Willard Huntington Wright

Born in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1888, he was raised in California and studied at St. Vincent and Pomona colleges, at Harvard, and later in Munich and Paris. Early in his career he worked as a literary and art critic, wrote about modern art, and edited The Smart Set, moving in ambitious cultural circles before he became famous as a novelist.

He is remembered most for the detective fiction he published as S. S. Van Dine, especially the bestselling novels featuring the amateur sleuth Philo Vance. Those books made him one of the most widely read mystery writers of the late 1920s and early 1930s, with Vance becoming a major popular-culture detective of the period.

Willard Huntington Wright died in 1939. Today he stands out as a writer with two distinct careers: first as a critic and advocate for modern art, and then as a bestselling mystery author whose work helped define the Golden Age style of American detective fiction.