The Jack Wright Adventures were written by “Noname” and appeared in 121 stories, beginning with “Jack Wright, the Boy Inventor; or, Hunting for a Sunken Treasure” (The Boys' Star Library 216, July 18, 1891). “Noname” was the pseudonym of Luis Senarens (1863-1939), a Cuban-American Brooklynite who as an enormously prolific writer of dime novels and later became an editor and executive for the Frank Tousey company. Other writers, including Frederic Van Rensselaer Dey, are thought to have contributed stories to the Jack Wright series.

The Jack Wright Adventures are quintessential Edisonades, similar enough to Senarens’ Frank Reade, Jr. stories (see: The Frank Reade Adventures) that they can be considered as virtually the same series.

The particulars are different, of course. Jack Wright lives in a coastal town, about an hour's train ride north of New York City, which later adventures reveal to be named “Wrightstown.” Wright begins as a bright, plucky seventeen-year-old who is brilliant at inventing machinery and technology. His talents come from his recently deceased inventor father. Jack is

a magnificently built young man, clad in neat clothing, and having a face that showed great kindness and courage. He was not handsome–on the contrary, he was rather an ordinary dark-eyed fellow, with rather intelligent, thin features, but it was very evident that what he lacked in beauty he compensated for in courage.¹

Jack begins with the construction of his Sea Spider submarine, assisted by his two faithful companions, Tim Topstay and Fritz Schneider. Topstay is an elderly, one-legged sailor and a former messmate of Jack's father; Topstay is given to lying about his nautical exploits. Schneider is a stout young Dutchman. Both provide comic relief for the stories. When the Sea Spider is built, Jack, Tim, and Fritz find sunken treasure, and Jack’s wealth is made. As the adventures pass, Jack builds increasingly exotic vehicles, sometimes wrecking them in the course of a story, and gains (and occasionally loses) great wealth, as well as fighting the usual array of bad guys. In “Jack Wright and his Electric Stage; or, Leagued Against the James Boys” (The Boys’ Star Library, Sept 14, 1894) Wright is robbed by the Frank and Jesse James (see: The James Brothers Adventures) but eventually captures them. In another story (“Jack Wright and Frank Reade, Jr., the Two Young Inventors; or, Brains Against Brains,” Happy Days, Oct 20 to Dec 15, 1894) Jack Wright and Frank Reade, Jr. race each other around the world to win a bet for $10,000. (Wright wins) Like Frank Reade and Frank Reade, Jr., Wright eventually ages and has a son who grows up to be just like him.

But although some of the details between the Frank Reade and Jack Wright stories differ, in most respects the two are the same. In both series the protagonists violently kill non-WASPs in great numbers. If anything, the Jack Wright stories are more reprehensible than the Frank Reade, Jr. stories; the portrayals of Mexicans, Jews, Asians, African-Americans, Africans, and various other native groups, including the native Australians, are more vile than in the Frank Reade, Jr. stories, and some of the Jack Wright stories are unbelievably offensive–which is to say, modern readers will have a hard time believing that the story could possibly be so offensive. The Edisonade’s exploitive mentality was also exacerbated in the Wright stories; treasure-hunting and the recovery of loot were the usual theme of the stories.

There is one large (if not significant) difference between Senarens’ Frank Reade, Jr., stories and Senarens’ Jack Wright stories: Senarens made Wright's adventurers wilder and more imaginative. Wright creates more exotic inventions and vehicles, appears in Lost Race Stories, and fights more bizarre enemies: Native American cults, the pirate Blackbeard, voodoo cultists in the Great Dismal Swamp, sea monsters, the descendants of Vikings, the descendants of Aztecs, Thugs, and hostile Atlanteans. In Wright’s second story, “Jack Wright and his Electric Turtle; or, Chasing the Pirates of the Spanish Main” (The Boys’ Star Library 220, Aug. 15, 1891) Wright accompanies Stephen Decatur and the American Navy on the 1803 expedition against the Barbary pirates. (There is no time travel in the story; the 1803 expedition takes place in the 1880s). But Wright's adventures weren't as popular with the readers as the Frank Reade, Jr. stories, and the Wright stories stirred a backlash against Senarens and against the dime novel Edisonades. Critics saw them as (in the words of Sam Moskowitz) “drawn from the dark pits of madness”² and were concerned about the possibly destructive influence that the Wright stories might have on younger minds. Senarens was eventually forced into a hiatus from writing because of the criticism of his Jack Wright stories.

The Jack Wright stories are important as examples of early science fantasy and of the Edisonade dime novels, but the mentality of the stories, from their racial biases to the shameless glorification of Wright’s looting of native cultures, will make them difficult for modern readers to enjoy.

Print: John Spencer, The Steam Man of the Prairies: A Dime Novel Anthology. Seattle: Amazon Createspace, 2016.

¹ Noname, “Jack Wright, the Boy Inventor; or, Hunting for a Sunken Treasure,” The Boys’ Library 216 (July 18, 1891): 2.

² Sam Moskowitz, Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction (New York: Hyperion Press, 1974), 121.