Plains Song: For Female Voices was published by Harper & Row in 1980 and won the American Book Award for Fiction in 1981. The novel traces three generations of women in a Nebraska family: Cora (the pioneer generation, who endures the physical hardships of homesteading with stoic silence), her daughters and nieces, and Sharon Rose (the contemporary generation, who escapes to the wider world).
The title announces Morris’s formal intention: this is a novel told through female voices and experiences, a departure for a writer whose earlier work was dominated by male consciousness. Cora’s silence — her refusal to speak about her inner life, her absolute devotion to work and duty — is presented not as emptiness but as a kind of strength: the strength of women who built a civilization through endurance rather than expression.
Sharon Rose represents the opposite: the articulate, self-aware modern woman who has escaped the plains and can look back at her grandmother’s world with both admiration and horror. The tension between these two modes of being female — silent endurance and articulate freedom — provides the novel’s central energy.
Morris’s prose is at its most refined: sentences are pared to essentials, emotional states communicated through gesture and object rather than statement, and the passage of time (sixty years covered in under two hundred pages) handled with extraordinary compression.
Collecting Plains Song
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1980): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$75
- Very good: $15–$30
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation. Second National Book Award winner.
Three Generations of Women
Plains Song: For Female Voices (1980) follows three generations of Nebraska women from homesteading days to the 1970s. It is Morris’s most feminist novel and his most emotionally direct — the stoicism, endurance, and thwarted ambitions of the women who built the Great Plains are rendered with devastating clarity. The novel won Morris’s second National Book Award and is his most accessible late work.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why isn’t Morris better known? Morris’s relative obscurity is one of American literature’s puzzles. His prose is demanding — elliptical, understated, full of silences — and his subjects (the Great Plains, small-town Nebraska, the American past) lack the glamour of coastal literary settings. He was also an experimentalist whose photo-text books and fragmented narratives were ahead of their time.