The Shepherd of the Hills - Harold Bell Wright

About the Book

"Here and there among men, there are those who pause in the hurried rush to listen to the call of a life that is more real"

Introduction and Notes by Henry Claridge, Senior Lecturer, School of English, University of Kent at Canterbury.

Few works of American fiction have proved as enduringly popular as Harold Bell Wright's The Shepherd of the Hills.   Wright's novel, first published in 1907, was an instant best seller; by 1918 the book had sold over two million copies; the following year it was adapted for the silent screen (the first of four cinematic versions); and by the mid-1920s Wright was established as the most commercially successful American novelist of all time.

Wright's compelling and moving tale of an outsider who begins a new life in the isolated, insulated world of the fictional Mutton Hollow draws on his work as a Protestant pastor and his familiarity with the pioneer culture of homesteaders in the Ozark Mountains region of southern Missouri.  The novel is both exciting and elegiac, mysterious and melodramatic.

Henry Claridge's introduction to this new Wordsworth edition provides an account of the social and historical background to Wright's novel, particularly its dramatisation of the changing world of the American frontier in the late 19th century, and an explanatory note for the modern reader to aid him or her with the idioms and speech-patterns of Ozark dialect.

Available September 2015

About the Author

Harold Bell Wright

Harold Bell Wright, Wright was born in Rome, Oneida County, New York on May 4, 1872.

When Wright was eleven years old his mother died and his father abandoned the children. For the remainder of his childhood Wright lived with various relatives or strangers, mostly in Ohio. He found odd jobs here and there, frequently sleeping under bridges or in haystacks. In his late teens he found regular employment painting both works of art and houses. After two years of education at Hiram College in Ohio, Wright became a minister for the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Pierce City, Missouri.

Whilst pastoring, he began writing stories for his congregation which were eventually published. The second of these, The Shepherd of the Hills, published in 1907 and set in Branson, Missouri, established him as a best-selling author. In fact, it was later said that he was in fact the first American writer to sell a million copies of a novel and the first to make one million dollars from writing fiction.

Between 1902 and 1942 Wright wrote 19 books, several stage plays, and many magazine articles. More than 15 movies were made or claimed to be made from Wright's stories, including Gary Cooper's first major movie, The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926) and the John Wayne film, The Shepherd of the Hills (1941).

From 1935 until his death in 1944, Wright lived on his "Quiet Hills Farm" near Escondido, California. But whatever city he called home, he travelled much, staying for months at a time in primitive camps, vacation homes, hotels or resorts. Wright usually lived one or two years in a location before using it as the setting for one of his novels.

After struggling most of his life with lung disease, Wright died of bronchial pneumonia in Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, California. He was buried in the Cathedral Mausoleum, in Greenwood Memorial Park, in San Diego.