, especially, Henry James’s The American Scene.

The Inhabitants has received much more critical attention from Morris scholars than from experts in photography or Americana. These commentators see it as a work that attests the variety of Morris’ art. They see it as a minimalist version of his writings as a whole. They acknowledge, however, the book’s weaknesses. For G.B. Crump, too many of the voices exhibit a sentimental folksiness of which the mature Morris would purge himself, and Crump is also unable to perceive the mysticism in the photographs. Leon Howard considers Morris too ambitious, since explaining what it is to be an American is impossible. David Madden wishes that The Inhabitants, The Home Place, and the latter’s sequel, without photographs, The World in the Attic (1949) could have been combined in one volume to create a more successful blend of fact and fiction. Such a volume would also make clearer what Morris is saying about America’s shift from farm to town to city.

Because The Inhabitants is not all that it could have been, however, hardly means that it is a failure. Thomas Mann praised the book in a letter to Morris: “What these courageous pictures show is the harsh beauty of ugliness, the romanticism of the commonplace, the poetry of the unpoetical.” Behind the “slang-like anti-rhetoric, the anti-aestheticism of its texts,” the German novelist discovered “a social and spiritual democratic tendency.”

Bibliography

Crump, G. B. The Novels of Wright Morris: A Critical Interpretation, 1978.

Howard, Leon. Wright Morris, 1968.

Knoll, Robert E., ed. Conversations with Wright Morris: Critical Views and Responses, 1977.

Madden, David. Wright Morris, 1964.

Wydeven, Joseph J. “Consciousness Refracted: Photography and the Imagination in the Works of Wright Morris,” in Midamerica. VIII (1981), pp. 92-114.

Wydeven, Joseph J. “Images and Icons: The Fiction and Photography of Wright Morris.” In Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, 1985. Edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum.

Wydeven, Joseph J. “Photography and Privacy: The Protests of Wright Morris and James Agee,” in Midwest Quarterly. XXIII (Autumn, 1981), pp. 103-115.