Mary Tappan Wright (1851-1916) was an American novelist and short story writer, from a family of prominent academics. Her father, Eli Todd Tappan, was president of Kenyon College. Her husband, classical scholar John Henry Wright, taught at Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She also had two notable sons; legal scholar Austin Tappan Wright, author of the classic utopian novel Islandia, and geographer John Kirtland Wright, originator of the concept of geosophy.
     Authors are admonished to write what they know, a dictum Wright took to heart; she knew college life from the inside, and explored it in many of her works. Her favorite fictional venue was Dulwich College, a religious foundation like so many actual early American institutions of higher learning.
     In a writing career extending from 1890 to 1912, Wright published four novels and close to two dozen short stories; additional unpublished works are in her papers at the Harvard University Library. Her main publisher was Charles Scribner’s Sons, which put into print twelve of her published stories in its journal Scribner’s Magazine, gathered six of them into her first book, A Truce, and Other Stories, and issued three of her four novels.
     Noted for their acute characterization, evocative description and pointed humor, Wright’s works were deservedly successful in her own day, but fell into obscurity after her death; if she is remembered at all today it is merely as the mother of Austin Tappan Wright. Aside from the tales in A Truce, her short stories were never collected into book form until the present Fleabonnet Press project.

     Dead Letters, and Other Pieces collects for the first time four of Wright’s later stories, along with a book review from her hand and a bonus piece by her son Austin Tappan Wright, the only short story he ever published. It follows up our previous Wright collection, Pro Tempore, and Other Stories (Dec. 2007); a further volume, projected for June 2008 and to be titled Beginning Alone, and Other Stories, will return to print the remainder of her published short stories.

     Dead Letters, and Other Pieces is the 21st chapbook published by Fleabonnet Press, and the third in its classics line.
 

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