Harold Bell Wright

Born in 1872, Harold Bell Wright was an American novelist, essayist, and former Christian minister whose books reached an enormous audience in the early decades of the 1900s. He is often remembered as one of the first American writers to become a true mass-market bestseller, with novels such as That Printer of Udell's, The Shepherd of the Hills, and The Winning of Barbara Worth helping define his reputation.

Wright's fiction commonly blended moral questions with romance, frontier settings, and everyday people trying to live decent lives. Several of his books were adapted for film, and The Shepherd of the Hills in particular stayed closely tied to the Ozarks region that inspired it.

He died in 1944. Though he is less widely read today than some of his contemporaries, his influence on popular American storytelling and early bestseller culture remains an important part of his legacy.