Wright Morris (right) signing his books in the Heritage Room.A new Heritage Room display on the second floor of Bennett Martin Public Library in downtown Lincoln celebrates author Wright Morris. Morris gained critical acclaim as a novelist and as a photographer. He received a National Book Award twice, in 1957 for The Field of Vision , looking at how a visit to a Mexican bullfight alters the lives of a group of Nebraska tourists, and in 1981 for Plains Song.
Photography and fiction were equally important in Morris' extraordinary life-long effort to capture the soul of the Midwest. In 1942 and again in 1946 Morris won a Guggenheim fellowship to support his photographic projects. The support enabled him to return to Nebraska and to produce his first two photo-texts, The Inhabitants, and The Home Place. These ground-breaking works, combining photography and fiction, have been recognized as an attempt to create an entirely new literary form. In honor of the 100th Anniversary of Wright Morris's birth, the Nebraska Center for the Book has chosen The Home Place as the One Book, One Nebraska book for 2010. The Lone Tree Literary Society in Morris's birthplace, Central City Nebraska, will host many of this year's One Book One Nebraska activities.
Our display (snapshot above) includes signed Wright Morris posters, books and other memorabilia. Heritage Room archival collections include the Wright Morris-Victor Musselman correspondence and several original Morris prints. Wright Morris developed a close friendship with Loren Eiseley when when both men lived in the same building in Philadelphia in the late 1940s. Gale Christianson's interviews and correspondence with Morris are in our Gale Christianson Collection of Eiseley Research Materials
New acquisitions over the last few months include these titles among others:
Lisa Norman, Haythorn Land & Cattle Co., A Horseman's Heritage. A pictorial essay by Lisa Norman. (introduction by Red Steagall). Kansas City: Trabon Printing, 2007. This coffee table book explores ranch history and work life through the seasons on the famed Sandhills ranch founded by Harry Haythornthwaite and his wife Emma in 1884.
Heritage Room uncatalogued holdings include Nebraska photographer Charles Guildner's album of photographs, Lives of Tradition, Vol. 2, Scenes. (9 in a limited edition of 20), also with some scenes from the Haythorn ranch.
John Janovy, Jr. Pieces of the Plains: Memories and Predictions from the Heart of America. Lincoln: J&L Lee Co., 2009. John Janovy, Jr. is one of Nebraska's human treasures, a distinguished scientist who has also written for broader audiences. Seeking to show us what "there is to learn from nature rather than about nature," Janovy is the author (and illustrator) of some of the most admired books and essays in American natural history, among them, Keith County Journal, Return to Keith County, and Dunwoody Pond: Reflections on the High Plains Wetlands and the Cultivation of Naturalists. He has often written about how young people learn, and about the philosophical and social consequences of our contested and evolving understanding of nature and our place in it. This is a very personal book about the issues Janovy cares most about.
The Loren Eiseley Reader, published by the Loren Eiseley Society, 2009, with an introduction by Ray Bradbury is intended to remind us of the work of the anthropologist, essayist, and poet, and to introduce that work to a new generation. Eiseley, who grew up in Lincoln and attended the University of Nebraska, was a pioneer in asking us to reconsider our place in the natural world and think about the limits of our scientific and technical mastery. Eiseley was a brilliant essayist, with a capacity to pull his readers into his own inward experience of nature, his "night country" and then carry them along along on his journey into a new scientific and humanistic understanding of the waking world. The Reader is a collection of short pieces and excerpts from Eiseley's best known works.
Mari Sandoz, Capital City, a new edition with an introduction by Nebraska born writer Terese Svoboda. (Lincoln: Bison Books, 2007). This new (to our collection) paperback edition has a wonderful period cover photograph that could remind us, as Ms. Svoboda does, that when Sandoz was writing this in Lincoln in the late 1930s, some Lincoln families were finding their food at the municipal dump. Capital City contains some of Sandoz's most angry writing.
Kwakiutl L. Dreher, Dancing on the White Page: Black Women Entertainers Writing Autobiography (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), explores the popular autobiographies of well known Black women entertainers, including Diahann Carroll, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Whoopi Goldberg, and Mary Wilson. The author was our February "Lunch at the Library" speaker.
George E. Hyde, Rangers and Regulars (Columbus, Ohio: Long's College Books, 1933, 1952). New to our collection, this book surveys Spanish, Mexican and American conflicts with the mounted Southern Plains Indians, especially the Comanches. Omaha resident Hyde was a prodigious researcher with a deep interest in Native American history and contacts in many tribes. Legally blind, he was sought out by George Bird Grinnell and assisted Grinnell in researching books on the Cheyenne and the Pawnee. He wrote several early tribal histories and was an early explorer in the field now known as ethnobotany. Having obtained and cultivated many of the old varieties of Indian corn, he was co-author with George F. Will of Corn Among the Indians of the Upper Missouri, published in 1917.
