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91 years.[22][23] West Virginia University holds a collection of Wright's notebooks, including the manuscript of an unpublished novel at the West Virginia & Regional History Center.[24]