Will’s Boy: A Memoir was published by Harper & Row in 1981. Morris was seventy-one, and this memoir — the first of three autobiographical volumes — covers his childhood and youth: born in Central City, Nebraska, in 1910, his mother died within days of his birth. He was raised by his father, Will Morris — a dreamer, a drifter, a man of unrealized schemes who moved the boy through a succession of small towns, jobs, and households.
The memoir reveals the autobiographical foundations of Morris’s fiction: the motherless boy, the improvising father (the source of Uncle Dudley), the Nebraska small towns, the sense of absence and incompleteness that pervades all his work. But Morris tells his own story with the same restraint he brings to fiction — there is no self-pity, no dramatic revelation, no therapeutic confession. Events are recorded with the same precise, elliptical notation that characterizes his novels.
The book is important for understanding Morris’s creative method: how lived experience becomes fiction through compression, selection, and formal arrangement. The reader who knows the novels recognizes scene after scene — transformed, rearranged, given new significance by fictional context — and understands that Morris’s work is autobiography rendered as art rather than transcribed as memoir.
Collecting Will’s Boy
First edition (Harper & Row, New York, 1981): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation. Morris’s memoir.
The Nebraska Boyhood
Will’s Boy (1981) is Morris’s autobiography of his Nebraska childhood — growing up in Central City, the death of his mother, life with his itinerant father (the model for Will Brady in The Works of Love), and the formation of the sensibility that would produce over thirty novels. The memoir is characteristically understated: Morris writes about hardship and loss with the same spare, elliptical prose he brings to his fiction.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Wright Morris? The Field of Vision (National Book Award winner, his most formally accomplished novel) or Plains Song (his most accessible late work) are the best entry points. For the photo-text work, The Home Place combines photography and fiction in a short, beautiful book. The memoir Will’s Boy provides essential biographical context.