His mother, on the other hand, paid close attention to the children, taught them moral principles and read to them from the Bible, Shakespeare, The Pilgrim's Progress and Hiawatha.

In 1902, while pastoring the Christian Church in Pittsburg, Kansas, he wrote a melodramatic story, entitled That Printer of Udell's, which he intended to read to his congregation, one chapter per week, at successive Sunday night meetings.

Wright despised the magazine version so much that he "hid the poor mutilated corpse in the bottom of the least used drawer of my desk and moved on to other things" (To My Sons, p. 213).

In 1911, he published his most popular book, The Winning of Barbara Worth, a historical novel set in the Imperial Valley of southeastern California.

To Wright, hard work, integrity and concrete efforts to aid people in need were far more important than church doctrines or sermons.

In 1909, pastors across America were incensed by his third book, The Calling of Dan Matthews, which told the story of a young preacher who, like Wright, resigned from the ministry in order to retain his integrity.

[7][3] He traveled much, staying for months at a time in primitive camps, vacation homes, hotels or resorts, in such places as Riverside, San Diego, Palm Springs and Benbow, California; Tucson and Prescott, Arizona; Hawaii; and the Barbados.

[9][10] In 1945 Frank Luther Mott developed a system to compare top selling books from 1665 (Golden Multitudes, the Story of Bestsellers in the United States).

By Mott's reckoning Harold Bell Wright was one of only three American authors to write five best sellers from the arrival of the pilgrims in America through the first quarter of the 20th century.

Owen Wister’s comments are representative: “I doubt if the present hour furnishes any happier symbols [of the quack novel] than we have in Mr. Wright [and The Eyes of the World].

It is,” Wister says, “stale, distorted, a sham, a puddle of words,” and “a mess of mildewed pap.” It was also number one on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list for 1914.

In 1946, Irvin Harlow Hart wrote, "Harold Bell Wright supplied more negative data on the literary quality of the taste of the fiction reading public than any other author.

(Hundred Leading Authors, p. 287) Wonder Stories panned Wright's only science fiction novel, The Devil's Highway, in 1932, saying "If not for the mawkish sentimentality, and endless moralizing of this book, it might have been an interesting piece of work".

[11] Amazing Stories, however, found the novel "a very creditable attempt at combining two almost incompatible conceptions: The psychic and the physical" and concluded that The Devil's Highway "is quite enjoyable, as it is logical and exceedingly well written".