Willie Morris

Debbie Morris: Forgiving the Dead Man Walking: Only One Woman Can Tell the Entire Story, Zondervan ; weicher Einband / soft cover ISBN: 0310231876

PAPERBACK Good 0310231876 Editorial Reviews\n\nFrom Publishers Weekly\nAlready familiar to readers from the movie Dead Man Walking, this horrifying crime story, related here by one of the victims, becomes an inspiring morality tale of one woman's redemption. In 1980, Morris, then a 16-year-old high school junior in tiny Madisonville, La., was parked with her boyfriend, Mark Brewster, along the Tchefuncte riverfront sipping a milkshake when two men suddenly appeared. Mark and Debbie were kidnapped: he was tortured and left for dead, while she was terrorized and raped repeatedly. With extraordinary presence of mind, she managed, incredibly, to talk her captors into letting her go. The aftershock, however, lasted for years: her relationship with Mark deteriorated; she dropped out of high school; and she suffered recurring claustrophobic fears. Her abductors, Robert Lee Willie and Joe Vaccaro, were captured, and Debbie aided the prosecution in its successful bid for the death penalty for Willie for the earlier rape/ murder of Faith Hathaway. After the trial, she discovered, "Justice doesn't really heal all the wounds." Her true path toward healing was hard won: She's often angry?at Sister Helen Prejean's attentions to Willie ("Where was the help I needed when I felt so alone?"), at her family, at God ("I'd found it easier to forgive Robert Willie than it was to forgive God"). But at the end of a journey that rings true and intensely human, she looks to her husband, son and new life and ceases to see herself as a victim, but instead as a survivor. (Sept.) FYI: Morris's story first appeared on a Frontline segment titled "Angel on Death Row."\nCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.\n\nFrom Library Journal\nFor years after, she was known only as the "l6-year old from Madisonville," who had been talking with her boyfriend, Mark, when Robert Willie and Joseph Vaccaro kidnapped them. Mark was tortured and shot but survived, and Morris was repeatedly raped but eventually got out alive. Willie and Vaccaro were captured and Morris tried to move on with her life, eventually marrying and having children but always living with hurt and resentment. When the movie Dead Man Walking was made, she contacted Sister Helen Prejean (Dead Man Walking, LJ 6/15/93), the nun who counseled Robert Willie in prison and who was the focus of much of Debbie's anger. After speaking with Sister Helen, however, Morris was able to use her Christian beliefs to learn to forgive. Although Morris does include details of her awful ordeal, this is more a personal reflection on human nature than a traditional true-crime book. The writing is somewhat self-conscious and stilted in spots, but that only gives the story a much more human and vulnerable feel. For larger public libraries.?Christine A. Moesch, Buffalo & Erie Cty. P.L., NY\nCopyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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(Jones, James). Morris, Willie. JAMES JONES: A FRIENDSHIP. INSCRIBED by Willie Morris. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1978. ISBN: 0385144326

- Octavo, dark gray paper covered boards backed with cream cloth in a price-clipped dust wrapper. The dust jacket is lightly rubbed & chipped with some very minor soiling & foxing. 259 pages. Black-and-white illustrations. The front endpaper is lacking & the fore-edge is lightly foxed. Very good. <p>First edition.<p>Inscribed by the author on the half-title: "Bridgehampton, / Spring, 1979 / To Carol and Bobby, who would have cared for the good old fellow, for his kindness, generosity, courage, and talent, and his profound regard for the complexities of his fellow human beings. / Love, Willie Morris.<p>William [Willie] Morris [1934-1999] was a writer and editor, born in Jackson, Mississippi. He was known for his writing on the American South, especially the Mississippi Delta. He became the youngest editor of Harper's Magazine in 1967. He completed James Jones's "Whistle" after the death of his friend in 1977.

[SW: LITERATURE; AMERICAN LITERATURE; TWENTIETH CENTURY; 20TH CENTURY; MEMOIR; JAMES JONES: A FRIENDSHIP; AUTHOR; EDITOR; WILLIE MORRIS; INSCRIBED; SIGNED; SIGNATURE; AUTOGRAPH; FIRST EDITION; 1ST EDITION.]

