North Toward Home
by Willie Morris
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Book Summary Information
Author: Willie MorrisEdition: Paperback
Published: 2000-08
ISBN: 0375724605
Number of pages: 464
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of North Toward Home
Book Review: From Mississippi to the sino-atrial node of Texas Liberalism, UT Austin
Summary: 4 Stars
I earned a bachelor's degree from the UT Dallas with hopes of one day going on to UT Law in Austin. Instead, after a diversion of 4 years into the US army, I went to UT to begin and complete an undergrad degree in nursing. For me, the best part of the book was Morris' impression of Texas politics back in the 60s when we had only one party to speak of: the Democratic party. At the state level the Republican party would eventually emerge to dominate the legislature and all statewide elected offices. Most folks who had been the old style conservative Democrats of the type Morris writes about quietly and without fanfare "moved their letter" to the GOP in the early days of Ronald Reagan. Its fair to say that most of the legislature's conservatives back in the day when Morris toiled away at the Texas Observer were earlier incarnations of Tom DeLay or Warren Chisum. And when I attended a Gubernatorial inaugural ball for George W Bush, tellingly one of the old "conservative Democrat" governors was there ensconced in a wheel chair to celebrate W's ascendancy to the largely ceremonial Texas Governor's job.
I particularly enjoyed Morris' writings about his early days as a student at UT. It is a vast campus today and I'm sure it was equally intimidating to a young man from Yazoo City Mississippi. Morris' references to various dorm bldgs and campus activities held special significance since I had either been in any of them or walked by them regularly. Unlike in Morris' day, today the campus dominant political viewpoint is Democratic, although a strong libertarian movemt continues to attract all who've grown disenchanted with the superstate
Aside from the period piece on UT and the politics of the mid50s, early 60s what I most found valuable was the agonizing dilemma Morris and so many other Southern writers faced: they loved their home states and all the quaint slow ways they'd known growing up there, but they were rightly repulsed by the segregation and race-hate which surfaced with the beginnings of the civil rights movement. Tellingly, when a black female (they called them Negroes in them days) confronted Morris' description of life in the delta she told him rather bluntly "Your delta wasnt mine" and perhaps at that and other moments Morris realized he hadnt been as observant of the world around him as he thought he had been. Like Germans in the decades just after World War II, Morris and other southern men of letters were almost reflexively apologetic for being from the South.
I cant help but wonder how the nation and Mississippi would view Morris had he and other southern writers been willing to lend their name and fame to an organization akin to "They Dont Speak for Me" wherein the so-called liberated Southern writers could openly distance themselves from Lester Maddox, Orval Faubus, George Wallace and other race-baiting demogogues. Instead, when Morris and other southern literary men were on the radio and could have easily taken such a "they dont speak for me" line, they chose to divert the interviewer away from integration or other issues to more trivial things.
Summary of North Toward Home
With his signature style and grace, Willie Morris, arguably one of this country's finest Southern writers, presents us with an unparalleled memoir of a country in transition and a boy coming of age in a period of tumultuous cultural, social, and political change.In North Toward Home, Morris vividly recalls the South of his childhood with all of its cruelty, grace, and foibles intact.??He chronicles desegregation and the rise of Lyndon Johnson in Texas in the 50s and 60s, and New York in the 1960s, where he became the controversial editor of Harper's magazine.??North Toward Home is the perceptive story of the education of an observant and intelligent young man, and a gifted writer's keen observations of a country in transition. It is, as Walker Percy wrote, "a touching, deeply felt and memorable account of one man's pilgrimage."
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