The Press: Monocled Journalist

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On the staff of the Los Angeles Times in 1910 was a brilliant young reporter who was so sensitive that a bad concert which he covered one night gave him a splitting headache, forced him to quit work early. Ten minutes after he left the building the McNamara boys blew it up, killing 21 men. That was the first occasion when illness brought luck to Willard Huntington Wright.

Wright moved East, wrote books and criticism, grew a beard, affected a monocle. He went to work for The Smart Set, a sort of pretentious pulp, became its editor and transformed it into what Critic Burton Rascoe called "the most memorable, the most audacious, the best edited, and the best remembered of any magazine ever published on this continent."

By 1923 Wright had published nine scholarly books (What Nietzsche Taught, The Future of Painting, etc.), had worked himself into a nervous breakdown that turned his luck again. He spent two years in bed, unable to read, one more year reading and analyzing detective stories, the heaviest fare his doctor would allow him. When he was able to get around, he took to Editor Maxwell Perkins of Scribner's the outline of three Philo Vance detective stories. As S. S. Van Dine, Wright wrote serialized best-sellers for a decade, so obscured his earlier reputation that when his identity was revealed (by Bruce Gould, now co-editor of The Ladies' Home Journal) few people except literati remembered who Willard Huntington Wright was.

Wright hoped that with financial success he could resume his earlier scholarly career. But several months ago he became ill, developed coronary thrombosis. This time illness did not bring luck to 51-year-old Willard Huntington Wright. Instead, last week, came Death.