S. S. Van Dine - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Willard Huntington Wright was born to Archibald Davenport Wright and Annie Van Vranken Wright on October 15, 1888, in Charlottesville, Virginia. He attended St. Vincent College, Pomona College and Harvard University without graduating. In 1907, Wright married Katharine Belle Boynton of Seattle, Washington. He married for a second time in October 1930. His wife was Eleanor Rulapaugh, known professionally as Claire De Lisle, a portrait painter.

At the age of twenty-one, Wright began his professional writing career as literary editor of the Los Angeles Times. Wright's early career in literature (1910–1919) followed literary naturalism. He wrote a novel, The Man of Promise, and some short stories in this mode. He also published similar fiction by others as editor of the New York literary magazine The Smart Set, from 1912 to 1914.

Wright's book What Nietzsche Taught appeared in 1915. It described and commented on all of Nietzsche's books, and also provided quotations from each book. Recently Brooks Hefner revealed heretofore unknown short stories that featured an intellectual criminal, written by Wright under a pseudonym several years before his adoption of the Van Dine pseudonym.

In 1917, Wright published Misinforming a Nation, in which he mounted a scathing attack on alleged inaccuracies and English biases in the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition.