This page is dedicated to the author of Islandia, Austin Tappan Wright. If you have any questions or suggestions, please email me.
Biography
Austin Tappan Wright was born on 20 August, 1883 in Hanover, New Hampshire to John Henry Wright (Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University) and Mary Tappan Wright (a novelist). He was educated at Harvard College (1905), and Harvard Law School (1908), where he edited the Harvard Law Review and graduated cum laude. He married Margaret Garrad Stone and had four children, William Austin, Sylvia, Phyllis, Benjamin Tappan. After serving in the Boston law firm of Louis Brandeis, Wright took faculty positions at the University of California law school at Berkeley (1916-1924) and the University of Pennsylvania law school (1924-1931). He died on 18 September, 1931 in a car accident.
Islandia
From his early childhood, Wright spent much of his private time developing an imaginary realm called Islandia, a community on a small subcontinent in the South Pacific. As he advanced in his career as a legal philosopher and teacher, Wright amassed thousands of pages detailing the geography, language, religion, history, and even the peerage of his own private utopia. After his death, Wright's widow taught herself to type and organized a two-thousand page novel from his papers. Her daughter edited the typescript to just over a thousand pages and persuaded Farrar & Rinehart to publish Islandia in 1942, eleven years after Wright's death. The book sold approximately 30,000 copies.
In the novel, a pre-industrial civilization confronts early twentieth century colonialism in a struggle to reconcile their happily unadorned culture with the excesses of modern technology. The protagonist, John Lang, attempts to mediate this culture clash as a United States consul - but gradually comes to appreciate Islandian life. Eventually, he brings his New England bride to the Island and rejects American culture altogether. Despite some elements of Islandia which contain a distressingly racist tinge, the novel's progressive attitude towards the state of women in Wright's time (and our own) made this novel a classic in utopian literature.
Excerpts
These are selected quotations from articles that address Wright or Islandia. In selecting alphabetical order for these excerpts, I've employed no overarching strategy to organize these ideas. They were simply useful in preparation for a small biographical essay I've written on the subject, located in the American National Biography, vol. 24, pp. 3-4: Oxford University Press. By all means, use these for your own research. However, I strongly suggest that you track down the original full text sources to ensure that your citations are in proper context.
Bacon, Leonard. (1942). Introduction. Islandia. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.
"[I]n spite of my affection for him and what I supposed to be my knowledge of him I hadn't the faintest inkling that he had left something behind him outside of his professional publications" (p. vi).
Cousins, Norman. (1942, April 11). The anniversary of 'Islandia.' The Saturday Review, p. 7.
[Writing 25 years in the future] "There was no literary Shangri-la here, no paradise of the imagination, only an entirely eredible creation -- an Islandia which, whether as nation or as people, had its faults and its problems, its promise and its strengths. This, of course, is just what Austin Tappan Wright wanted to do, for he did not create Islandia as escape, any more than an artist creates a new design as escape. Austin Wright wanted Islandia to sound real and convincing, and this book is a monument to the success of that ambition. Islandia, like life, was real; Islandia was earnest" (p. 7).
Flieger, Verlyn. (1983). Wright's Islandia: Utopia and its problems. In M. Barr & N.D. Smith (Eds.).,Women and utopia: Critical Interpretations. (pp. 96-107). Lanham, MD: University Press of America.
"His vision is not an extreme one, and is predicated on his perception of clear differences between the sexes -- differences which define, but do not hamper roles. Still, his sympathy for women and his insight into their problems make him unusual not just in his own time, but in any time" (p. 97).
Jacobs, Naomi. (1995). Islandia: Plotting utopian desire. Utopian Studies, 6, 75-89.
"Far from a political radical -- his unpublished poetry is critical of socialism as well as of American boosterism -- Wright himself was prosperous and privileged enough to live quite comfortably within the world whose inadequacies he lamented" (p. 86).
"What is notable, and absorbing, in Wright's handling of the conventional associations between utopian world and utopian woman, is his work's insistent tone of frustration, its prolonged deferral of satisfaction -- and its ultimate, explicit rejection of the equation of utopian longing with sexual desire" (p. 81).
Little, Robert. (1942, May 18). Daydream. Time Magazine, p. 86.
"The product of modern time, Islandia is vivid chiefly with the desire for complete escape from the actual world. It tries to make that escape so detailed, so palpable, that it will outrealize reality. It also tries to anatomize (and to dream solutions for) those pressures which have made escape so desirable" (p. 86).
Lloyd, William. H. (1931). Austin Tappan Wright. University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 80, 1-4.
"If anything he took too little interest in the prosaic but unavoidable details of administration. For faculty and committee meetings he had no linking and attended in a spirit of resignation, although if a problem arose involving serious consequences, he would give it his best thought" (p. 3)
"The home was the center of his life and his intimate friends formed an outer circle; publicity he did not seek; indeed it may be doubted if he possessed, or if he had possessed would have practiced, the histrionic arts necessary to catch the public eye. But if fate had spared him, one feels certain that the charm and force of his personality in the maturity of middle age would have left a deep impression in circles where intelligence is valued" (p. 4).
