The Field of Vision was published by Harcourt, Brace in 1956 and won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1957. The novel’s structure is daring: five characters from a Nebraska small town attend a bullfight in Mexico City, and the narrative moves between their consciousnesses, showing how each perceives the same event through the filter of individual memory, personality, and desire.
The characters are Walter McKee (a solid, unimaginative farmer), his wife Lois, Gordon Boyd (McKee’s charismatic childhood friend, now a failed writer), Dr. Lehmann (a psychoanalyst), and Scanlon (an ancient plainsman who lives entirely in the past). The bullfight provides the formal occasion — like Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse or Joyce’s single day — around which consciousness circles and memory erupts. Each character’s “field of vision” is determined by what they bring to the act of seeing.
Morris’s formal achievement is considerable: the shifting perspectives are handled with precision, the prose is compressed and exact (Morris believed in economy above all), and the thematic unity — the relationship between seeing and being, between the plains and the world, between American promise and American failure — gives the novel intellectual weight beyond its modest scale. The book confirmed Morris as one of the most formally ambitious American novelists of his generation, though his reputation never matched that of contemporaries like Bellow or Malamud.
Collecting The Field of Vision
First edition (Harcourt, Brace, New York, 1956): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. National Book Award winner, Morris’s masterpiece.
The Bullfight
A group of Americans from Nebraska attend a bullfight in Mexico City, and the spectacle triggers a cascade of memories, associations, and revelations. Morris uses the single afternoon to explore the characters’ entire lives — their ambitions, failures, relationships, and the Great Plains past they carry with them. The novel won the 1956 National Book Award and is Morris’s most formally accomplished work, using a cinematic structure (multiple viewpoints, fragmented chronology) that reflects his dual career as writer and photographer.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who was Wright Morris? Wright Morris (1910–1998) was a Nebraska-born novelist, photographer, and essayist who published over thirty books but never achieved the popular readership his work deserved. He won two National Book Awards — for The Field of Vision (1956) and Plains Song (1980) — and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His photographs of the Great Plains are held by major museums.