Islandia

The Harvard-educated legal scholar Austin Tappan Wright spent many years developing his childhood fantasy of a place called Islandia into a utopian novel with worldbuilding to rival Tolkien's. "The author saw every view from its near detail of farms, trees, or gardens on to the horizon," writes his daughter Sylvia in the postscript to this book. "He knew what geological forces shaped its outline; he knew what winds were blowing and how the changes of season crept slowly over Islandia."

After Wright's death in a car accident in 1931, his widow and daughter began the ten-year task of pruning the manuscript into a publishable, though still massive, novel. The publisher's slip declares the book "one of the most exciting of our adventures in publishing." A 1942 Kirkus reviewer admitted that he expected to be "a trifle bored" but found himself deeply interested in the "well-rounded, documented, social studied country." Max Saxton, who edited the book for Farrar & Rinehart, was so fascinated by the work that he later wrote three sequels.