"I Used to Be a Highbrow but Look at Me Now‪"‬

This article reads Willard Huntington Wright's work against his anxieties about cultural hierarchy and value, utilizing archival work in Wright's papers at the University of Virginia and unearthing a previously unknown series of crime stories that he published under another pseudonym a decade before his success as bestselling detective novelist S. S. Van Dine. The author argues that Wright's work in popular fiction provides a special opportunity for interrogating the highbrow/lowbrow divide and its phrenological roots.

   This article originally appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Volume 30, Issue 1.