North Toward Home

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.

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.

After seeing the movie My Dog Skip, I bought this book to learn about a educated man who grew up in the South. I anticipated a recollection of why the South is great. What I read was a man recalling growing up in the South when it was a lazy, great place to grow up in. The first part of the book covers this and provided a perfect synopsis for the movie, My Dog Skip. The second part of the book covers his time in Texas where he attended college and stayed to become an editor of a local liberal paper. He also was the school paper editor who became famous for his liberal stances taking on the administration. While this section gets long, it is the most interesting section as Morris is thrown in a foreign environment, becomes quite intimidated as many freshman do, and then grows in the process. This growth culminates in his acceptance as a Rhodes Scholar competing against many Ivy League namedroppers who once again intimidate him. He graduates and eventually writes for a liberal paper in Texas covering politics which allows him to see this magnificent state and challenge the beliefs of politicians and himself as he has grown into a full liberal in a very conservative state. Significant time is spent coloring the political landscape of the time and it's quite interesting to view this from 40 years hence. Anyone remember the John Birch Society?The final section was an evolution as he moves to New York, goes through the humiliating first job search before he finds a low paying job working for Harpers Magazine. He describes what it's like working in New York, which he calls the "Cave", and living in substandard conditions where the sun never hits his building. He describes his first literary party and the pompous attitude of these intellectuals, particularly about the rest of the country. This becomes the fascinating introspective part of the book as he parallels his life in the South and his existence living in the "Cave". This book covers the 40's,50's and 60's so clearly race was a central theme as the civil rights movement was in boom causing him to challenge so much of what he knew growing up. I think this culminates when he asks a German woman to leave his apartment after she makes some mild racist Jewish remarks. Morris really struggled reconciling the race issue given his background in Mississippi and at one point when he was introduced, he said he was from North Carolina as he had become embarrassed to mention being from Mississippi. It's a fascinating story of personal growth that any reader will learn from. The book closes with him moving out of the Cave to a 70 mile, 4 hour commute daily to the city. And the last paragraph states the title "North Toward Home". I think many people will take the close differently but to me he was accepting his new home and turning over the page on the South which he would always appreciate and remember fondly. This book will be of interest to Southerners looking to learn about their heritage and what living in

I read this book, in the original 1967 paperback edition, about a year ago... as a work of literature, and as a work of history and autobiography, it is truly magnificent... the language and imagery is lush and evocative, funny and full of truth... I was shocked to hear that he had passed away, as I knew nothing more of him than this one book... for those of us who have a particular fascination with history as it is made, this books publication date of 1967, and the author's provenance as a progressive Southerner, give you an insight into the period, at a level of honesty that no contemporary historian, with it's veil of time and the judgement of history, could match. In this book, LBJ has not yet resigned, Vietnam is just becoming visible, and Martin Luther King Jr. and RFK are not yet dead. Read this book, and Yazoo will be forever ingrained in your mind, as will the the tragic contradictions of the pre-Civil Rights era South, the intimacy and distance between black and white and the interplay of cultures present nowhere else in the U.S.Buy this book. You will not regret having read it. You will want to give it to your friends to read it, afterwards (or have them buy it over the web).

For anyone who loves the South or wants to better understand Southerners, Willie Morris is a great, easy read. Lots of humorous stories from a rambunctious little boy's perspective. This is a book you can read to your children, and you will laugh together as Morris tells his tall tales of growing up in small town Mississippi. Willie's books are great fun and must read for those with parents who grew up in the South in the 40's and 50's.