The exhibition was comprised of black and white photographs Morris took in the late 1940s of the small towns in the Midwest where he grew up.

Morris was a photographer, writer and teacher, well-known for all three of his vocations. He wrote a series of novels about the Midwest and a three-volume autobiography, and he taught English for a long time at San Francisco State. He died at 88, just before we entered the 21st century.

His books are enjoyable—I am particularly fond of the autobiography Will's Boy—but he is perhaps less well-known for his photographs. They are almost all empty of people, but they are filled with reminders of a time that is now gone.

Several, for instance, show the interior of a barbershop in a little town where he once lived. The barbershop, oddly enough, was also once the town bank, and the photographs show the elaborate grillwork in the building.

Morris also photographed the shaving mugs, brushes, scissors and other pieces of barber equipment, an ancient wooden bench backed in leather and other items that have long since gone to the junk heap.

In one Morris photograph, a stark wooden farmhouse stands alone, its roof covered with snow. Surrounding the house is nothing but a thin blanket of snow—not a tree, a fence, a barn or anything to indicate it is anything except an alien on the plains, a lonely, bleak outpost.

Morris confessed that in taking pictures he was fascinated not by people but by the arrangements that buildings and equipment made when photographed. Because the pictures are in black and white, they appear even more stark than they would have in color.

But the photographs hold another fascination, too. They are the last record of a time that is past. In their shadows and stark sunlight they show us a Midwest that has mostly died or is dying. The small towns of Nebraska (which is where many of the pictures were taken), like the small towns of Kansas and the Dakotas, are slowly drying up and blowing away on the prairie winds.

The small family farms that once nourished these little places have mostly disappeared. With their passing there is little reason for the towns around which they once huddled to exist.

Just as family farms have given way in California to agribusiness, so has industrial farming converted the Midwest into vast agricultural factories. Those who once lived on the prairie have moved to Kansas City or Chicago or some other great city or suburb.

The barbershop pictured in Morris' photographs, the grain elevators, the small wooden churches—almost all have gone.

Much the same thing has happened in California. I grew up in a family of farmers. Even though they somewhat grandly called themselves ranchers, they were really small farmers. They farmed orchards of 50 or 60 acres. They and their families were most of the labor used to bring in the crops. They went to town once or twice a week, just as the farmers of the Midwest did, but the difference is that when the end of their small farms came, their land was turned from orchards into subdivisions.

In the Midwest the great spreads of grain are still planted and harvested each year, but unlike the time in which Morris' photographs were taken, they are owned by corporations, not individuals.

But nostalgia may make the photographs seem they are from a time more friendly than it really was. In reality, the little town and the little farm struggled to survive. Most small farmers could grow enough to feed themselves and still have some left over to sell, but they had no control over the market in which they operated, and they seldom got rich. More likely they were in debt to the bank, and not infrequently the bank foreclosed on their property.

Life was hard; rewards were few. Many children raised in Wright Morris' homeland fled, as he did, to better jobs, better climate and a more rewarding task than tilling a difficult soil.

All this is the legacy Morris left in his pictures and in his books. It's one we may treasure and admire and hope not to relive.