A Short History of Progress

Ronald Wright is a Canadian author of fiction, travel, and historical non-fiction. He has written several fictional and non-fictional pieces set in the colonial era of the Americas, including The Stolen Continents and The Gold Eaters. He has also written a dystopian satire, A Scientific Romance. A Short History of Progress was originally delivered as a series of five lectures, the 2004 Massey lectures. His follow-up book, What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order, continues the work of A Short History of Progress by examining the era of the American empire in more depth than is provided in A Short History of Progress.

Alongside Wright’s experience as a writer, he has also studied history, anthropology, and archaeology at the University of Calgary and Cambridge University. In 1996, the University of Calgary awarded him an honorary doctorate for his contribution to the study of history. Wright’s interdisciplinary intellectual background is an important component of his oeuvre as well as the make-up of A Short History of Progress. Just as he shifts in his writing career between historical fiction and non-fiction focused on the same source texts, his lectures take shape as a highly argumentative and singularly cohesive story about human culture that is equally able to use historical record and archaeological data as it is able to use anthropological information and fictional texts.