McMurray, Orrin K. (1931). Austin Tappan Wright (1883-1931). California Law Review, 20, 60-61.
[Of his years at Cambridge] "young Austin knew many of the great scholars of those days. Ames, Wambaugh and others of the law faculty were not only his teachers but his friends. Indeed, Ames appeared in a police court in Boston for Wright and a fellow student who had been arrested for trespass on the railroad tracks of the New Haven & Hartford or Boston & Maine Railroad, and not only secured their discharge, but if memory serves me correctly, got compensation for wrongful arrest" (p. 60).
Oliver, Kenneth. (1955). The spectator's appraisal: Islandia revisited. The Pacific Spectator, 9, 178-182.
I think we can say that no other author of a utopian novel has known the land of his creation as intimately as Austin Wright knew Islandia. Plato descended from the stratosphere of abstract philosophy to his Republic. He did not intimately associate with its inhabitants under the conditions of life which he had created. Other utopian authors conceived fantasy-worlds where one or another great principle -- economic, political, scientific, etc. -- arose to dominance out of nothing, as it were, and waved a magic wand that suddenly gave perfection to eagerly awaiting man. Lewis Carroll, who did achieve intimacy with his dream world, did not give it the full depths of import which derive from the perfect interweaving of the real and the imaginary in a total panorama of life" (p. 179).
Powell, Lawrence C. (1957). 'All that is poetic in life': Austin Wright's Islandia. Wilson Library Quarterly, 31, 701-705.
"[T]he result [of Islandia] is a critique of our industrial civilization, Puritan morality, and business ethics, from all of which the author was a refugee, creating in Islandia a way of life dearer to his heart than that to which he was born" (p. 701).
"He was a kind of Renaissance man, akin to Leonardo in the diversity of his interests. He even learned enough engineering to lay out a railroad curve. His dearest pastimes were sailing and mountain climbing -- two important things to note when we come to read the novel, for his Islandians are both saline and alpine" (p. 702).
"Although utopian -- that is, about a way of life more ideally perfect than the one into which the author was born -- Wright's Islandia was not a wholly imaginary world. In fact, its landscape is pure New England, of the White Mountains, and the Main and Cape Cod marshes. Its architecture is Oxonian. Its women are physically the women Wright knew or dreamed of knowing" (p. 702).
"Islandia is a document of the artist's victory over himself and life. Writing it was Austin Wright's way of keeping his sanity in an obviously mad world of cutthroat competition, cancerous industrialization, sexual frustration, and worse" (p. 704).
Searles, Baird. (1991). Wright, Austin Tappan. In N. Watson & P.E. Schllinger (Eds.).,Twentieth Century Science-Fiction Writers, 3rd ed. (pp. 888-889). Chicago: St. James Press.
"There are [in Islandia] discernible elements of Japan, Madagascar, Indonesia, and India, but the sum total is curiously more Western than Eastern, more homely than exotic" (p. 888).
Staff. (1958, August 23). Vanished. The New Yorker, pp. 18-19.
"[A]s he moved ever higher in a legal and professional career [Wright] delved ever deeper into his make-believe land" beginning his "methodical" development of Islandia at Harvard University and completing the manuscript around 1930.
"The Wrights' sailboat was called Aspara -- the Islandian word for 'seagull.' Wright did not talk much about Islandia outside the family" (p. 19).
Strauss, Harold. (1942, April 12). A novel that casts a spell. The New York Times Book Review, pp. 1, 22.
"We have already banished a good many of the horrors of which he complains and on the other side of the ledger Wright falls into the city dweller's miscalculation of the amount of leisure that an agricultural people may have. The cards are stacked against the American way of life by the very origin of the book as a dream-compensation for personal lacks" (p. 22).
Wright, Austin T. (1915). 1915?. Atlantic Monthly, 115, 453-463.
1915 is a short story that traces the conversion of a small town businessman from passive bystander to imminent patriot in the face of foreign invasion.
"Once more in the street, he looked up at the sky. Overhead was the familiar, smoke-tinged blue, but in the motionless facades of the buildings, in the many curtained shops, in the emptiness of the streets, and in the furtive silence of the few passers was something chilling and sinister. Before the big guns of the invaders' battleships in the harbor below, what houses of cards all these apparently substantial structures! He knew that, in many of the trades which they housed, the margin of profit -- gained with infinite care and worry -- was figured so closely that without the usual pressure of daily business one would follow another in a widening circle of disaster, no less ruinous than destruction from bombardment. Against this moral ruin he must fight with other sane-minded men, and he, an intermediary between business and the public in his occupation, was above all able to act effectively. He must not let languor overcome him" (p. 460).
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