Archives West Finding Aid

David Lane Wright was born on May 22, 1929, in Bennington, Idaho to Conover and Lenora Rich Wright. He was a descendent of LDS Apostle Charles C. Rich. He spent his childhood in Bennington, and from the time he was a young man he kept copious journals. He loved sports, especially baseball and football, and enjoyed exploring the terrain around Bennington and Montpelier which figures prominently in his work. When he was seven, his brother Rich, to whom he had been very close, died from an acute appendicitis and this event continued to influence David for the rest of his life and the character of his brother often appeared under different names in many of his writings. In fact his most prominent piece, a play first produced in 1956 called "Still the Mountain Wind," was about Rich's death.

Wright started attending Utah State University,(then called Utah State Agricultural College), in 1946 at the age of seventeen on an athletic scholarship. He studied English under the tutelage of Professors A. N. Sorensen and Ira Hayward both of whom encouraged him to write and publish. He also was a sports writer for the student paper. Throughout his life, his dream was to become a writer, but he also prepared to become an English teacher. For the first three years at college he was on the track team and played football. His final year he quit football to spend more time writing.

After graduation Wright held many jobs as a teacher throughout Idaho. On October 22, 1950 he married Nancy Johnson, one of his students from Rexburg. He changed positions several times and eventually ended up back his home town working at the elementary school. He entered the Air Force and was called into active duty and continued write, winning several Air Force story contests and producing his work, "Still the Mountain Wind." Also during this time he was stationed in various places throughout the United States and the world including South Dakota, Florida, Alabama, and Iceland.

In 1963, Wright was able to pursue his Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of Iowa while still in the Air Force. He completed it in 1964. While stationed in Alabama during this time, he became involved in the civil rights campaign. In 1965, Wright was sent to Saigon, Vietnam. There he performed mostly administrative and diplomatic duties, earning a Bronze Star and was promoted to rank of Major. When he returned from Vietnam in December, 1966, he and Nancy divorced. Wright maintained custody of the children. In February of 1967, he suffered a heart attack. He recovered somewhat and was able to return to his home in Montgomery, Alabama where he lived for the next four months. On June 26, 1967, he suffered a second heart attack and passed away at the age of thirty-eight. (Source: Utah State University's David Lane Wright Papers)

Charlotte M. Wright, David Lane Wright's daughter, earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas in 1994. She worked as an associate editor and editorial director at UNT Press and was the managing editor of the University of Iowa Press. She is also the author of An Iowa Schoolma'am: Letters of Elizabeth "Bess" Corey, 1904-1908 (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, Iowa, 2011), Plain and Ugly Janes: The Rise of the Ugly Woman in Contemporary American Fiction (University of Iowa Press: Iowa City, Iowa, 2000), and Crazy Horse and Walt Whitman's Hands (Redneck Press: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1993).