The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer brings together two of Wright Morris's best-known novels, The Works of Love (1951) and The Huge Season (1954).

The Works of Love tells the story of Will Brady, a kind-hearted man who builds a successful egg business, willfully loses it, then lives on the road as a migrant worker. Brady is self-destructively drawn to a series of hardened women, and his failed relationship with each progressively wears away his resiliency but not the core of his inexplicable hopefulness.

The Huge Season presents scenes from the life of Peter Foley, a middle-aged professor of classics. As one of his old friends testifies before McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Foley recalls their shared college years and the political education they received from their charismatic, wealthy, and doomed classmate Charles Lawrence. Through its juxtaposition of the two unsettled periods in Foley's otherwise staid life, Morris explores themes of collective response and personal responsibility, of calculated deference to authority and unexpected, private epiphanies, of public misconstruction and personal regret.