Wright was born in
Boston, Massachusetts, to Henry Estes Wright, a veteran of the
Civil War, and Clara Adelaide Wright. According to the
1900 Census, he had been working as a dancing instructor. Then, according to the
Census ten years later, he was a salesman in the typewriting industry. In July 1917, Wright was enlisted and drafted to work for the navy, before being discharged in 1919/1921. During the 1920's, he had worked as a musician. Eventually, he worked as a newspaper reporter and editor before turning to fiction. However his work was largely ignored by critics and publishers during his lifetime. In October 1930, Wright wrote a letter to
The Evening Independent newspaper boasting about how he had written a fine lipogrammatic work and asked if the paper would host a lipogram competition, with a prize of $250 awarded to the winner. The paper turned Wright down as they said it was "hardly worth the spending $250 to be offered as the capital prize" and that there "probably would have been few entries". In 1936, Wright completed a draft of
Gadsby during a nearly six-month stay at the National Military Home in California. Unable to secure a publisher, he self-published the novel. Copies of
Gadsby became extremely rare, with some selling for thousands of dollars. Wright previously authored several other works, including
The Wonderful Fairies of the Sun (1896),
The Fairies That Run the World and How They Do It (1903), and
Thoughts and Reveries of an American Bluejacket (1918). His humorous poem, "When Father Carves the Duck," appears in some anthologies. ==Works==