Wright Morris

Morris was born in Central City, Nebraska, and spent much of his career alternating between fiction and photography, pairing his own black-and-white images of abandoned farmhouses and worn tools with prose in books like The Home Place, a hybrid form he helped invent.

He won his first National Book Award in 1957 for The Field of Vision, but Plains Song: For Female Voices (1980) marked a late turn: tracing three generations of women on a Nebraska farm whose interior lives the men's version of plains history had always silenced, it won a second National Book Award in 1981.

He taught for decades at San Francisco State University while continuing to mine the Nebraska plains of his childhood as his fiction's central, inexhaustible subject. He died in Mill Valley, California, in 1998.