Harriet Wolf was an internationally acclaimed American writer whose groundbreaking, award-winning, and bestselling series of six novels follows the lives of her beloved characters Daisy Brooks and Weldon Fells. Wolf, born in 1900, led a reclusive life after publication of her second novel, Let Go the Day, in 1950. She remained a hermit for nearly half of a century.
The speculation of the whereabouts of her seventh novel, which was supposed to supply the ending of the septet, was not uncovered until 2000, many years after her death.
Harriet Wolf's novels include: Tender Weeds, Let Go the Day, Brutal Angels, Klept of My Heart, Home for the Weary, and The Curator of Our Earthly Needs. Wolf sent out the first book in search of a publisher in 1947, however all six novels were already completed.
The series was unconventional, in fact unique, because Wolf wrote it for an audience that could age as the characters did, as if Daisy and Weldon themselves were the intended readers of her books at every given age at which they were depicted. The genres also shift to best tell each portion.
The first book is a children’s novel with fairy tales and talking animals, but halfway through the next novel, when Daisy and Weldon are moving into adolescence, the narration becomes darker, more surreal.
When Daisy and Weldon are teens, they exist in the apocalyptic novel Brutal Angels, a dystopian tale of a doomed society of corrupt adults. It moves to realism in the next book, Klept of My Heart, when they are in their early twenties, but as they move into their thirties, time erodes and shifts; points of view meld. Wolf's fourth novel is heralded as a model of Modernism.
When Daisy and Weldon are middle-aged in Home for the Weary and advancing in years in The Curator of Our Earthly Needs, the magical childhood is as vivid as ever and the present is filled with absurdist twists. In fact, in a moment that's been widely discussed as pioneering meta-fiction, a writer appears, and the writer is named Harriet Wolf. Harriet talks to Daisy and Weldon, sometimes asking them what they want from her.
No one knew what to expect in the seventh book—not in content or genre. By the time, the term “postmodern” was being widely used, her books were already classics. Her novels were published over the course of only a decade, but, ideally, someone could read each one now as her life progressed through each stage; it is widely held that this was how Wolf intended them to be read.
For the remaining years of her life, she was supposed to be completing the seventh and final book in the Wonder Series, as it was eventually called. The manuscript was unearthed in 2000. Although it has been exploited by novelist Julianna Baggott and Harriet Wolf's heirs in the novel Harriet Wolf's Seventh Book of Wonders, it is not exactly clear what's true and what isn't, which is the problem with handing a manuscript over to a novelist! Wolf's seventh book is said to be a memoir -- although this notion is still being debated. It has no title.
Harriet Wolf was never married. She is the mother of one child, Eleanor Wolf Tarkington. Wolf's granddaughters include Tilton Tarkington and Ruth Tarkington, who briefly considered herself a literary critic, but no longer identifies as such. It should be noted that Ruth's ex-husband, Dr. Ron Everly, Ph.D., has written widely on the life and literature of Harriet Wolf, and he is currently a board member of the Harriet Wolf Society.
