Charles David Wright Papers, 1931-1984

Charles David Wright was born on June 2, 1931, the first son of a Scottish immigrant coal miner. During his childhood in Marion, Illinois, his father also baked bread and worked for the WPA. In 1940, the family moved to Detroit, where Wright attended public schools. His mother worked as a domestic for a high school home economics teacher. This experience instilled in her a sense of "gracious living" which included an appreciation of writers like Edgar A. Guest, the Detroit Free Press, and the Harvard Classics, as well as for proper table setting, which she passed on to Charles. Her family had lived on a triangle of land between railroad tracks; Charles would have choices.

Intent on the ministry, Charles David Wright was influenced in his teenage years by his Baptist youth minister, who fed him books: American and British classics, as well as some that shook his fundamentalist beliefs. While he flunked high school English, he made it into Wayne State University in 1949, where his passion turned to the social gospel. His writings began to reflect a concern for issues such as race relations and workers' rights. During the summers he worked in Ford plants and in construction. His diaries reveal that folk music, the Student League for Industrial Democracy, and a love of Jewish culture were shaping his thinking. Wright's mentors at Wayne included a Victorian scholar, Jim McCormick, whose intellectual life, family, and knowledge of food and wine became a model for Wright's own sense of good living. Another, Vincent Wall, a professor and playwright, produced a one-act play by Wright that had won a playwriting competition. Wright graduated from Wayne in 1953 with a degree in English. In 1954 Charles David Wright enrolled in the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin. He earned a masters degree in English in 1954.

His political activism grew at Wisconsin, and he became close friends with George Rawick, a fellow student working on a Ph.D. about the political left movements of the thirties. Awaiting the draft in Detroit, Wright met Ruth Petty. In 1955 they were married in Alaska where he spent two years in the U.S. Army driving oversnow vehicles and editing a newspaper. He also taught a community college course in English and once graded exams by the light of candles fashioned of tent rope and butter. He smuggled moose steaks in water tanks on winter maneuvers, always carried something to eat, read, and smoke. He would later say that the inhumanity of the Army made him the best possible civilian.

In 1957 the Wrights moved to Germany, where Charles David Wright spent a year studying German history and literature at Tubingen University. On their return to the United States, he entered the Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa. He completed the requirements for a Ph.D. in English in 1962 with a doctoral dissertation entitled Matthew Arnold's Response to German Culture. The literature of the Victorian period, as well as poetry (both writing and appreciation) would be Wright's areas of concentration during his teaching career. The Wright's two children were born in Iowa: a son, David, in 1958, and a daughter, Vivian, in 1960. While at Iowa, Wright picketed for racial equity in student housing, wrote quatrains, and kept a sign above his desk which read "Graduate school is not life." Charles David Wright's first academic appointment came in 1962 when he joined the English faculty at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. He spent ten years at North Carolina, where he attained the rank of Associate Professor with tenure. In 1965 he won an award from the student government for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He served as state coordinator for the North Carolina Poetry Circuit and organized the Southeastern Conferences of Little Magazines in 1968. Both he and his wife were active in the civil rights movement during the mid-1960s, and he served as Democratic precinct chairman, PTA officer, and Cub Scout leader. In 1969, he was an unsuccessful candidate for the Carrboro, N.C., board of aldermen, campaigning on a ticket with a black candidate. During the campaign, he politicked in the backwoods of rural Carrboro and received harassing phone calls. One caller challenged, "Mr. Wright, I hear you're a god damned atheist." To which he responded, "Well now, how can you know a man's heart?" Religious values, indeed, were important in his life. He affiliated with religiously liberal congregations and participated in programs of the Society for Religion in Higher Education. He was a Danforth Foundation fellow at the University of North Carolina, and maintained a lifelong correspondence with his childhood friend David M. Gracie, who had become an activist Episcopal priest. Exploration of religious concepts was an important part of their correspondence. While on the faculty at Chapel Hill, Charles David Wright resumed the writing of poetry. He had stopped writing seriously during graduate studies, not wanting to be just "another earnest young poet." A turning point came when he was sleeping one night and sat bolt upright in bed exclaiming, "I've got a poem!" The poem was initially rejected by magazine publishers, but his friend and colleague, O.B. Hardison, pushed him to resubmit it. The poem "Dimensions" was accepted for publication in Harper's in 1965. It was among the first of more than 50 poems to be published in magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. Wright began reading his poetry in North Carolina at conferences and small poetry gatherings. During the summers of 1969 and 1972, he taught poetry at the Pythagoreion Institute of Art on the island of Samos, Greece, and in 1970 he read at the Struga Poetry Festival in Yugoslavia. He published scholarly articles on Matthew Arnold in Victorian Poetry and Studies in Philology in 1967 and 1968, and on James Joyce in the James Joyce Quarterly in 1968. Charles David Wright spent the academic year 1970-71 at Freiburg University in Germany on a post-doctoral, cross-disciplinary fellowship sponsored by the Society for Religion in Higher Education. His principal topics of study were 19th century German religious criticism and the English response.

Even before his return to North Carolina, however, he began actively seeking a faculty position elsewhere. In a letter to the chairman of the English Department at Boise State College, he wrote: "UNC is devoting its main resources to growth in its graduate program. I have enjoyed the graduate teaching I have done, but as a teacher and developing humanist I am more interested in undergraduate teaching... and in terms of our national culture, I give the higher priority to undergraduate and 'adult' education." Boise State College was not the only undergraduate institution to which he applied; he expressed interest in academic deanships as well as teaching positions at several colleges and universities. He was particularly interested in programs of innovative undergraduate education, such as residential colleges, which had been part of his focus in teaching at UNC. He had been offered a position at University of the Pacific's Raymond College in 1969, but declined it to undertake the post-doctoral fellowship in Germany. When Boise State College offered him an appointment on the English faculty in 1972, he accepted. Wright and his family relocated to Boise in time for the 1972 fall semester. They purchased and remodeled a 1918 house on two acres of land on Manitou Street in South Boise where--driven by ecological convictions--they developed a mini-farm: goats, chickens, rabbits, steers, ducks and a large garden. Wright taught courses on poetry, creative writing, and Victorian literature at Boise State, developed several interdisciplinary courses with faculty from other departments, and participated in the planning of the university's Humanities program. Wright continued to write poetry and actively sought opportunities t read his poems at universities and conferences. He read twice at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., and in 1976 was awarded a Creative Writing Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. Wright was active in the organization of the Association for the Humanities in Idaho and served as its first chairman, 1973-75. He coordinated the Poetry-in-the-Schools program and the Boise Poetry Series, a grant-funded program of poetry readings held at the Boise Gallery of Art. Among the poets and writers that Wright brought to Boise were Robert Bly, Alan Dugan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Judith Guest, Carolyn Kizer, Marge Piercy, and Gary Snyder. Wright once said, "If I'd been born during the Renaissance, I would have been a minstrel." He believed that the public sharing of poetry sustained the life blood of the community, and he continued to write poems meant to be read aloud.

In the fall of 1977 Wright discovered that he had cancer. After initial treatments revealed the progress of the disease, he decided not to undergo extensive therapies. He wrote "A Killing Frost" during this time and said, "It's the only poem I'm going to write about dying; death is so full of clichés." Charles David Wright died at home on July 13, 1978. His life was celebrated at a memorial poetry reading at the Boise Gallery of Art six days later. He was survived by his wife Ruth and his children David and Vivian. Wright's poems have been published in book form in two collected editions. The first, Early Rising, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1968. The second, Clearing Away, was issued posthumously in 1980 by Confluence Press of Lewiston, Idaho.

Prepared by Ruth and Vivian Wright