James Wright

In 1953, James Wright married Liberty Kerdules, his classmate at Marin Ferry High School. They had two sons, Franz and Marshall. In around 1958, the relation between the two became strained. It led to their separation in 1959 and divorce in 1962.

In 1967, when Wright was 40, he married Edith Anne Crunk, a sculptor. She was the source of inspiration for many of his later poems and appeared as "Annie" in many of them. They did not have any children.

In 1979, he developed a severe sore throat. It was later diagnosed as an aggressive type of cancer. He was initially hospitalized at New York’s Mount Sinai; but later was transferred to Calvary Hospital for terminal cancer patients. He died there on March 25, 1980, at the age of 52.

James Arlington Wright was born December 13, 1927, in Martins Ferry, Ohio. Both his parents were school dropouts. His father, Dudley Write, worked as a die-cutter at Hazel-Atlas Glass while his mother, Jessie Wright, was employed at the White Swan Laundry, both located in the neighboring town of Wheeling, Virginia.

Apart from two brothers, Ted and Jack, James had an adopted sister named Marge. Although his parents could not study due to poverty they gave their children good education. Later Ted became a well-known reporter and photographer while Jack mastered in astronomy and became a prominent mathematician, physicist, and astronomer.

Martin Ferry, being an industrial town, was crisscrossed with miles and miles of railroads. It also held numerous factories that belched out smoke all day long and it swirled over the town, carried by the strong wind blowing in from the Ohio River.

The people here were poor, the roads were dirty and the houses mostly in dilapidated condition. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, the situation became even worse. To earn additional money, his father and uncles joined in to dig a WPA swimming pool in a city park.

In contrast to such poverty and sorrow, the area was gifted with natural beauty. Apart from the deceptively powerful Ohio River, which dominated the lower valley, the jagged hills, punctuated by ravines, offered a new dimension to the beauty of the place.

In 1946, James Wright graduated from Martins Ferry High School with Valediction. In the same year, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he served for 18 months. Out of these eighteen, he spent 12 months as part of the Occupation Forces in Japan.

Towards the end of this period, he met another soldier from Ohio, who intended to join Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. On returning home, he too decided to follow him and taking advantage of the generous educational provision of the GI Bill, he applied for a seat.

Thereafter in January 1948, he entered Kenyon and was shocked to find that every semester the college dismissed at least half of the fresher. Wright was not one of them; but like most others, he soon realized that he was not as smart as he had thought.

At Kenyon, he studied English with great teachers like James Crowe Ransom, Charles Coffin, and Philip Timberlake. In addition, he enthusiastically took part in extracurricular activities, publishing more than twenty poems in the college’s literally journal, ‘The Kenyon Review’.

In addition, he regularly contributed to HIKA, the oldest literally magazine of the college and won the school’s Robert Frost Poetry Prize just before graduating magna cum laude in 1952. Sometime during his junior years, he was also elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

In 1957, soon after receiving his MA degree, James Wight started working on his doctoral thesis. Later in the same year, he joined the faculty of University of Minnesota, thus beginning a long career in teaching. It was also the year, which launched him as a poet.

Wright had all along continued writing poems; in 1954, his manuscript was selected by W. H. Auden for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. The book, entitled, ‘The Green Wall’ was published in 1957. In the same year, it was awarded the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize.

Concurrently, he continued working on his doctoral thesis, writing his dissertation on Charles Dickens. In around 1958, he began translating and publishing the works of German and South American poets in collaboration with Robert Bly and John Knoepfle.

In 1959, Wright received his PhD degree from the University of Washington. In the same year, he had his second book, ‘Saint Judas’ published. In 1960, it earned him the Ohioana Book Award. Thus his reputation as a poet began to spread.

Concurrently, Wright continued to contribute poems to important journals like New Yorker and New Orleans Poetry Review. Moreover, he also had reviews published in major publications like the Sewannee Review.