George Byron Wright

A native Oregonian, George Byron Wright was born on the Columbia River at The Dalles, Oregon. Along with his mother and brother, he migrated to three other small Oregon towns as his father pursued the life of a mortician. Living in Baker City, Tillamook and Roseburg endowed him with a lifelong fondness for small places.

George wrote his first story in a small lined notebook when he was nine and living in Baker City in 1948. It was about a cowboy is all he can remember. But the yen was forged to create people, places and events from his own imagination; it became his life-long passion.

During a 30-year-plus career in the not-for-profit sector, George used his creative energy on professional writing. With the formation of a consulting practice with his wife, Betsy, George’s published books on not-for-profit management, edited and published a national newsletter for not-for-profit CEOs, and wrote a newspaper column for the Daily Journal of Commerce called the “Social Agenda”. He also owned a bookstore for several years in the early 1980s.

His love for writing novels didn’t get back on track until the mid 1990’s. By that time he had gained experience running his own small publishing company and knew the realities of producing and marketing books. His first novel, the award winning BAKER CITY 1948, is influenced by the murders of women in Baker County that were never solved; it was published in 2005 and caused a cold case investigation to be opened into the old murders when his book was released. TILLAMOOK 1952, published in 2006, is influenced by the huge Tillamook forest fire of 1933, the first of the four fires to become known as the “Tillamook Burn”. The third novel of what Wright bills as the “Oregon Trio” came out in the fall of 2007. ROSEBURG 1959 is set against the backdrop of the massive blast of a truckload of explosives in August of 1959, leveling 12 square blocks of the town’s core.

Wright’s next novel, DRIVING TO VERNONIA, was published in 2009 and is the story of a man desperately needing to find a man from his past who had a significant impact on his life. His most recent novel, NEWPORT BLUES, A SALESMAN’S LAMENT, was published in 2011 and tells the story of Sidney Lister a ground down ex-salesman who has to fill in for a dead man on short notice. Wright lives with his wife and first reader Betsy in Portland, Oregon, USA.

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