This gives him a chance to write about the great hope of the blacks in Mississippi." "Sometimes I think he has a guardian angel. It is in her house that Morris is holding forth. "Willie jumped at it," says Dean Faulkner Wells, William Faulkner's niece. The idea for such a book was suggested by Morris' friend, David Halberstam, when he passed through Oxford two years ago. Morris is working on a book for Doubleday about "a middle-aging man, and a 19-year-old black athlete." The middle-aging man is Morris the athlete, Marcus Dupree, is a star University of Oklahoma running back and a native of Philadelphia, Miss. His migration back to his native state in 1980 is a study in southern ways, southern pride and southern comfort, a new perspective on an old land that, curiously, is as intertwined with sports as it is with literature. Now Morris has again taken up that burden. "Why is it," he wrote at the conclusion of "North Toward Home," "in such moments before I leave the South, did I always feel some easing of a great burden? It was as if someone had taken some terrible weight off my shoulders, or as if some old grievance had suddenly fallen away." He already had formally bid goodbye to the South. Morris then went to dwell on the cusp of his own notoriety, at the far end of Long Island, close to writing constellations such as Irwin Shaw and James Jones. But his stewardship foundered in 1971, mostly on the publication in Harper's of Norman Mailer's "Prisoner of Sex," a lurid, sometimes brilliant extrapolation on writers and the reproductive act. He was one of the most talked-about writers in America. Morris created a regional flower garden in the Big Cave - his characterization of Manhattan - and a sense of excitement in the late '60s that many people think was Harper's finest time. At Harper's he encouraged others to write about home, inspiring reminiscences and accounts of homegoings that drifted around the literary marketplace long after he had departed. It was 15 years ago that Morris emerged from the cultural kudzu to become the youngest editor ever of Harper's magazine, and the author of an extraordinary autobiography, "North Toward Home." The word "home" echoed through his work with an extraterrestrial fervor. But the eyes - deep-set in the backcountry countenance of a Magnolia State axle-snapper-have an idealist's intensity. He wears a faded jacket and a pair of wrinkled trousers torn in the seat. Morris, 48, has himself grown broad of beam. Morris's dog, Pete, a black Lab with the canine equivalent of a beer belly, sleeps noisily on the rug. Oxford's the only place in the state where I could live." In Jackson, the new South is writ too large. I didn't want to go Greenville"-the Athens of the Delta-"after the Hodding Carters sold that newspaper. Besides, there aren't any bars or restaurants in Yazoo City. "I know the people there too well, and they know me. "I couldn't go back to Yazoo City," he says softly. Not Oxford, England, where Morris was once a Rhodes scholar, but Oxford, Miss., home of the Ole Miss Rebels, the author of "Intruder in the Dust," and now Morris himself. Willie Morris is drinking bourbon by the fire in the house that belonged to Faulkner's sister, next door to the Exxon station in Oxford. After my mother died, I had no more close relatives.
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