Meridian native Snowden Wright is living his dream and pursuing his passion; that of being a full-time writer. At 37, Wright has published two novels and is working on a third.

Wright, a Lamar High School graduate, said he started to “dabble in writing” in junior high school, but his interest in writing came earlier. 

“As a young child, I was a voracious reader,” Wright said.

He spent much of his earlier years visiting Yazoo County, spending time on his family’s farm. With not a lot of book stores at the time in Meridian, he and his father, Judge Charles Wright Jr., would travel to Jackson where he would spend hours browsing through books. Judge Wright serves over the Tenth Circuit Court.

Wright lived in New York for nearly 10 years after college and wrote his first book, “Play Pretty Blues,” while holding down a day job.  When his grandfather died and left him a small inheritance, he returned to the South to start work on his second book, the recently released “American Pop.” He primarily lived in Oxford during that time, but also spent a lot of time in an old shotgun cottage on the family farm in Yazoo County.

“Play Pretty Blues” is a novel about the late Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, told in the first-person narrative of Johnson’s six wives. The book received the 2012 Summer Literary Seminars’ Graywolf Prize.

Wright’s newest book, “American Pop,” introduces the reader to the Forster family, who are a founding family in the South from the late 1800s to the 1970s and have garnered success with their founding of Panola Cola.

“I began with a hypothesized question as to what would the Kennedys’ lives have been like if they had made their fortune in Cola,” Wright said.

The Forster family set out to make their fortune in what is in almost every refrigerator in the country; good ole carbonated soda.

“I tried to make it southern and very American,” Wright said. “It was a vehicle to explore the past 100 years in America.”

Mixed with the Forsters’ wealth, social status, political aspirations and Mississippi heritage, the book also has a lot of humor.

“The last thing I would want to do is write a book serious, but not funny,” Wright said. “I love making my readers wonder if it’s real or made up. If I had my way, I’d want readers to wonder if real books were real or if fake books were real.”

The book is full of humorous moments as it takes readers on a ride through the lives of the founding family members and the fact they lose their fortune despite the country’s love affair with cola.

“ ‘American Pop’ is a family saga set in the South, a literary novel, and I’m hoping it will be a popular novel that will appeal to a broad spectrum of the public,” Wright said.

The book has already garnered recognition in the literary world having been chosen as the Okra Pick by the Southern Independence Booksellers Alliance’s Discover Great New Writers Program. It is available wherever books are sold, such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble and was published by Harper Collins, who Wright said, “have done very well by me.” He also credits his publicist Eliza Rosenberry, senior publicity manager for William Morrow & Dey Street Books, as being “great and brilliant” in her assistance in promoting “American Pop.”

With the success of the new book and to focus on writing the third, Wright quit his job Feb. 15 as a grants administrator for Georgia Institute of Technology. He is building a cabin in Yazoo County where his grandfather’s had stood owned before it was lost to a fire.

“I feel the best way to honor my inheritance and my grandfather’s legacy is by moving back to Mississippi,” Wright said.

He will split his time living there and in Atlanta.

He has named his cabin “The Sweetest Thing.” When his book tour is over he said he plans to raise a yellow Labrador puppy – that he’ll name Falkor – at the cabin.

His third book, Wright said, is a book about the American South set in South America.

“It is written almost as a work of non-fiction,” he said.

“I want to thank all my family and friends in Meridian who have been so supportive of the book,” Wright said.

In addition to graduating from Lamar, Wright graduated from Dartmouth College and Columbia University in New York. His father and his mother, Rebecca Snowden Wright, live in Meridian and he has two siblings, Rebecca Taff and Parker Wright.