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By Willie Morris

Categories: Biographies & Memoirs

Willie Morris's 1967 memoir follows his path from Yazoo City, Mississippi, where he grew up in the 1940s, to the University of Texas, where as editor of The Daily Texan he wrote controversial editorials. After Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, he returned to Austin to edit The Texas Observer before moving to New York to join Harper's Magazine. The book reflects on race, Southern identity and family, and on carrying Mississippi with him to New York.

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• Ryan Holiday: “I have never liked Catcher in the Rye. Perhaps it is not the book that is at fault but the undeserved reaction it gets. There are so many better boyhood memoirs (or books about boyhood alienation, whatever you want to call them), the best being This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff.”