Mr. Wright went to Tucson, Arizona, some ten years ago on a business errand. Three days after reaching the city he had bought a cottage. Now he owns eighty acres outside Tucson and has built a new home, a comfortable but by no means pretentious house with a garden transplanted from the neighbouring desert. The scale of living is modest. Wright and his wife take care of the grounds and house, to a large extent; and there is usually not more than one servant. Mr. Wright has a motor car that he has driven for six years and will continue to drive for some years yet. He is fond of horseback riding and spends as much time camping as at home. Two or three tents, the car, some tinned stuff and staples and plenty of ammunition are all Mr. and Mrs. Wright need, for both are good marksmen. They shoot for food, but Wright will not kill a deer.
The stories are frequently written, or largely written, on these expeditions into the desert. Because he is not an artist, Wright has a sadly difficult time. He will submit a story like The Winning of Barbara Worth to five engineers in order that they may check up his account of the irrigation of the desert. A long time was spent in worrisome “looking over the ground,” visiting factory towns, interviewing employers and workmen, before Helen of the Old House took even preliminary shape. As a rule, the incidents Wright uses are transcribed from life, producing the effect of extreme incredibility of which his readers sometimes complain. Being his readers, they are silenced when he tells them of the actual occurrence.
Hildegarde Hawthorne has pointed out the very great and incontestable service of Wright: He creates book readers. It requires very little examination of the facts to discover that thousands whose reading has been nothing but newspapers and magazines have been led by Wright’s stories into the habit of reading a book occasionally. That is an accomplishment of an importance hard to overrate.
As for the man, there is one story I like better than any he has written. Some years ago, riding horseback on a narrow trail, Wright was struck by an automobile that came suddenly around a corner of rock. Horse and rider were pitched into a gully; the horse was killed and Wright’s particularly bad lung so suffered by the fall that everyone assured him there was nothing left but to die. He said: “I won’t die.” Because he couldn’t be moved, a tent had to be erected over him there in the gully, so that he might die in the shade. Lying there under the tent, he fulfilled his purpose by getting well. He also, under the same tent and in the same place, wrote When a Man’s a Man.... And now he is again in good physical shape, riding his horses after the day’s work is over through the desert or up into the foothills of the Catalina Mountains.
The preacher he began, the preacher he must probably remain. There may, perhaps, be something pitiful in the spectacle of a man struggling with the palette of words, as there is something bizarre in the voice proceeding from the wilderness with a perfectly mundane message: That every valley had better be filled, every mountain and hill nicely graded; the crooked carefully straightened, the rough ways ... paved with asphalt.
Books by Harold Bell Wright
1903 That Printer of Udell’s
1907 The Shepherd of the Hills
1909 The Calling of Dan Matthews
1910 The Uncrowned King
1911 The Winning of Barbara Worth
1912 Their Yesterdays
1914 The Eyes of the World
1916 When a Man’s a Man
1919 The Re-Creation of Brian Kent
1921 Helen of the Old House
1923 The Mine With the Iron Door
Sources on Harold Bell Wright
Harold Bell Wright. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company
Harold Bell Wright, the Man Behind the Novels, by HILDEGARDE HAWTHORNE. Booklet published by D. Appleton & Company
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