Read the beginning of "A Man of Caliber" from Wright Morris Territory: A Treasury of Work edited by David Madden with Alicia Christensen:

This story, originally published in the Kenyon Review in 1949, is an early version of the novel The Works of Love.

"On summer nights, the window open, he could lie there and hear the hum of the wires, or the click when the semaphore changed from red to green. Then he would roll on his side, put up his head, and watch the Flyer go through. The streaming coaches made a band of yellow light on the plains. It would be a little while before the night was quiet again.

South of the tracks was the cattle loader, strong with the smell of fermenting manure, and down the spur to the west, past the sawmill, the house of a man named Schultz. This man lived alone on a ten-acre farm. In his bedroom, along toward morning, a lamp chimney could be seen smoking, and now and then his shadow moved about the room. This man Schultz was something of an eccentric, and many years before—so it was said—he had loved a city girl with soft white hands. But after one night and day in his house she had run away. Nobody blamed her. No, nobody blamed her for that.

A little after the Flyer went by, stirring up the night air, rustling in the trees, the eastbound local came up from North Platte. It stirred nothing up. It was hardly a train at all. Will Brady would hear the chug of the motor, or maybe the long honk of the whistle, while he stood in the kitchen, the pancake flapper in his hand. But as this local brought men in, and sometimes took men away, a man like Will Brady, who ran the Merchants Hotel, had to be there. Now and then pretty important people came to Callaway. Once a month, for example, T. P. Luckett, a big man in every respect, who had charge of the Union Pacific Commissary in Omaha. Mr. Luckett had his breakfast in the Hotel, and while sitting in the lobby, smoking his cigar, he seemed to feel like talking to someone. At that time in the morning Will Brady was the only man there. In T. P. Luckett’s opinion, that of a man who spoke frankly, Callaway was dead and didn’t know it—a one-horse town with the horse ready for pasture, as he put it. Nebraska, he said, had spread itself too thin, the western land was not particularly good, and what future there was—for men of caliber—lay in the east. The whole state was tipped, T. P. Luckett said, low in the east, high in the west, and the best of everything had pretty well run off of it, like a roof. The good land was along the Missouri, near Omaha. The good men, as well, and in T. P. Luckett’s opinion it was high time a young fellow like Will Brady gave it serious thought. Saw which way the wind was blowing, that is, and got off the dime. Callaway might always need, he said, a jerkwater hotel to meet the local, but a jerkwater man, not Will Brady, should take care of it.

Will Brady had never thought of himself in terms like that. Whether he was an up-and-coming man, and ought to be up and coming with the east, or whether what he was doing, or not doing, was wasting his time. He just did it. That was the end of it. But it doesn’t take a man long to acquire a taste for the better things —all he needs are these things. The taste comes naturally.

For example, when you’re married and settled down, and have stopped, in a way, thinking about women, you find you have the time, now and then, to sit and think about something else. Eggs, for instance. A man like T. P. Luckett thought about eggs all the time."

Wright Morris (1910–98) was a photographer, essayist, literary critic, and author of thirty-three books including The Field of Vision, The Home Place, and Plains Song: For Female Voices, all available in Bison Books editions. David Madden is the Robert Penn Warren Professor of Creative Writing emeritus at Louisiana State University and the author of fifty books, eleven of which are novels. Alicia Christensen is Bison Books editor at the University of Nebraska Press.

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase Wright Morris Territory, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Wright-Morris-Territory,674875.aspx.