Гарольд Белл Райт: Американдық жазушының өмірі мен шығармалары

American writer

Harold Bell Wright (May 4, 1872 – May 24, 1944) was a best selling American writer of fiction, essays, and nonfiction. Between 1902 and 1942 Wright wrote 19 books, He also maintained a home in Palm Springs, California.

From 1914 to about 1933 Wright lived mostly in Tucson, Arizona. Wright's land on Tucson's east side became the Harold Bell Wright Estates subdivision and the streets bear names of some of his fictional characters and book titles such as Printer Udell, Barbara Worth, Shepherd Hills, Brian Kent, and Marta Hillgrove. A small city park in the neighborhood is named for him. His home has been restored and is now a private residence. From 1935 until his death in 1944, Wright lived on his "Quiet Hills Farm" in or near Escondido, California. He traveled much, staying for months at a time in primitive camps, vacation homes, hotels or resorts, in such places as Riverside, San Diego, Palm Springs and Benbow, California; Tucson and Prescott, Arizona; Hawaii; and the Barbados. Wright usually lived one or two years in a location before using it as the setting for one of his novels. Wright struggled most of his life with lung disease. He died of bronchial pneumonia in Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California on May 24, 1944, twenty days after his 72nd birthday, and was buried in the Cathedral Mausoleum, in Greenwood Memorial Park, in San Diego.

Wright's biographer, Lawrence V. Tagg (Harold Bell Wright: Storyteller to America, Westernlore Press, 1986), gathered a collection of contemporary attacks on Wright. Owen Wister’s comments are representative: “I doubt if the present hour furnishes any happier symbols [of the quack novel] than we have in Mr. Wright [and The Eyes of the World]. It gathers into its four hundred and sixty pages all the elements of the quack novel. It is,” Wister says, “stale, distorted, a sham, a puddle of words,” and “a mess of mildewed pap.” It was also number one on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 1914. In 1946, Irvin Harlow Hart wrote, "Harold Bell Wright supplied more negative data on the literary quality of the taste of the fiction reading public than any other author. No critic has ever damned Wright with even the faintest praise." (Hundred Leading Authors, p. 287)

Wonder Stories panned Wright's only science fiction novel, The Devil's Highway, in 1932, saying "If not for the mawkish sentimentality, and endless moralizing of this book, it might have been an interesting piece of work". Amazing Stories, however, found the novel "a very creditable attempt at combining two almost incompatible conceptions: The psychic and the physical" and concluded that The Devil's Highway "is quite enjoyable, as it is logical and exceedingly well written".