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He is not bitter either about his relative lack of recognition. Partly, he believes, the trouble is that the Midwestern novelist, unlike the Southern or the urban novelist, cannot count on any factional audience. "Today," he adds, "except for those writers who have a wide response, there is no longer a predictable public for the novel. The old audience is fragmented. Even though much of the current writing is brilliant, it lacks a coherent response."
Wright Morris has been married twice but has no children. At 61, he is as spare as his prose. A gentle-looking, though apparently rough-hewn character, he wears a subdued lion's mane of silver-white hair. For years he has made some of his living at part-time jobs, especially teaching. He is currently at Princeton for a year. During the past decade he has been a creative-writing instructor at troubled San Francisco State, an excellent place to get acquainted with the kind of radical young whom he treats in Fire Sermon with ambiguous reserve.
Morris admits he does not care for what he calls "their tribalism," but he likes the young. "I'm truly amazed," he says, "at how little the American character has changed. In my teaching I find absolutely no distinction between the young students I deal with and myself at their age. They are as idealistic, naive, soft and hard, and as appealing as—I hope—I was."