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Morris, Willie: James Jones - A Friendship, NY Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1978 ; fester Einband / hard cover; Schutzumschlag / dust cover; sig.; 1. Ed. ISBN: 0-385-14432-6
0-385-14432-6 Fine in Fine Dust Jacket Dust Jacket Typography By Lewis Friedman

264pp. Cream quarter-cloth, brown paper boards, black ink spine lettering, cream endpapers, deckled fore-edge. Dust jacket price 8.95. SIGNED BY AUTHOR to half-title page. " Willie Morris (November 29, 1934-August 2, 1999), was an American writer and editor born in Jackson, Mississippi, though his family later moved to Yazoo City, Mississippi, which he immortalized in his works of prose. Morris' trademark was his lyrical prose style and reflections on the American South, particularly the Mississippi Delta. In 1967 he became the youngest editor of Harper's Magazine. He wrote several works of fiction and non-fiction, including his seminal book 'North Toward Home' and 'My Dog Spot'." - wikipedia. "James Jones (1921-1977), one of the major novelists of his generation, is known primarily as the author of fiction that probes the effects of World War II on the individual soldier. Born in Robinson, Illinois, Jones entered the U.S. Army and had the distinction of being the only individual who would become a major writer to witness the attack by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor. A member of the 27th U.S. Infantry Regiment (25th Division), Jones was wounded at Guadalcanal and returned to Robinson, where he started to write about his experiences eventually producing the critically acclaimed international bestseller 'From Here to Eternity' (1951). He assisted in the creation of the Handy Writers' Colony in Marshall, Illinois (which lasted from 1949 to 1964) before taking up residence in Paris as part of the Second Generation of American Expatriate writers and artists. Jones's other novels are 'Some Came Running' (1957), 'The Pistol' (1959), 'The Thin Red Line' (1962), 'Go to the Widow-Maker' (1967), 'The Merry Month of May' (1971), 'A Touch of Danger '(1973), and 'Whistle' (1978). Jones published an acclaimed short-story collection, 'The Ice-Cream Headache and Other Stories' (1968), a nonfictional history of World War II from the viewpoint of the soldier, 'WWII' (1975), and a book of essays, 'Viet Journal' (1975). Jones's selected letters [mainly concerned with the craft of writing] were published in 1989. Of the trio of American writers on the big scale who emerged in the '50s--Mailer, Styron and Jones--the last has the most problematic reputation. This is partly because he was the least educated of them and his writing was, to put it kindly, less eloquently shaped [Drieser comes to mind]; but also in part because he seemed insufficiently self-critical and sometimes wrote large chunks of what seemed like barely digested naturalism [e.g. 'Some Came Running']. His raw emotional, but nonetheless considerable, talents as a writer seemed best-suited to describe the military world, in and out of combat, and less so the post-war world of America and Europe. His critical standing has only increased since his death." - James Jones Literary Society. " This is a highly unusual memoir - elegiac, funny, and heart-rending - written by one American writer about another. The subject is James Jones, celebrated author of 'From Here to Eternity', 'The Thin Red Line', and most recently, 'Whistle'. The author is Willie Morris, former editor of Harper's and author of 'North Toward Home', 'Yazoo', and 'The Last of the Southern Girls'. He is also the man who completed 'Whistle' after his friend's death in 1977. 'James Jones; A Friendship' is not only a moving tribute to the artist, it is a complex portrait of the living man - a man who cut a tough, luminous figure among a whole generation of writers, a man of integrity, strength, and a zest for life, a man whose experiences and insights into World War II made him the spokesman for its victims and its survivors. Willie Morris explores Jones's early years in the Midwest and in the peacetime Army, the Pearl Harbor attack and combat in the Pacific, the military hospital in Memphis, the first successes; he takes us through Jones's time in Paris, his final return to the United States, and his struggle against death to finish his life's work. Recollections from Jones's many friends, such as Irwin Shaw and William Styron, add depth and variety to this remembrance of one of our most popular literary figures. This is a book about being a writer, an American writer; about exile and return; about a sense of what counts and what doesn't; about personal courage. But most of all, it is an account of a very special friendship between two men who supported and encouraged each other in their work, and in their lives." - dust jacket flaps. Book and dust jacket are in fine, unread condition. No remainder markings. Signed by Author First Edition Fine Hard Cover 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall; First Edition

