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"Taps is a touching, beautiful story, told as only a master can tell it, with enduring passion and warmth." —Winston Groom
"Willie Morris's last book may be his truest . . .a very knowing look at small town life in the 1950s." —David Halberstam
"Lush, eloquent, sharply rendered in its details, a novel of great warmth and sensitivity." —Donna Tartt
"Willie Morris lived a grand legacy, daily. His generous spirit nourished many young writers, and those who were not struck down in awe to know him directly had his first book, North Toward Home, and now have his last, Taps, as guides through life, through the thick and thin and the whole vivid, splendid glory of it that Willie Morris loved. This book is outstanding." —Kaye Gibbons
"What delicious, real, and beautifully conceived characters . . . Times were simpler in the 1950s, but this is not a simple novel, it's a deep and enriching last act for the delightful Willie Morris." —Booklist
From the author of the award-winning classic North Toward Home and the enormously popular My Dog Skip, comes Taps, Willie Morris's final work, a grand, full-bodied novel rooted in the southern tradition. For twenty years, Willie Morris returned again and again to this work. In fact he once said he put everything he knew into Taps, and not surprisingly, it marks the crowning achievement of his career. Here is an unforgettable American coming-of-age tale set in a time of war, a book that combines the playful boyhood antics for which Morris is so well known with a larger, deeper vision of the south, its beauty, its pain, its inexorable hold on its own.
In the sixties, Morris took over the reigns of Harper's magazine and published William Styron, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and Norman Mailer. His literary endeavors established him as a great American author. The London Sunday Times proclaimed Morris's North Toward Home "the finest evocation of an American boyhood since Mark Twain." The New York Times praised his "vivid sketches of persons and places, moments when the spirit of things is caught with affecting precision" and "prose that is extraordinarily clean, flexible and incisive."
Morris always possessed a talent for evoking the spirit of a time and place and imbuing it with an honest emotional force Ö and he has done it once more in Taps. The setting is Morris's native stretch of Mississippi Delta at the time of the Korean War. Swayze Barksdale is sixteen, in love, and plagued by an obsessive tap-dancing mother who leaps from the bushes to comb his hair. He lives in Fisk's Landing, where "the trees arched in shadowy silhouettes, darkly green now before the coming of the heat, dripping with moisture in the cooling breeze. The hills began only a hundred yards from the house, and the whole earth sang with crickets and other nocturnal things." Too young to follow the town's other young men into battle, Swayze is called to service in an unexpected way. When the small town's first, soldier dies, Swayze is called upon to play "Taps" at the funeral. Funeral after funeral, Swayze's trumpet sounds the somber note that echoes throughout the story. Taps is a book about death that teems with life. A cast of wonderfully eccentric characters helps shepherd Swayze toward adulthood and teaches him what it means to be a citizen, a lover, a patriot, a son, and a friend. Life goes on in this small town with its comforting southern rhythms, hilarious mishaps, and pure moments of joy. Young love blossoms and age-old hatreds flare. Ultimately "Taps" is played for someone Swayze holds dear, and he crosses the difficult divide from boyhood to manhood.
Taps is a sweeping, big-hearted book. It is storytelling at its finest, delivered with passion and intelligence. Willie Morris's Taps will appeal to those who have been fans for years, and to those
Willie Morris
Willie Morris was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1934. He graduated from the University of Texas and pursued graduate studies in history at Oxford University. During the Korean War, Morris played "Taps" for military funerals in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi. He worked on Taps from the late 1960s until his death in 1999.
Morris held editorial roles at the Daily Texan and the Texas Observer, and was the youngest editor in chief of Harper's, the nation's oldest magazine. From 1967 to 1971, while at Harper's, he worked with writers such as William Styron, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and Norman Mailer. Morris wrote for many publications, including Vanity Fair, George, Esquire, Oxford American, and Southern Living.
Morris won numerous awards, including the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship for North Toward Home (1967), the Christopher Medal, the Richard Wright Medal for Literary Excellence, and the Governor's Award for Literature. His works include My Cat Spit McGee (1999), The Ghosts of Medgar Evers: A Tale of Race, Murder, and Hollywood (1998), Prayer for the Opening of the Little League Season (1995), Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home (1981), The Last of the Southern Girls (1973), and Yazoo: Integration in a Deep Southern Town (1971). Morris's novel My Dog Skip (1995) was adapted for the screen and made into a popular film.
