Overview

At the time of Marcus Dupree's birth, when Deep South racism was about to crest and shatter against the Civil Rights Movement, Willie Morris journeyed north in a circular transit peculiar to southern writers. His memoir of those years, North Toward Home, became a modern classic. In The Courting of Marcus Dupree he turned again home to Mississippi to write about the small town of Philadelphia and its favorite son, a black high-school quarterback. In Marcus Dupree, Morris found a living emblem of that baroque strain in the American character called """"southern.""""Beginning on the summer practice fields, Morris follows Marcus Dupree through each game of his senior varsity year. He talks with the Dupree family, the college recruiters, the coach and the school principal, some of the teachers and townspeople, and, of course, with the young man himself. As the season progresses and the seventeen-year-old Dupree attracts a degree of national attention to Philadelphia neither known nor endured since """"the Troubles"""" of the early sixties, these conversations take on a wider significance. Willie Morris has created more than a spectator's journal. He writes here of his repatriation to a land and a people who have recovered something that fear and misdirected loyalties had once eclipsed. The result is a fascinating, unusual, and even topical work that tells a story richer than its apparent subject, for it brings the whole of the eighties South, with all its distinctive resonances, to life.

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9780878055852

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A document of significance and undeniable truth-- ""New York Times Book Review""

Black, bespectacled, 17-year-old Marcus Dupree, star running back for an integrated high school in Philadelphia, Miss., was the most sought-after and acclaimed young football player of 1982; and Morris (North Toward Home, Good Old Boy) goes to Philadelphia to cover that 1981-82 season here, with an overload of relevant/irrelevant digressions often swamping the central story. Was the white community using him? Or did the truth go further - that the parents, students, teachers, teammates there had intuitively adopted him? Was there a need for expiation in the town? And was he saving its soul? I wished to find out; I would become part of the boy and the town. In between chunks of similar rhetoric, then, Morris talks to the locals about homegrown legend Marcus, about the town's apparently successful integration. He talks to Marcus and his family, goes to games (with play-by-play), responds to Marcus' greatness. He recounts the area's racial history - including frequent, unnecessarily belabored flashbacks to the violent Sixties. ( I shall rely here, in paraphrase, on the well-documented account by Don Whitehead in his Attack on Terror: The FBI and the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi. . . ) With far less justification, he indulges in autobiographical effusions - on his own high-school days, his lifelong interest in sports, his love for dog Pete (whose death will later provide a maudlin fadeout), his feelings of symbolic kinship with Marcus: this narrative, much as an act of the subconscious, has really become a book about two small-town Mississippi boys - a seventeen-year-old black and a middle-aged white. . . And eventually the overlong mosaic comes to focus on quiet-but-frantic Marcus' need to choose (with his mother) among the dozens of college-football offers he's been getting: Morris sketches in the college-recruitment scene, its rules and sometime abuses (no blatant) ones in this case); and, in the book's final section, he gives a day-by-day account of Marcus' hectic, traveling bout of last-minute indecision as the salesmen come and go - the choices now down to Texas, Oklahoma, Southern Mississippi, and UCLA. ( What, pray, was going through the young man's thoughts?. . . Who could help our young man? Who might come forward now? ) After all the heavy build-up, however, this climax is a busy blur, more tiresome than suspenseful, without real connection to those larger themes. And, while a more disciplined reporter might have made a small, powerful book out of the personal/football/sociological interplay here, Morris' sprawling treatment - at its very best in the interview-evocations of daily life in today's Philadelphia - is only fitfully involving, only obliquely provocative. (Kirkus Reviews)

A document of significance and undeniable truth-- New York Times Book Review

Author Information

Willie Morris (1934-1999) was the award-winning author of many books, including North Toward Home, My Dog Skip, and After All, It's Only a Game.

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