Taney County Poster
You can read the article in the Springfield, Mo. News-Leader:
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Harold Bell Wright was the father of Norman Wright, our father, and HBW was our grandfather.
He was born in upstate New York in 1872 and became an orphan at the age of 10 when his mother died. His father, though alive, was a drunk and abandoned his family.
HBW had no formal education and taught himself to read and traveled from Ohio to the Midwest where as a young man he entered Hiram College. His studies were cut short by illness. He met his first wife and mother of his three sons, Frances, and the two of them traveled to Missouri where in the late 1890s he became a Minister on a "fluke" when the local circuit-riding preacher failed to appear one Sunday and HBW was asked to speak.
In 1903, a series of his sermons were published as his first novel, "That Printer of Udell's". It caused quite a controversy, particularly in his own church, because he exposed the un-Christian attitudes and actions of too many church-going folks.
In 1907, his second novel, "The Shepherd of the Hills" became a best seller and changed his life from country minister to one of the most beloved writers of the first quarter of the Twentieth Century.
The critics hated him; but his readers loved him placing him at the top of the best-selling lists many years from 1907 to 1920. Some of those years he had two books in the Top Ten lists.
In 2007, Pelican Publishing released a "Shepherd of the Hills Trilogy" which includes The Calling of Dan Matthews and God and the Groceryman and completes the saga of the Matthews Family that was begun in The Shepherd of the Hills.
There is a new group here at eons, The Harold Bell Wright Group where we share information about this almost forgotten, but important writer of the Twentieth Century. Please join us:
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