Morris returned to Mississippi in 1980 and served as writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi in Oxford. In 1999 he died of a heart attack at the age of sixty four. He is survived by his wife, JoAnne Prichard Morris, and his son, David Rae Morris.
JoAnne Prichard Morris
JoAnne Prichard Morris was born in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1944. She graduated from the University of Mississippi and pursued graduate studies in folklore and American and southern culture at Western Kentucky University. She is the coauthor of Yazoo: Its Legends and Legacies (1976) and was executive editor at the University of Mississippi Press from 1983 to 1997. JoAnne met Willie Morris in 1967 while teaching high school in Yazoo City. She has said that her marriage to Willie was "a very happy and a richly textured one, based on books and writing, love of the ragged beauty of our native Mississippi, politics, friends, family, and Willie's wonderful capacity for generating warmth and fun everywhere he went."
JoAnne Prichard Morris and other friends of Willie’s will be in the following cities to promote Taps.
Jackson, Mississippi...April 18
Lemuria
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Memphis, Tennessee...April 19
Burke’s Books
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Oxford, Mississippi...April 20
Square Books
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Blytheville, Arkansas...April 24
That Bookstore in Blytheville
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Nashville, Tennessee...April 26
Davis-Kidd Booksellers
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Atlanta, Georgia...April 27
The Margaret Mitchell House and Museum
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New York, City...April 30
Barnes and Noble, Union Square
JoAnne will be joined by William Styron and David Halberstam.
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Washington, D.C...May 2
Politics and Prose
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Yazoo City, Mississippi...May 12
"Remembering Willie: A Yazoo Celebration"
"Remembering Willie: A Yazoo Celebration" May 12
Writers, friends, and fans of Willie Morris will gather in his hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi to reminisce, laugh, and express appreciation for the life and work of the town's most celebrated son and one of America's most beloved writers. Longtime friends and colleagues David Halberstam, Winston Groom, Larry L. King, and William Styron (unconfirmed), lead the list of writers who will talk at the daylong event, to be held at Morris's elementary school, now the Triangle Cultural Center. Among other writers on the program are Rick Bragg, Curtis Wilkie, and Jill Conner Browne, whose work Willie inspired and encouraged. Several of his Yazoo classmates from earliest childhood, who appear in his books, will be on hand to tell tales of growing up with their famous friend.
The event also celebrates the publication of Morris's posthumous novel, Taps, which he dedicated to "the people of Yazoo." The day will end in the cemetery at dusk with the playing of "Taps"--one trumpeter at Morris's grave and another playing echo, as described in the novel.
Note: The celebration actually begins the day before with the showing of the movies My Dog Skip and Good Old Boys and tours of local sites associated with Willie and his books.
An Interview with JoAnne Prichard Morris, widow of Willie Morris
Q) When did Willie Morris write Taps?
A) In a way, Willie had been writing Taps for most of his writing life — that is, from the mid-1960s, before he even published his first book, North Toward Home. Before he began NTH, he had experimented with a novel using material from his boyhood, including the scenes in the cemetery when Swayze plays "Taps" for local boys killed in the Korean War. These scenes form the central image of Taps. Over the years Taps stayed on his mind; he pondered plot and organization, he wrote sections of it, off and on, and in the 1980s, after he had come back to live in Mississippi, he began writing in earnest. He completed a good working draft in the late 1980s. Then other projects intervened. Periodically, he would get the manuscript out, make notations, polish the language a little. Sometimes he would ask me to read a section, and we'd discuss it. There wasn't much he wanted to change. I think he just wanted it to be perfect.
Also — and I'm speculating here, but I believe I'm right — I think he sensed on some deeper level that Taps would be his last book. He knew he was very close to finishing it, and he had other books he wanted to write. Taps was very special to Willie — his "baby," he called it.
Q) Why was Taps so special to him?
A) First of all, I think the experience of playing "Taps" for military graveside services when he was in high school touched him deeply, profoundly, on an emotional level. It also gave him ideas he contemplated and developed — was consumed by, really — throughout the remainder of his life and through all his work — about human emotions (love, sacrifice, patriotism, joy, and melancholy) and complicated personal relationships, social and racial divisions and injustices, the power of land, and the presence of death in life. He wanted to say in one book all he felt and had learned over a lifetime. Taps is that book. So, in a real sense, Taps was his life's work. He loved it, and he feared it, too, I think.
Q) Why did he fear it?
A) I think he feared he wouldn't get it right, or maybe that he couldn't. I think he feared the depths of his own soul. Here was a man who had spent most of life writing memoirs and other very personal nonfiction; yet in this book of fiction, he probably got closer to his own flaws and regrets and demons than he ever did in nonfiction.
