See also
1 Austin Tappan WRIGHT1,2 (1883-1931) [9993]. Born 20 Aug 1883, Hanover, NH.1,2 Died 17 Sep 1931, Bernal, NM.1,3 Cause: Auto accident.
From a biography of Austin Tappan Wright by Dr. Andrew Wood, member of the faculty of San Jose State University.
"Austin Tappan Wright was born on 20 August, 1883 in Hanover, New Hampshire to John Henry Wright (Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University) and Mary Tappan Wright (a novelist). He was educated at Harvard College (1905), and Harvard Law School (1908), where he edited the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude. He married Margaret Garrad Stone and had four children, William Austin, Sylvia, Phyllis, Benjamin Tappan. After serving in the Boston law firm of Louis Brandeis, Wright took faculty positions at the University of California law school at Berkeley (1916-1924) and the University of Pennsylvania law school (1924-1931). He died on 18 September, 1931 in a
car accident.
Islandia
From his early childhood, Wright spent much of his private time developing an imaginary realm called Islandia, a community on a small subcontinent in the South Pacific. As he advanced in his career as a legal philosopher and teacher, Wright amassed thousands of pages detailing the geography, language, religion, history, and even the peerage of his own private Utopia. After his death, Wright's widow taught herself to type and organized a two-thousand page novel from his papers. Her daughter edited the typescript to just over a thousand pages and persuaded Farrar & Rinehart to publish Islandia in 1942, eleven years after Wright's death. The book sold approximately 30,000 copies.
In the novel, a pre-industrial civilization confronts early twentieth century colonialism in a struggle to reconcile their happily unadorned culture with the excesses of modem technology. The protagonist, John Lang, attempts to mediate this culture clash as a United States consul - but gradually comes to appreciate Islandian life. Eventually, he brings his New England bride to the Island and rejects American culture altogether. Despite some elements of Islandia which contain a distressingly racist tinge; the novel's progressive attitude towards the stale of women in Wright's time (and our own) made
this novel a classic in Utopian literature."
From the Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT)
September 20, 1931 - "Philadelphia, Sept. 19, - (AP)- Word was received here today that Austin Tappan Wright, 48, a native of Hanover N.H., and a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania for six years was killed Thursday in an automobile accident at Bernal, N.M. He was motoring from California with his son, William, to his home here.
Mr. Wright practiced law in Boston from 1908 to 1915 and formerly taught in the University of California.".
2 John Henry WRIGHT4 ( - ) [10017].
| 1 | "Fay family papers collection, 1800-1953, Radcliffe College". |
| 2 | "From a biography of Austin Tappan Wright by Dr. Andrew Wood, member of the faculty of San Jose State University.". |
| 3 | "Obituary of Austin Tappan Wright in the Hartford Courant (Hartford, CT), September 20, 1931". |
| 4 | "Engagement announcement of Phyllis Wright and Lowell King in the New York Times, May 18, 1941". |