Melodrama, Popular Religion, and Literary Value: The Case of Harold Bell Wright

I came to my work, not by way of the graded highways of literature but by the rough trails and rutted roads of desperate living.

The taste of some of these modern, self-styled intellectuals, who soar so high over my lowly head, would gag a buzzard.

I...state a most literal truth when I say that in my slice of breakfast toast I realize God.

Harold Bell Wright, To My Sons

These meditations on the work of authorship, the vagaries of literary taste, and religious faith in everyday life come from the pen of minister and author Harold Bell Wright (1872–1944). Wright was one of the five best-selling novelists in the first quarter of the twentieth century.¹ His That Printer of Udell's (1903), The Shepherd of the Hills (1907), The Calling of Dan Matthews (1909), The Winning of Barbara Worth (1911), The Eyes of the World (1914), and When a Man's a Man (1916) outsold almost every other novel published before World War I. Despite his immense popularity, Wright is almost entirely absent from American literary history. In this essay I examine some reasons for Wright's exclusion from the American literary canon, and I argue that Wright's novels were useful to nonliterary audiences as popular melodramas. My larger intellectual project is to suggest that reading and writing are rich, immensely complicated cultural practices and that self-consciously literary writers and readers represent only a tiny part of the literary field. An inclusive literary history will more fully illuminate what Richard Brodhead calls the many "cultures of letters" that coexisted and continue to coexist in America.

1. Authorship, Manliness, and Ministry

Wright embraced a blatantly commercial and blatantly evangelical model of authorship, one at odds with the modernist vision that became dominant in the early twentieth century. In some ways, his was a nineteenth-century model. As Jane Tompkins argues in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (1985), the wives and daughters of liberal Protestant ministers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan Warner, and Maria Cummins dominated the literary marketplace with pious, domestic novels that were continuous with the ubiquitous, evangelical Christian tracts of nineteenth-century America. That is to say that a good book was one that brought a reader's heart into better alignment with the teachings of Jesus. A pastor at several churches in Missouri, Kansas, and later California, Wright read his first novel in installments to his congregation in place of a more conventional sermon. Writing novels, he maintained, was merely an alternate ministry, one with a much bigger congregation (To My Sons 252).²

Wright knew that this model of authorship was out of fashion by the early twentieth century. If sentimental fiction writers of the 1850s saw themselves as respectable, Christian ladies in need of protection by a chivalrous gentleman publisher, Wright saw writers and publishers as an unsympathetic fraternity hell-bent on exposing the unspeakable and immoral for profit.³ In a paragraph of the draft copy of his autobiography, Wright explains, "Dare to speak of an author as a servant or to suggest that it is a writer's job to add something to the fullness of all life, that the glory and honor of writing is the measure of the contribution to the more abundant living of those who read, and you will very quickly see what the fraternity will do to you" (To My Sons, Ms. 220).

In other ways, Wright broke with the most popular nineteenth-century Christian writers. Eschewing domesticity and the world of women, Wright's books were often Westerns. In The Winning of Barbara Worth, well-educated, wealthy, effeminate Easterner Willard Holmes conquers the burning California desert and the raging Colorado River to prove himself a real man, winning the hand of Barbara Worth in the process. In When a Man's a...