Helen of the Old House
First Edition. First printing. A novel of Capital and Labor, set in an American industrial mill town, described by Fay M. Blake as “a sentimentalized tale of industrial strife” (Blake also notes, in characteristically forthright fashion: “The writing, plot and characterizations are all incredibly bad”). Harold Bell Wright, today little-remembered, was the best-selling author of his day and is reputed to be the first American author ever to sell a million copies of a book. Wright's popular success has often been cited as evidence of American readers' lack of discernment, one mid-century critic having famously noted: “Harold Bell Wright supplied more negative data on the literary quality of the taste of the fiction reading public than any other author. No critic has ever damned Wright with even the faintest praise.” (Irving Harlow Hart, “The Hundred Leading Authors of Best Sellers in Fiction from 1895 to 1944,” in Publisher's Weekly for Jan 19, 1946). BLAKE (The Strike in the American Novel) p.241.
Harold Bell Wright, (1872-1944).
Helen of the Old House.
New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1921.
Lehigh University Catalog Record: https://asa.lib.lehigh.edu/Record/00011625926
A version of this text has been digitized and is available through the Internet Archive.
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