North Toward Home - Hardcover

Morris, Willie

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1578062667 ISBN 13: 9781578062669

Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi, 1999

Synopsis

With his signature style and grace, Willie Morris, arguably one of this country's finest Southern writers, presents us with an unparalleled memoir of a country in transition and a boy coming of age in a period of tumultuous cultural, social, and political change.

In North Toward Home, Morris vividly recalls the South of his childhood with all of its cruelty, grace, and foibles intact.  He chronicles desegregation and the rise of Lyndon Johnson in Texas in the 50s and 60s, and New York in the 1960s, where he became the controversial editor of Harper's magazine.  North Toward Home is the perceptive story of the education of an observant and intelligent young man, and a gifted writer's keen observations of a country in transition. It is, as Walker Percy wrote, "a touching, deeply felt and memorable account of one man's pilgrimage."

About this title

From the Publisher:

Willie Morris always wrote from the heart and with a generosity of spirit. His first book, North Toward Home, was published to extraordinary acclaim in 1967. It was to be his signature work, a memoir on which all his other books would pivot. In North Toward Home he found his voice and discovered his identity.

This self-styled "autobiography in mid-passage" is one man's emotional journey to understanding his own southern origins while reluctantly coming to regard the North as home. As Morris chronicles his own experiences during the nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties he also explains their relationship to the larger contemporaneous trends in America.

And critics applauded. A New Republic reviewer noted that "it is this ambitious attempt to relate recent personal experience to history that gives North Toward Home its character and attraction." A writer for America went a step further. "It wasn't enough that in 1967, at the age of 32, Willie Morris became the editor of Harper's, the oldest and one of the most prestigious magazines in America. He had to compound our amazement by producing this autobiography, one of the best books of the year in any category."

To honor and remember Willie Morris' literary legacy, this book is reissued in hardcover on the sixty-fifth anniversary of his birth--November 29, 1999--as a commemorative edition of a true American classic.

From the Back Cover:

"North Toward Home is the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain."--Sunday Times (London)

"Vivid sketches of personas and places, moments when the spirit of things is caught with affecting precision.... And...prose that is extraordinarily clean, flexible and incisive."--The New York Times Book Review

"North Toward Home is a classic."--William Styron

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 1578062667
• ISBN 13: 9781578062669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 456