The World in the Attic was published by Scribner’s in 1949 as a sequel to The Home Place. Clyde Muncy — Morris’s fictional alter ego — returns to Nebraska with his family, this time visiting his wife’s people in the town of Junction (as opposed to the farm country of the earlier book). The attic of the title is both literal (the stored objects of past lives) and metaphorical (memory itself as an attic full of discarded things).
Unlike The Home Place, this novel does not include photographs — Morris apparently decided that the narrative here needed to stand alone, without the documentary counterweight of images. The prose carries the full burden of evoking place and memory, and Morris’s style is more developed than in the earlier book: more compressed, more willing to trust implication over statement, more confident in its elliptical rhythms.
The novel continues Morris’s central theme: the impossibility of going home — the discovery that the place one remembers no longer exists (if it ever did) and that the attempt to recover it produces not satisfaction but a deeper awareness of loss. Muncy is drawn to Nebraska by genuine need — the need for roots, for continuity, for the known — but what he finds there is not home but the evidence of home’s disappearance.
Collecting The World in the Attic
First edition (Scribner’s, New York, 1949): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $60–$150
- Very good: $25–$60
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation.
The Sequel
The World in the Attic (1949) continues the story of The Home Place, following the writer and his family as they explore the attics and outbuildings of the Nebraska farm, finding objects that trigger memories and reflections on the American past. The “world in the attic” is both literal (the physical artifacts of rural life) and metaphorical (the stored-up experiences of previous generations).
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Morris’s relationship to American nostalgia? Complex. Morris is often mistaken for a nostalgist because he writes about the Great Plains past, but his work consistently interrogates nostalgia — exposing the gap between the American myth of the heartland and the reality of poverty, isolation, and thwarted ambition that characterised Plains life.