Bøger af Willie Morris

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."

In New York Days, the long-awaited sequel to the prize-winning North Toward Home, Willie Morris recalls his triumphant, exciting, and ultimately devastating years as the youngest ever editor-in-chief of Harper's, America's oldest magazine, when he was at the center of the nation's stunning cosmos of writing, publishing, politics, and the arts. It was the 1960s, when New York City was a place "throbbing with possibility" and "in which everyone seemed to know everyone else and where everything of importance seemed to happen first". These were Willie Morris's New York days - with William Styron, David Halberstam, Woody Allen, Bobby Kennedy, Truman Capote, Shirley MacLaine, George Plimpton, Leonard Bernstein, and the other leading figures of the time. For he knew them all: the writers, the poets, the intellectuals, the editors, the actresses, the tycoons, the detectives, the athletes, and not a few fakirs and charlatans. He wined with Sinatra at the Players Club and eavesdropped in the trattorias on the Mob; sat next to DiMaggio in the Garden ringside seats and spent evenings at Elaine's. And during the day, Morris worked to transform Harper's from an uninspired literary magazine to its apex as the groundbreaking political and cultural voice of the '60s, until the editorial rift and the mass resignations of 1971 - possibly the most notable dispute in American publishing history. New York Days is a portrait of an era, but it is also a poignant, deeply personal yet universal story of a man's life: a man who attains everything he has ever hoped for only to realize that what he has sacrificed is even greater. For in the process of reaching the pinnacle of his career, Morris also experiencedprofound loss: the dissolution of his marriage and the breakdown of the magazine as he helped create it. Now, from a vantage point of more than twenty years and a thousand miles, Morris asks his younger self: "Where on earth, fast-moving boy, are you going now?" And what, if anything, did it all mean? Beautifully written with bittersweet lyricism and exuberant humor, New York Days captures the spirit of the '60s: the dazzling parties, the fervent intellectualism, and the sense of slowly decaying idealism as the country plunged deeper into a tragic war and intensifying social chaos. And in the midst of this scene is Willie Morris, exalted, exhilarated, and eventually almost consumed by his brilliant, electric, enervating New York days.

In this collection of essays Willie Morris explores the subject of “home” and what it means to Americans. Morris takes the reader on a chronological journey of places he lived and worked: as a student at the University of Texas in Austin, as Rhodes scholar in Oxford, England, as Editor-in-Chief of Harper’s magazine in New York City, in Bridgehampton on Long Island, in Washington, DC, where he wrote guest columns for The Washington Star in 1976, and, finally, returning to his native Mississippi in 1980. “Willie Morris in this book that is reminiscent of the rhythms of Thomas Wolfe reveals his love of a place where individuals, relationships, the link with generations gone not only matter but buttress the everyday life. Like all the fine artists who live linked to a place from which they draw nourishment and strength, Morris makes us understand his people and his land.” (Chicago Tribune Book World)

GOOD OLD BOY: A DELTA BOYHOOD is a novel for young readers about a boy's adventures growing up in post-WWII Mississippi. Author Willie Morris, then editor of Harper's Magazine in New York, wrote GOOD OLD BOY when his son David, age ten, asked, "What was it like to grow up in Mississippi?" Morris's response turned into a timeless story of growing up in Yazoo City, Mississippi, in the early 1950s, roaming the town with his friends and playing practical jokes and having adventures. GOOD OLD BOY is recommended for sixth through ninth grade.

The novella, "The Fumble," a sports classic about high school football in the Deep South in 1951 describes an epic game between a small town football team and the omnipotent Central High Tigers. Six autobiographical essays form chapters of a Great American boyhood. Illustrated with 28 photos from h.s. yearbook.

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favourite son, a black high-school quarterback.

In the course of his career Willie Morris (1934-1999) attained prominence as a journalist, editor, nonfiction writer, novelist, memoirist, and news commentator. As this eloquent book reveals, he was also a master essayist whose gift was in crafting short compositions. The diverse works included in this anthology reflect the scope of Morris's wide-ranging interests.

This portrait of Jews in the South takes readers inside the nexus of southern and Jewish histories, from the earliest immigrants to the present day. This edition includes a gallery of more than two dozen family and historical photographs as well as a new introduction by the author.