From the Publisher
Willie Morris always wrote from the heart and with a
generosity of spirit. His first book, North Toward Home,
was published to extraordinary acclaim in 1967. It was to be
his signature work, a memoir on which all his other books
would pivot. In North Toward Home he found his voice
and discovered his identity.
This self-styled "autobiography in mid-passage"
is one man's emotional journey to understanding his own
southern origins while reluctantly coming to regard the North
as home. As Morris chronicles his own experiences during the
nineteen forties, fifties, and sixties he also explains their
relationship to the larger contemporaneous trends in America.
And critics applauded. A New Republic reviewer noted that
"it is this ambitious attempt to relate recent personal
experience to history that gives North Toward Home its
character and attraction." A writer for America went a
step further. "It wasn't enough that in 1967, at the age
of 32, Willie Morris became the editor of Harper's, the
oldest and one of the most prestigious magazines in America.
He had to compound our amazement by producing this
autobiography, one of the best books of the year in any
category."
To honor and remember Willie Morris' literary legacy, this
book is reissued in hardcover on the sixty-fifth anniversary
of his birth--November 29, 1999--as a commemorative edition
of a true American classic.
