Austin Tappan Wright

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Austin Tappan Wright

Austin Tappan Wright (* 20th August 1883 in Hanover , New Hampshire , † 18 September 1931 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American legal scholar and science fiction - writers , who best known for his masterpiece, the utopia Islandia , has been.

Life

Austin Tappan Wright was the son of classical scholars: John Henry Wright and Mary Tappan Wright ; his brother was the geographer John Kirtland Wright . He was the uncle of the writer Austin Wright (who was named after him) and the grandfather of the editor Tappan Wright King .

He married Margaret Garrad Stone on November 14, 1912. They had four children, William Austin, Sylvia, Phyllis, and Benjamin Tappan. The family lived consecutively in Berkeley , California and Philadelphia , Pennsylvania . Wright died in a car accident near Santa Fe, New Mexico, on September 18, 1931. He was survived by his wife, children, and brother.

Wright entered Harvard College in 1901 and graduated with a BA in 1905 . He enrolled in 1906 at the Harvard Law School and at 1906-1907 long a year interrupted his studies there, the University of Oxford to visit before he returned and graduated in 1908 with "cum laude" and an LL.B graduated. During his senior year at Harvard, he served on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review .

From 1908 to 1916 Wright worked for the Brandeis , Dunbar and Nutter law firm in Boston. He then taught from 1916 to 1924 at the School of Jurisprudence at the University of California, Berkeley . His teaching activities were interrupted by the First World War. He worked as an assistant to the US Department of Shipping and the US Department of Shipping Emergency Fleet Corporation in San Francisco . After the war, he was an attorney with the Thatcher and Wright law firm in San Francisco from 1919 to 1924. Wright taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1924 until his death in 1931 . During these years he also held teaching positions at other universities: in 1922 at Stanford University , in 1924 at the University of Michigan and in 1931 at the University of Southern California .

His subjects included common law, partnerships, corporations, damages, mortgages, municipal corporations, military law, and judicial proceedings, with his own main interests in common law and military law. He has published extensively in various legal journals, particularly the California Law Review and the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

Literary work

Although Wright's peers were aware that he had literary interests outside his area of ​​expertise and some expected that at some point he might expand to other areas of literature, those possibilities seemed to be excluded by his untimely death. During his lifetime he published only one fiction in April 1915, the short story 1915? in Atlantic Monthly .

Few people outside of Wright's own family knew that he had long worked on a comprehensive utopian fantasy about an imaginary land called Islandia, comparable to JRR Tolkien's lifelong work about Middle-earth .

In his estate there was a 2300-page manuscript of a novel exploring the country, with appendices containing a glossary of the island language, a list of the population, a historical register of nobility, a list of places and a history of the individual provinces. Another book manuscript is said to be a general history of the country.

After Wright's death, his widow edited the manuscript for publication, and after her own death in 1937, her daughter Sylvia continued to revise the text. The novel Islandia , based on the Wright Appendices, was finally published in 1942 along with a promotional brochure by Basil Davenport , An introduction to Islandia; its history, customs, laws, language, and geography , based on the original supplementary material.

Islandia became a cult classic and eventually spawned three sequels by Mark Saxton .

Wright's articles, including the carbon typescripts of the unabridged version of Islandia and the unpublished Islandia: History and Description , Dreams and Other Verses , College Writings, and Letters to Family Members, are in the Houghton Library at Harvard University. Some of his wife's correspondence is in the Fay family writings at Radcliffe College.

In 2018 Islandia was nominated for a Retro Hugo Award .

bibliography

fiction

  • 1915? (1915)
  • Islandia (1942)
  • An introduction to Islandia; its history, customs, laws, language, and geography (1942) (with Basil Davenport)
  • The Story of Alwina (1981)

Poetry

  • The Voyagers (1906)

Non-fiction

  • Undisclosed Principal in California (1917)
  • Government Ownership and the Maritime Lien (1919)
  • California Partnership Law and the Uniform Partnership Act (1921)
  • Supervening Impossibility of Performing Conditions in Admiralty (1923)
  • Uniformity of Maritime Law in the United States (1925)
  • Opposition of the Law to Business Usages (1926)
  • Private Carriers and the Harter Act (1926)
  • The New Ohio General Corporation Act (1927)
  • An Islandian on the Islands: a Field Report (1963)

literature

  • Lloyd, William H. "Austin Tappan Wright." University of Pennsylvania Law Review , v. 80, no. 1 (Nov. 1931), pp. 1-4.
  • McMurray, Orrin K. "Austin Tappan Wright (1883-1931)." California Law Review , v. 20, no.1 (Nov. 1931): pp. [60] -61.
  • Aviator, Verlyn. "Wright's Islandia: Utopia with Problems". in Women and Utopia . New York: Lanham, 1983. pp. 96-107.
  • Saler, Michael. "" Islandia "by Austin Tappan Wright (1942)", in The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders . Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005. p. 1106-1108.
  • Wood, Andrew. Austin Tappan Wright: The Man Who Envisioned Islandia

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jim DeBrosse: Will Tom Ford's Film Induce Austin Wright's Literary Rebirth? . In: cincinnatimagazine.com of January 8, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Wright, Austin Tappan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American lawyer and author
DATE OF BIRTH August 20, 1883
PLACE OF BIRTH Hanover, New Hampshire
DATE OF DEATH September 18, 1931
Place of death Santa Fe