Wright Morris
Boyhood Home
Central City, Nebraska
By Nathan Tye
For Wright Morris, home was both a physical place and emotional ache. Born in Central City, Nebraska, in 1910, Morris made his life elsewhere, but returned to the Platte Valley in his writing and photography. His childhood home remains, now a museum maintained by the Lone Tree Literary Society and in it I find a shared weight of homecoming. Like him, I was born in the Platte Valley, built a life elsewhere, and returned. Morris’ labor to excavate the home’s memories resonate as I uncover connections fallen into disrepair and begin to build a new life on the old.
Carefully restored, this single-story white frame house, built amidst the Panic of 1893 by a real estate agent, carries the faded wealth of a small-town businessman. Certainly, it must have felt like that when a widower, his son, and housekeeper moved in two decades later. Morris’ earliest memory of “lampglow and shadows on a low ceiling” is likely tied to this home. A window topped with a row of colored glass faces northeast. Bedbound with pneumonia, Morris traced the colored beams as they moved across his sheets in that room. In his first memoir, he admits that such memories left him with “the ache of a nameless longing,” which he threaded through his work until he died.
In The Home Place (1948), Clyde Muncy returns to Lone Tree, a stand-in for Central City. Nearly 30-years gone, Clyde has a new family, a new place, and memories ill-fit to Lone Tree’s present. Clyde’s futile attempt at placemaking is framed by images of debris and empty farmsteads, a subject Morris’ first explored in The Inhabitants (1946). In both books he captures a world worn over — abandoned homes, barren storefronts, football-worn carpets, frayed familial ties — and finds those spaces inhabited by absence. These homebound texts are all the sharper in our homebound epoch, for our own places are now populated with days upon days of unbroken living.
Morris relished patina, the worn, and the lived-in. For him, abandonment closes distances in time. Or, as the art critic and novelist John Berger found, “Home is the return to where distance did not yet count.” What though, does home mean, in Central City and the elsewheres we find ourselves ordered in? Where do our ties to the past take us when the future is so uncertain? Morris returned to escape, and by documenting these visits laid the foundation for the preservation of his home. The connection to the past, “was the important thing. It had to be established,” Wright wrote in The Home Place, “I had to be born again.” Morris’ texts and images commingled the present and past to forward a vision of living nostalgia.
The Lone Tree Literary Society has reversed the decay Morris documented and made his childhood home available to curious publics. And while what Morris called “the inhabitants” of these structures may now be obscured by respectful restorations, in Morris’ work, their absence persists. Later in his career, Morris commented that photographs came from “the most durable of ghosts, nostalgia.” In his early images of Central City, he reached back to the remnants he left in order to move forward. Nostalgia is a welcome escape given the uncertainty of our present, but as Morris’ struggle with his homebound ghosts underscores, our worn-over homes are points of departure, not occupation.
At home with ourselves, we’re learning to live with our inhabitants. Like Morris’ photographs, Covid-19 emptied the streets, turned homes into lived-in voids, and blurred delineations between past, present, and future. Yet, by documenting deterioration and distance, Wright pointed toward a restorative future. Now, in the stillness of an uncertain time, the inhabitants of Morris’ home and those of our own become clearer, and the possibilities they hold emerge.
Nathan Tye was born and raised in the Platte Valley. A historian by trade, Tye is assistant professor of Nebraska and American West history at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is currently working on his first book, a history of hobo workers in North America.
