Lillian Mayfield Wright

Lillian Perry Mayfield was born in Conaway, West Virginia,^[1][2] the daughter of Joshua Grant Mayfield and Florence May Carter Mayfield. She attended West Virginia Wesleyan College^[3] and New York University, and studied with poet Joyce Kilmer.^[1]

Many of her poems and stories were published in national magazines under the name Lillian Mayfield Roberts.^[4] "The best of these mountain poets is Lillian Mayfield Roberts," commented H. L. Mencken in The American Mercury in 1926.^[5][6] One of her poems, "Hill Hunger", was included in the anthology Modern American Lyrics (1924).^[7] Her short story "The Fly on the Window" won $1000 from the West Virginia Review.^[8]

• "The Prayer" (1918)^[9]
• "Clarksburg Season Opens" (1919)^[10]
• "The Professor's Wife" (1921)^[11]
• "Skies are so High" (1921)^[12]
• "Tomorrow" (1921)^[13]
• "Requiem for Dead Hopes" (1921)^[14]
• "Retrospect" (1922)^[15]
• "If (for the Wife)" (1922)^[16]
• "In the Market" (1923)^[17]
• "Home" (1925)^[18]
• "Zinnias" (1927)^[19]
• "Mountain Medicine" (1964)^[20]

Lillian Mayfield married twice. Her first husband was George Paul Roberts; they married in 1916, and divorced in 1928.^[21] Her second husband, John J. Wright, was a public health professor at the University of North Carolina; they married in 1930. She died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1986, aged 91 years.^[22][23] West Virginia University holds a collection of Wright's notebooks, including the manuscript of an unpublished novel at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.^[24]