Born in 1927 in Martins Ferry, Ohio, one of the steel-producing towns strung out along the heavily-industrialized Upper Ohio River as it borders West Virginia and Pennsylvania, James Wright graduated with honors from Kenyon College in 1952 and studied in Vienna the next year on a Fulbright fellowship. In 1954 he went on to the University of Washington where he studied with Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz. That year, when he was still a graduate student, W. H. Auden selected his manuscript for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. In 1957, when The Green Wall was published, he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota where his colleagues were Allen Tate and John Berryman. In 1959, he earned a PhD from Washington with a dissertation on Charles Dickens and his second collection, Saint Judas, was published in the new and distinguished Wesleyan University Press series in which a rotating board of poets acted as editorial advisors. During this period, Wright contributed reviews to major publications like the Sewannee Review and regularly published in virtually every important journal, from the New Yorker to the New Orleans Poetry Review. Nonetheless, the University of Minnesota did not believe he had the qualifications to become a tenured professor, and Wright had to relocate to nearby Macalester College.
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