Q) How did you feel about helping prepare Taps for publication?
A) I had some reluctance about getting involved so soon after Willie's death. I put off getting "inside" the manuscript as I knew I must, apprehensive that it would be too difficult emotionally. But I knew that Willie wanted me to do it: among his final words to me were "get Taps together." It was together really; there wasn't much he had wanted to change. I knew he trusted my judgment, and he had always felt I could and should trust my editorial instincts.
When I finally delved deeply into it, I found myself in touch with Willie in a way I had not been since his death. We had conversations, just as we always had, about words and ideas. Sometimes I'd go to sleep wondering what to do about a detail or even a particular word, and the next morning it would be clear to me. One word in particular comes to mind: the word dalliant. The dictionary shows dalliance, the noun, but not dalliant, the adjective. None of the synonyms seemed words Willie would have used, and rewriting the sentence with dalliance didn't work, either. Dalliant communicated the mood and the meaning, and it just felt right. And then I could hear Willie's voice: "Yes! It's the writers who create the language!" Dalliant stayed in.
I went over the manuscript line by line, word by word, making the deletions Willie had indicated, checking spellings and meanings and usages of words, checking facts and regional and cultural information — matters Eudora Welty has described as making sure the moon is in the right part of the sky. (Were the titles of songs playing in the juke joint correct for that time? Were the flowers blooming in the correct month?) I didn't write any new material other than a word or phrase here and there. The big difference, of course, was that Willie couldn't respond in person to what I suggested, but we talked so many times about Taps over the years that I knew I was carrying out his final wishes for the book. This is absolutely Willie's book.
Ultimately, the whole process was a uniquely fulfilling one — a sweet and wonderfully intimate conversation with Willie. As always, I learned much from Willie about words and ideas, and even more about his tender, sorrowful, loving, full heart.
Q) Do you think Willie would be pleased with Taps in its final form?
A) Yes — not only with my part but with the loving care Houghton Mifflin has given his "baby." Houghton Mifflin published his first book and now this, his last. Everything comes full circle. Willie would love that. I wish he could see the final book.
Q) Willie Morris is best known for North Toward Home, his first book, and My Dog Skip, a more recent one, which was made into a popular family movie. Both books were memoirs. Taps is fiction. Will fans of those books find similarities in Taps?
A) Yes, of course. It has humor and small-town adventures, tender moments, touching scenes, and Willie's wonderfully lyrical prose.
Taps is set in a small town (Fisk's Landing), that is physically quite similar to his own hometown of Yazoo City, Mississippi, on the edge of the Mississippi Delta.
It has a teenage boy as its main character and narrator, who has a dog, a girlfriend, and a prankster pal. There's an eccentric supporting cast: a snoopy, obsessive mother who teaches tap dancing; a foul-mouthed basketball coach; a demanding English teacher; a paranoid undertaker and his blind black helper; a greedy, racist plantation owner; a smart black football player; and a retinue of quirky old World War I veterans, raucous hill-boy soldiers, and self-absorbed southern girls.
In Taps he draws on the prodigious memory and attention to detail for which he is known in North Toward Home, My Dog Skip, and all his other books. I think those who have read many of Willie's books and friends who knew him will feel his presence in every line.
But there are some surprises in Taps, some dimensions as yet undiscovered.
Q) What surprises will readers of Willie Morris's previous books find in Taps?
A) Taps is a bigger, deeper book than his well-known previous books. It is as thoughtful and wise as it is entertaining. The novel form, which Willie had used only once before, allowed him to develop characters, scenes, ideas, and emotions more fully. In Taps, he shows great depth and understanding of human motivations, failings, and triumphs. Both expansive and intimate, Taps is a serious, mature realization of the themes and obsessions that preoccupied him for most of his life. (And it has sex, intrigue, and murder, too!)
Q) Would someone who isn't familiar with Willie's previous work want to read this book?
A) Willie was a storyteller, and Taps is a beautiful and unforgettable story, told by one who uses words as musical instruments. Southern in its mood and sensibilities, the story unfolds gracefully in the relaxed pace of small-town southern life in the 1950s. Although Taps may not entice readers who demand lean, gritty prose and hard-driving action, anyone who wishes to enjoy a luxurious, richly textured vacation with words and emotions and ideas will find it a sumptuous holiday to be savored and treasured. Taps is, above all, a book of the heart. And no heart was bigger than Willie's.
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