Harold Bell Wright, master practitioner of the craft of sentimental romance, was one of America's best-selling authors. His eighteen books, published from 1903 through 1942, sold perhaps ten million copies, but he was most popular before World War I, during the vogue of such domestic romances as Gene Stratton Porter's A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), Kathleen Norris's Mother (1911), and Eleanor H. Porter's Pollyanna (1913). These homely, comforting stories told a middle-class white America that its homes were safe--intact in a new America that was torn by shifting religious values, industrial mechanization, vocal labor unionism, anarchism, and non-WASP immigration. Although most domestic romances were written by women, Wright's fiction, while largely set on the open spaces and Western frontiers of the country, nevertheless conformed to the prevailing norm: he told America that the sacrosanct American home would survive.

According to Asa Don Dickinson, Wright was the third most popular American writer between...