Austin Tappan Wright
Austin Tappan Wright (1883–1931) was an American legal scholar and novelist, best known for his posthumously published work, *Islandia*. Born in Hanover, New Hampshire, he was raised in an academically inclined family, with his father serving as a dean at Harvard University and his mother as a novelist. Wright graduated from Harvard with a law degree and gained experience in legal practice before transitioning to academia, teaching at institutions like the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
In addition to his legal career, Wright devoted much of his personal time to crafting an imaginary country called Islandia, which he meticulously developed through extensive notes detailing its geography, culture, and history. Following his untimely death in a car accident, his wife compiled and published *Islandia* in 1942, transforming his extensive notes into a novel that garnered critical acclaim and became an underground classic in the fantasy genre. The story follows John Lang, an ambassador who becomes immersed in Islandia's intricate culture, exploring themes of modernity and cultural identity. Despite some controversial elements in the narrative, Wright's *Islandia* remains a significant contribution to utopian literature.
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Austin Tappan Wright
- Born: August 20, 1883
- Birthplace: Hanover, New Hampshire
- Died: September 18, 1931
- Place of death: Las Vegas, Nevada
Biography
Austin Tappan Wright was born on August 20, 1883, in Hanover, New Hampshire. His father, John Henry Wright, was the dean of the Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. His mother, Mary Tappan Wright, was a novelist. Wright attended Harvard, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1905. He went on to attend Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude in 1908. While in law school, he edited The Harvard Law Review. He married Margaret Garrad Stone and the couple had four children.
Wright worked for the Boston law firm of Louis Brandeis for some time before he accepted a faculty position at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1916 to 1924. From 1924 to 1931, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. On September 18, 1931, Wright was killed in a car accident in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Beginning in his childhood, Wright began spending his private time developing an imaginary country called Islandia, located on a small subcontinent somewhere in the South Pacific. Continuing to develop his ideas throughout his career as a legal philosopher and teacher, he accumulated thousand of pages of research that detailed the geography, religion, language, history, and royal genealogy of his imaginary community. According to most accounts of his life, Wright was brilliant, learned, and charming. Some of Wright’s biographers have suggested that Islandia offered him the opportunity to escape from what may have been a stressful life.
Whether or not Wright ever intended to have his book published, after his death, his wife taught herself to type and compiled his notes into a two-thousand-page novel. One of Wright’s daughters edited the manuscript to just over one thousand pages, and she eventually convinced the editors at Farrar and Rinehart to publish the book in 1942, eleven years after Wright’s death. The book sold about thirty thousand copies when it was first published. The New York Times called the book brilliant in concept and execution. Since that time, Islandia has become a kind of underground classic fantasy, rivaled only by J. R. R. Tolkien’s world of Middle- earth.
The protagonist in Islandia is John Lang who comes to the island utopia as an ambassador. He becomes fascinated by the culture, which is much more complex than he originally believed. The inhabitants of Islandia are trying to come to grips with modern technology, which threatens their traditional way of life. Lang eventually rejects American culture altogether, and he even brings his American bride to live on the island. Despite some elements of racism in the book, Wright’s novel is a classic work of utopian literature.