Taps
By Willie Morris
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780618098590, 352pp.)
Publication Date: April 2001
Other Editions of This Title: Paperback (April 2002)
Categories: Literary
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The final work by one of America’s most beloved authors, TAPS returns to the stretch of southern delta that Willie Morris made famous with his award-winning classic NORTH TOWARD HOME and the enormously popular tales of his inimitable dog Skip. Morris said he put everything he knew into this novel, and the result is the crowning achievement of his career -- a tender, powerful, very American story about the vanishing beauty of the South and the fleeting boyhood of a young man coming of age in a time of war.
It is 1951 when sixteen-year old Swayze Barksdale watches the young men of Fisk's Landing, Mississippi, march off to a faraway place called Korea. Too young to serve overseas, Swayze is soon called to unexpected duty at home: a local boy is an early casualty of the war, and Swayze is enlisted to play "Taps" at his graveside. Gradually, Swayze begins to pace his life around these all too frequent funerals, where his horn sounds the tragic note of the times.
Still, life in Fisk’s Landing goes on, with its comforting rhythms, hilarious mishaps, moments of pure joy. Young love blossoms, age-old hatreds flare. A cast of eccentric characters help shepherd Swayze into adulthood and teach him what it means to be a patriot, a son, a lover, a friend. Ultimately, when "Taps" is played for someone he holds very dear, Swayze learns what it means to be man.
Wonderfully assured, infinitely wise, TAPS showcases Willie Morris at his most accomplished and resonant, as he takes readers on one last fictional journey through his South, a place as familiar to him "as water or grass or sunlight." Sure to be an instant classic, TAPS is a beautiful, unforgettable story about ordinary people whose lives proceed with the same inevitability as the seasons until day is done.
Willie Morris is the author of North Toward Home, New York Days, My Dog Skip, My Cat Spit McGee, and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. As the imaginative and creative editor of Harper’s Magazine in the 1960s, he published such writers as William Styron, Gay Talese, David Halberstam, and Norman Mailer, and he was a major influence in changing our postwar literary and journalistic history. He died in August 1999 at the age of sixty-four.
"...an intensely American story, a work of both compassion and insight, a crowning achievement for a favorite son now called home." Orlando Sentinel
"the posthumus publication fo this novel is a fitting elegy for Morris." Book Magazine
"a lifetime of wisdom,...lessons and contemplations. Passion for life and a fervor to expose its depths are clear on every page." The San Diego Union-Tribune
"Morris' going-away present was to arrange some of life's disparate pieces into a work of art." The Los Angeles Times
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