Daniel Wright Kittredge

Daniel Wright Kittredge (1879–1958) is an obscure American author whose best-known surviving work is The Memoirs of a Failure: with an Account of the Man and His Manuscript, first published in Toronto in 1908. Library and public-domain records confirm his dates and connect him clearly to that book, which was later digitized by the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg.

The novel presents itself as an "interpretative biography" of the enigmatic William Wirt Dunlevy, and its opening chapters place Dunlevy at the University of Virginia and later Harvard. That framing gives a good sense of Kittredge's style: reflective, literary, and more interested in inner life than in outward action.

Records for another title, All the World Loves a Quarrel: An Introduction to One (1911), suggest that he continued publishing in the early 1910s. Beyond those works, reliable biographical details are scarce, which gives Kittredge an unusual appeal today: he survives mainly through the books themselves, and they still carry the voice of a writer intrigued by failure, argument, and the puzzles of personality.