Austin Wright

Austin McGiffert Wright (1922 Yonkers, New York – April 23, 2003 Cincinnati) was a novelist, literary critic and professor emeritus of English at the University of Cincinnati.^[1]

Life

He grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, son of the geographer John Kirtland Wright and Katharine McGiffert Wright, and namesake of his uncle, Austin Tappan Wright, writer of the utopian novel, Islandia. He graduated from Harvard University in 1943. He served in the Army (1943–1946). He graduated from the University of Chicago, with a master's degree in 1948, and a Ph.D. in 1959.

He married Sara Hull Wright, in 1950. They had three children: Joanna Wright (died 2000), Katharine Wright of Berkeley, CA, and Margaret Wright, and two granddaughters, Madeline Giscombe and Elizabeth Perkins.

Austin Wright was an exacting but highly respected professor in the English Department at the University of Cincinnati for almost forty years. His classes in modern literature and creative writing were especially appreciated by graduate students, and his seminars were always fully enrolled. Wright was interested in the technical aspects of good writing, and he liked to have his students dissect novels under a microscope, so to speak, almost as if they were a species of life whose whole DNA could be gradually ferreted out.

Wright’s own novels also grew out of these proto-scientific concerns, and his plots often have the appearance of puzzles meant to be “solved.” His prose, however, has been regarded as a graceful and mellifluous instrument, and his insights into the relationships of women and men, perhaps the major subject of his work, often verging on the comic and ironic, are much admired.

Wright’s late book, Tony and Susan, was not as popular with readers in his department as his other works, and it was puzzling, especially to his women friends, that he could devote as much space as he did in the early part of the book to a thriller-like episode without much redemptive value: a late-night seizure of two women, a mother and daughter, and the subjecting of them to a trail of horror in which both are eventually raped and murdered. This episode is a “fiction” within the novel, and within a manuscript authored by the ex-husband of the Susan character, but its usefulness in Susan’s story has been open to question.

When Austin Wright died in 2003, he had realized certain proceeds from the sale of movie rights to this book, but he had no reason to believe that a film would actually be made, or that his novel Tony and Susan would be re-issued and become a major film called Nocturnal Animals.

Notes: See various documents available from the English Department of the University of Cincinnati; the review of Tony and Susan by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times, March 22, 1993; and an article forthcoming in Cincinnati Magazine.

Awards

• 1985 Whiting Award

Works

Novels

• Camden's Eyes Doubleday, 1969
• First persons: a novel. Harper & Row. 1973. ISBN 978-0-06-014759-4. 
• The Morley mythology. Harper & Row. 1977. ISBN 978-0-06-014751-8. 
• Recalcitrance, Faulkner, and the professors: a critical fiction. University of Iowa Press. 1990. ISBN 978-0-87745-301-7. 
• Tony and Susan. Baskerville. 1993. ISBN 978-1-880909-01-0.  reissue. Atlantic Books. 2010. ISBN 978-1-84887-021-5.  (review )
• After Gregory: a novel. Baskerville Publishers. 1994. ISBN 978-1-880909-12-6. 
• Telling time: a novel. Baskerville Publishers. 1995. ISBN 978-1-880909-36-2. 
• Disciples. Baskerville Publishers. 1997. ISBN 978-1-880909-55-3. 

Non-fiction

• The American short story in the twenties, University of Chicago Press, 1961
• John Leeds Barroll, Austin McGiffert Wright, eds. (1969). The art of the short story: an introductory anthology. Allyn and Bacon.  CS1 maint: Uses editors parameter (link)
• Formal Principle in the Novel. Cornell University Press. 1982. ISBN 978-0-8014-1462-6. 

References

External links

• Profile at The Whiting Foundation