Re-visiting The Re-creation of Brian Kent

Welty’s “Moon Lake,” the fourth, and middle, episode of her cycle of stories The Golden Apples, twice mentions the book The Re-Creation of Brian Kent by Harold Bell Wright. A young camper from the mythical Morgana, Mississippi, Nina Carmichael, is reading it first during naptime at the annual summer camp for girls where the story is set. In a scene that takes place later in the week, Miss Parnell Moody, one of the supervisors at the camp, is “[D]own in the hammock” reading the novel. The narrator explains parenthetically, “(Nobody knew whose book that was, it had been found here, the covers curled up like combs. Perhaps anybody at Moon Lake who tried to read it felt cheated by the title, as applying to camp life, as Nina did, and laid it down for the next person)” (423). Welty’s story proves, however, that the title of the novel, aspects of its plot, and perhaps even the life of its author do apply to life at this summer’s camp.

In the first two decades of the twentieth century, the books of Harold Bell Wright outsold those of every other writer in the United States. He “was the first American writer to sell 1 million copies of a single title book—in fact he had 8 books exceed 1 million copies in sales during his lifetime” (Wrightconcept). Orphaned at age ten, Wright first became a successful minister, but left this calling after “his publishers assured him that he could secure greater results from his pen rather than his pulpit” (Reynolds 346, 348). Five of Wrights’s novels became bestsellers. According to John P. Ferré in Social Gospel for the Millions: The Religious Bestsellers of Charles Sheldon, Charles Gordon, and Harold Bell Wright, the criterion for a best seller at the time was that it “sell at least as many copies as one per cent of the U.S. population for the decade in which it was published” (64). Ferré argues that Wright’s books also clearly reveal a major strain of pre-World War I values in America. Referred to as “frontier melodramas”—apparently because they were set in rural mid-America—the novels expressed readers’ discomfort with the urbanization, mechanization, and industrialization of the era.¹

The Re-Creation of Brian Kent was published in 1919, the year Welty turned ten years old, the same age as the campers in “Moon Lake,” and traveled away from her Jackson home for the first time to attend a camp on a lake in the Mississippi Delta. Her memories of this event, recited in her Afterword to an illustrated edition of “Moon Lake” and another story from The Golden Apples, are remarkably detailed, suggesting that the presence of Wright’s novel is a significant recollection that also helps date the story (Morgana 149–50). The novel was perhaps even more memorable to Welty because it was filmed in 1925, with Wright prominently featured in the promotional flier as both novelist and author of the screenplay.² This was the year Welty graduated from Central High School in Jackson, Mississippi, and possibly she saw the film, since her love of movies from early childhood on is acknowledged in her letters, memoir, fiction, and non-fiction. In 1936, when Welty was now a confirmed if yet-to-be successful writer of short stories, a different version of this Wright title was produced as the motion picture Wild Brian Kent, with less credit to Wright and less acclaim for the film (Chudleigh). Despite considerable success, Wright was largely forgotten by the time he published his last novel in 1942, several years before Welty wrote “Moon Lake.” But Welty remembered the title and plot of his novel and perhaps even that Wright was orphaned at the age of ten—the age of the orphans who are charity campers in the story—when she put The Re-Creation of Brian Kent into “Moon Lake.”

In her Afterword to Morgana: Two Stories from The Golden Apples, Welty recalls a deep homesickness that she felt at Camp McLaurin as a young girl away...