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.
Read more about this topic: S. S. Van Dine
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“In the course of twenty crowded years one parts with many illusions. I did not wish to lose the early ones. Some memories are realities, and are better than anything that can ever happen to one again.”
—Willa Cather (1873–1947)
“I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more—the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men; the deceitful feeling that lures us on to joys, to perils, to love, to vain effort—to death; the triumphant conviction of strength, the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires—and expires, too soon, too soon—before life itself.”
—Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
“From a hasty glance through the various tests I figure it out that I would be classified in Group B, indicating “Low Average Ability,” reserved usually for those just learning to speak the English Language and preparing for a career of holding a spike while another man hits it.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)