The World in the Attic

Wright Morris's "Nebraska Trilogy" (1946-49) embodies his attempt to capture and come to terms with his past. According to David Madden, in his study *Wright Morris*, "In *The Inhabitants* \[a picture collection\] the emphasis is on the artifacts inhabited and on the land; in *The Home Place* \[narrative and pictures\], on the inhabitants themselves; and in *The World in the Attic*, on what the land and the people signify to one man, Clyde Muncy, writer and self-exiled Nebraskan. . . . What was only suggested to Muncy in *The Home Place* is further developed, although not entirely resolved, in *The World in the Attic*. . . . \[In it\], Morris achieves the kind of objective conceptualization that is characteristic of his best novels. The first half of the book is impressionistic, a series of reminiscences like *The Home Place*; but the second half has a novelist narrative line. In *The Home Place*, the past, saturated in the immediate present, is merely alluded to. In *The World in the Attic*, however, the past is specifically and dramatically related to the present."