NORTH TOWARD HOME

by Willie Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 23, 1967

Willie Morris is at thirty-two the eight and youngest editor of Harper's Magazine. The name is in the family: his mother was a Harper of Mississippi, among whose forebears was the first territorial governor. Morris was born forty miles as the crow flies from the Mississippi, in Yazoo City (half hill, half delta), where his childhood was shaped by a sense of the South and the Lord Almighty. There he went to school with rednecks, walked in ""niggertown,"" feeling brave, fell in love with a blonde drum majorette. From the ""pleasant, driftless life"" of high school, his father sent him out into the world; at the University of Texas he discovered ""the presence of books,"" and pressure placed on newspaper editors. After four years at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he returned to Texas to work on the Observer; from this vantage point he felt ""the pull of Johnson's journey to power (later an appointment was not forthcoming: ""Those Observer boys were never kind to me""). Then came the move to the Big Cave, the break into publishing (the literary world of New York in the 1960's: ""Mean as hell""). A feeling for people and places and principles, a sense of roots and regionalism transferred and transmuted--the experience of an individual and a generation.

Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1967

ISBN: 0375724605

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION