Published by, U. Of Nebraska, 1968, 120 pages, Hardcover, 9 × 11 inches.

Used Fine

Published in 1968, God’s Country and My People came more than 20 years after Morris created The Inhabitants (1946) and its sequel The Home Place (1948), two volumes that opened new horizons in the relationship between photographs and words. God's Country and My People continues this exploration and brings back to view Mr. Morris' extraordinary gifts as a photographer. The landscape that emerges is both real and imaginary. The photographs substantiate that the place exists: the text is that of one traveler who lays claim to it. God's Country and My People would seem to be a matter of the heart's affections (and disaffections) as they appear to the imagination.

This report begins at the moment the plains are first broken by the plow. The dust released by this conquest never ceases to blow through God's country, and will turn up, years later between the teeth of most of its people. Houses and outbuildings, bedrooms, living rooms, and kitchens, the contents of drawers, basements, and attics, all shaped or misshaped by the needs and character of the inhabitants... The composite portrait that emerges will contain some faces familiar to the reader, a next of kin that relates him to the receding past.

The author tacitly admits that this volume is an effort to hold fast to what he knows is passing, to salvage, in words and pictures, the nature of an experience already historic. Is there something of value in this effort for those who now attempt to shape the future? God's Country and My People is one man's travels in a vanishing America, among those objects and places that still have a mystic meaning to give out.