Mary Tappan Wright (1851-1916) was an American novelist and short story writer, from a family of prominent academics. Her father, Eli Todd Tappan, was president of Kenyon College. Her husband, classical scholar John Henry Wright, taught at Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She also had two notable sons; legal scholar Austin Tappan Wright, author of the classic utopian novel Islandia, and geographer John Kirtland Wright, originator of the concept of geosophy.
     Authors are admonished to write what they know, a dictum Wright took to heart; she knew college life from the inside, and explored it in many of her works. Her favorite fictional venue was Dulwich College, a religious foundation like so many actual early American institutions of higher learning.
     In a writing career extending from 1890 to 1912, Wright published four novels and close to two dozen short stories; additional unpublished works are in her papers at the Harvard University Library. Her main publisher was Charles Scribner’s Sons, which put into print twelve of her published stories in its journal Scribner’s Magazine, gathered six of them into her first book, A Truce, and Other Stories, and issued three of her four novels.
     Noted for their acute characterization, evocative description and pointed humor, Wright’s works were deservedly successful in her own day, but fell into obscurity after her death; if she is remembered today it is solely as the mother of Austin Tappan Wright. Aside from the tales in A Truce, none of her other short stories were ever collected into book form until the present Fleabonnet Press project.

     Beginning Alone, and Other Stories collects for the first time in book form six of Wright’s early stories. It follows up our previous Wright collections, Pro Tempore, and Other Stories (Dec. 2007), and Dead Letters, and Other Pieces (Mar. 2008); a further projected follow-up volume will reprint A Truce, and Other Stories, completing our goal of returning all of her short fiction to print in Fleabonnet editions.

     Beginning Alone, and Other Stories is the 22nd chapbook published by Fleabonnet Press, and the fourth in its classics line.
 

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