Wakeling W. Dry

Wakeling W. Dry was a writer associated with music biography in the early 1900s. He is best known for Giacomo Puccini, published in 1906 as part of the Living Masters of Music series, a short book introducing the Italian composer to English-language readers.

Available catalog records and public-domain listings also connect him with other composer studies, including a book on Chopin. Based on the sources I could confirm, Dry appears to have written clear, compact works aimed at readers interested in composers and musical culture rather than highly technical scholarship.

Very little reliable biographical detail about his personal life was readily confirmed from the sources I found, so most surviving attention focuses on his books rather than on the man himself. For audiobook listeners, he stands out as one of those older nonfiction authors whose brief portraits of famous musicians still preserve the tone of an earlier age of music writing.