At the height of his popularity his domestic romances made his name a household word. He was attacked by those who shuddered over his sickly sentimentality and easy sermonizing but revered as a great religious writer (the best since Bunyan) by a segment of the American population that had seldom or never bought fiction. Mail-order houses delivered his works throughout rural and small-town America. Sales in New York City might be negligible but people in out-of-the-way villages in Missouri and Nebraska bought his romances in unprecedented numbers. A population not always economically middle class, his readership nevertheless staunchly upheld the middle-class values which crystalized during the nineteenth century: God and home, America and provincialism, morality and hard work. Uncomplicated, written in a pseudo-biblical style, dealing with homely people in homely homes, Wright's romances gave a largely unlettered public comforting answers to the alarming spectacle of modern America.
His whole life had been geared toward the ministry. Born in Rome, New York, to William A. and Alma Watson Wright, he worked on the family farm and attended school irregularly, finally, as an adult, spending two years in the preparatory department at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio.
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