Mary Tappan Wright

Mary Tappan Wright (1851–1916) was an American novelist<ref name="Wallace">Wallace, W. Stewart. A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased before 1950. Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1951, p. 520.</ref> and short story writer best known for her acute characterizations and depictions of academic life. She was the wife of classical scholar John Henry WrightAdams, Oscar Fay. A Dictionary of American Authors. 5th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1904, p. 438.Herringshaw, Thomas William, ed. Herringshaw's National Library of American Biography. Chicago, American Publishers' Association, 1914, p. 784. and the mother of legal scholar and utopian novelist Austin Tappan Wright and geographer John Kirtland Wright. Life and family Wright was born Mary Tappan December 14, 1851, in Steubenville, Ohio,Warner, Charles Dudley, ed. Biographical Dictionary and Synopsis of Books Ancient and Modern. Akron, Ohio: Werner Co., 1902, p. 619.Who's Who in New England. 2nd ed. Chicago : A. N. Marquis & Company, 1916. p. 1186. or December 18 of the same year, the daughter of Eli Todd Tappan, president of Kenyon College, and Lydia (McDowell) Tappan. She was educated at Auburn Young Ladies' Institute, Cincinnati, Ohio. She married, April 2, 1878, John Henry Wright, then an associate professor of Greek at Dartmouth College and later professor of classical philology and dean of the Collegiate Board of Johns Hopkins University, professor of Greek at Harvard University, and dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The couple had three children, Elizabeth Tappan Wright (who died young), Austin Tappan Wright, and John Kirtland Wright. They lived successively in Hanover, New Hampshire, Baltimore, Maryland, and Cambridge, Massachusetts, aside from one period during which John was a professor at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, when they resided in Greece. Wright was a founding member of the Boston Authors Club in 1900. Her husband died November 25, 1908, and she herself died August 25, 1916, in Cambridge."Death Notices" – article, Boston Journal, August 28, 1916, p. 11. She was survived by her two sons. Career Works Wright and her husband are said to have "worked together on their literary activities." Wright's first known published story was "How They Cured Him", which appeared in The Youth's Companion (March 24, 1887), one of several written for that periodical.