North Toward Home

Rating:
Summary: If only he had lived to tell us more
Review: Like a lot of other readers, I first became aware of Willie Morris when I read "My Dog Skip." I followed that up with the lesser known, but equally enjoyable, "My Cat Spit McGee" (in which Morris, an avowed dog lover and cat hater, comes to love a cat).

But for me, his most brilliant work has got to be "North Toward Home," which I did not discover until after he died in 1999. What is it about southern writers, particularly those from Mississippi (a state that continues to have one of the highest illiteracy rates in the world), that leads them to be such masterful story tellers?

This book was first published in 1967, but it still resonates beautifully today. Here Morris recounts his childhood in Mississippi, his time at the University of Texas, his days as a writer covering the wild Texas political scene, and his life as a transplanted Southerner adapting to life in New York (where at age 32 he became the editor of "Harper's)."

Morris brilliantly captures the changing environment in the United States as he traces his life in the forties, fifties, and sixties. Its too bad Morris died relatively young at 65, because I would have loved to see what else he had to write had he lived into his eighties or nineties.

This is about as good as an autobiography can get, as Morris examines not only his only personal growth over a thirty some-odd year period, but also reveals much about the changing political and social environment of those times.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant in parts...
Review: Ok, this book is quite eloquent in places and borderline brilliant, especially when writing about Mississippi. The second section of the book focuses on obscure 1960's Texas politics and gets rather dry and stretches on and on and on. The third part of the book focuses on New York and is depressing in that Morris reiterates over and over about how horrid the city is, ie the traffic, the dirt and grittiness, the noise, etc. Then he cuts on surburbanites who decide to commute to the city from farther up in N. England. Later, Morris does the same thing.
I guess my main concern with this book is the fact that Morris was only 30 years when he wrote his autobiography. Who knows enough of the world at age 30 to do such a thing? I question Morris for thinking he has lived some unique life by that age; I know the author passed away and all the reviews and tributes and obits were glowing and nostalgic, but I can't get over the fact that long stretches of this book were agonizing to get through.

Rating:
Summary: A fine modern writer of the South
Review: These days, people are probably more likely to know of Willie Morris as the boy in the movie, "My Dog Skip." So if anything, they know he grew up in a small town in 1940's Mississippi. They mostly wouldn't know that years later, after an education at the University of Texas, he was a Rhodes Scholar in Oxford, a controversial newspaper editor in Texas, and the youngest editor of America's oldest continuously published magazine, Harper's.

Throughout his adult life he was a writer. His memoir "North Toward Home" is a recollection of a boyhood in pre-integration Mississippi, the rough and tumble of state politics which he covered for the Texas Observer, and coming to terms as a Southerner with New York City, which he liked to call "the Cave."

As a writer, Morris saw both the humor and sadness in the circumstances of daily life. He was fascinated by people and politics, and deeply committed to social justice. Growing up in the rural South, he also had a strong sense of how people are shaped by their history, traditions, and the terrain of the land they call home.

His many books include an account of school integration in his hometown in 1970, a tribute to his friend James Jones, author of "From Here to Eternity," and an account of the making of "Ghosts of Mississippi," Rob Reiner's film based on the murder trial and conviction of the man who shot Medgar Evers. One of the best introductions to Morris' style and favorite subjects is a collection of essays and exerpts from longer works, "Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home," which was published in his later years and is currently in print.

A great companion volume for "North Towards Home" is "From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir," by African-American writer Endesha Ida Mae Holland. Her book is a compelling account of growing up poor and black in small-town Mississippi and coming of age during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Together, these two books provide a fascinating look at both sides of the racial divide in the Deep South of the mid-20th century.