[SW: Collectible Literature Literary Biography]

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Willie Morris: Yazoo: Integration in a Deep-Southern Town, BALLANTINE 1971 ISBN: B000OEQJ0M
GENTLY USED

GENTLY USED BOOK FROM A PRO MERCHANT. OVER 1 MILLION NEW AND USED BOOKS, MOVIES, GAMES AND CDS AVAILABLE. IN BUSINESS SINCE 1986. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED. He seemed to see his whole native land, his home-the dirt, the earth which had bred his bones and those of his fathers for six generations and was still shaping him into not just a man but a specific man, not with just a man's passions and aspirations and beliefs but the specific passions and hopes and convictions and ways of thinking and acting of a specific individual and even race.-William Faulkner Intruder in the DustLike Faulkner, Morris, the 36-year-old former editor of Harper's magazine, is Mississippi grown. Unlike Faulkner, who kept close to the home that he turned into a national myth, Morris has spent most of his adult life outside the state. In Texas as an undergraduate and muckraker for the Texas Observer; in England as a Rhodes scholar; and in New York as a hard-drinking, uncompromising and sometimes brilliant editor. Yet, says Morris, "the longer I live in Manhattan, the more Southern I seem to become."To be both a Southerner and an American like Willie Morris is to engage in a perpetual war between states of mind, between the received past and the acquired present. That past requires continual reconnaissance. So in January 1970, Morris took the first of six trips back home to Yazoo City on the edge of the Mississippi Delta.Ostensibly he was there reporting on the effects of the October 1969 U.S. Supreme Court order that 30 Mississippi school districts integrate immediately and completely. Beyond that, Morris was reluctantly bent on re-evaluating his own attachments to the South. Three years before he had published North Toward Home, a fine memoir of his boyhood and youth. Judging from the letters he received from Mississippi, he was not the most popular boy in town.Morris found that after 16 years of talking themselves into believing total school integration would never happen, the townspeople were too busy to notice him. As had previously occurred elsewhere in the South when integration began, hard-core segregationist parents enrolled their children in hastily organized, expensive all-white private "academies." But they did not really catch on. Yazoo's 11,000 citizens are about evenly divided between blacks and whites, but only 20% of the city's white pupils were pulled out for private schooling. Adult acquiescence was veiled in all sorts of rationalizations. One white mother argued that because her son customarily kept his head buried in books, he would never see a Negro.Pep Yells. Many of Yazoo's kids, Morris says, objected to being sent to private segregated schools. The public schools had their traditions, not the least of which were athletic, and the influx of black players added measurably to the quality of Yazoo's teams. Black and white athletes even began exchanging soul slaps on the field. White cheerleaders picked up black musical cadences in their pep yells. Morris notes Yazoo's new awareness of itself, not as a backwater of lost causes but as a place where important things are happening-a place to be. Yet he knows the South too well, and he knows how tenuous and how mortal is enlightened leadership. The mood of the '60s, with its racial violence and political assassinations, mutes Morris' blend of journalism and autobiography. It puts graceful reins on his prose, which sometimes seems about to run wild like Thomas Wolfe's or feed royally on itself like Norman Mailer's.It is Morris' tone of voice, finally, that gives Yazoo a nuance and emotional impact far more revealing than any amount of facts or figurings. The subtle tension in the book began well before the past decade. As heir to the tradition of such liberal Southern journalists as Ralph McGill and Hodding Carter, Morris remains faithful to the basic truth that the Southern white and Southern Negro are bound together like no other two groups in the country. In North Toward Home, Willie Morris' grandmother touched this haunting idea when she remarked, "Maybe when we all get to heaven, they'll be white and we'll be black." Paperback

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