• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Islandia is a tiny kingdom at the southern tip of the Karain sub-continent, isolated from the rest of the world by the impassable Sobo Steppes and hundreds of miles of trackless ocean. Its people are peaceful and agrarian and have for centuries resisted the influence of outsiders. In fact, the national assembly passed the Hundred Law in 1841, limiting the number of foreign visitors to no more than one hundred at any given time. But that isolation was no obstacle to Wright, who was able to become the West’s foremost expert on Islandia while circumventing the Hundred Law entirely. You see, he had invented the entire nation and its geography, its people and history and language and culture, all out of whole cloth, as a young boy. Islandia, though intricate and fully realized, is an entirely fictional country.

Wright rarely mentioned Islandia to outsiders, but his family knew about it, and knew that some part of him was always there. “This view looks like Islandia,” they would hear him remark at times, as he studied some landscape that must have reminded him of the vivid utopia in his mind’s eye. He named the family sailboat Aspara, the Islandian word for “seagull.”

When he died, he left behind the work on which he’d spent over twenty years: twenty-three hundred longhand pages describing every aspect of Islandian life, from the sarka plum liqueur enjoyed by its inhabitants to the candles, shielded from the wind by waxed paper, that light the streets of its capital city. He may never have intended anyone else to read it, but his widow, Margot, taught herself to type and transcribed the entire text. Wright’s oldest daughter, Sylvia, who later became a successful humorist and essayist in her own right,* spent the next decade cutting two hundred thousand words (about the length of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment) out of the manuscript and shopping the result around to New York publishers in seven thick binders, so heavy that she couldn’t carry them all herself.

When Islandia was published in 1942, at the height of World War II, it was a sensation. Readers had certainly visited fantastic places before, in day trips to Wonderland and Lilliput and Dante’s Inferno, but spending 1,013 pages among the simple, peaceful people of Islandia and their carefully constructed world was an entire vacation—especially at a time when real overseas travel was off the table due to the war. Reviewers clutched for words to describe this brand-new approach to fiction. Time called it “perhaps the most sustained and detailed daydream that has ever seen print . . . trompe-l’oeil on a vast scale.” The endpapers of the first edition were carefully drawn maps of Islandia, no doubt a crucial part of the illusion.

Today we can still be absorbed in meticulously imagined artificial worlds. In 2010, CNN reported that thousands of viewers of James Cameron’s Avatar were reporting feelings of loss and depression after watching the 3-D film, even contemplating suicide at the prospect that real life would never be as vivid and impossibly beautiful as the movie’s computer-generated moon of Pandora. But Cameron’s utopia was the result of hundreds of millions of dollars and man-hours and state-of-the-art digital technology. I prefer the image of the respectable law professor scratching away by gaslight after his children are in bed, trying desperately to record every detail of his little island, the byways and folkways that only he can see but that he has known since childhood. It’s the ultimate outsider art.

The creation of geographies must have been in the Wright family genes. As a young boy, Austin Tappan Wright refused to let his younger brother, John, share Islandia with him; John shrugged and created his own island, Cravay. John Kirtland Wright would grow up to gain fame as an influential cartographer, director of the American Geographic Society, and coiner of the term “chloropleth map.”* Their mother, Mary Wright, wrote a series of popular novels set in a painstakingly detailed but wholly