Crossing a Line

Sixty-five kilometres south of my childhood home is a single-level white vernacular house from 1893, with an enclosed porch from sometime later. Growing up, I passed this place hundreds of times — on the way to visit my grandfather, on the way to cross-country or track meets, on the way to the multiplex where I saw A League of Their Own and Contact for the first time. But years went by before I learned that Wright Morris lived there as a young boy.

Who? I would have asked that myself back then, having never heard of the innovative novelist, essayist, and photographer — a man who exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, who carried on a thirty-plus-year correspondence with the Scottish writer Muriel Spark, and who won a National Book Award twice, but who nonetheless flew under the radar.

For so long, I didn’t know about Wright Morris or his remarkable books because others took centre stage at my high school and public library...