Louis B. Wright
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Louis Booker Wright (1899–1984) was an author, scholar, and educator who served as the second director of the Folger Shakespeare Library.
Early life
Wright was born on March 1, 1899, in Greenwood County, South Carolina. Both of his grandfathers served in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia during the American Civil War; his paternal grandfather served under James Longstreet, and his maternal grandfather under Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.[1] In the 1910s, Wright matriculated at Wofford College, but swiftly enlisted in the Student's Army Training Corps, and served for at least sixth months in Plattsburgh, New York, during the First World War. At war's end, he and a veteran of the Army Air Corps worked on government contract as airmail pilots. He soon returned to Wofford to complete his studies, and graduated in 1920 with a B.A. in chemistry. He then became a reporter for a local South Carolina newspaper.[2]
Young academic
Not fully satisfied as a reporter, Wright abandoned journalism in 1923 for a position as a teaching assistant in the English department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he received his Master's degree in 1924 and his Ph.D. in 1926.[3] He continued teaching at Chapel Hill until 1928, when he and his wife, Frances (née Black), moved to London upon his reception of a Guggenheim Fellowship to study English drama before 1642.[4]
Folger director
After the death of Joseph Quincy Adams, Jr., the Library's first director in 1946, the Amherst Board of Trustees approached Wright in 1947 as a candidate for the directorship. He officially began work at the Library in summer 1948.
Among the scholarly work Wright completed while director was the first series of Folger editions of Shakespeare's works. Wright arrived as director intending to publish separate edited volumes of each of Shakespeare's plays, though he could not begin work on the project until the end of his first decade as director. Along with executive secretary Virginia LaMar, Wright annotated each play with notes to make the works more accessible to the public, completed after comparing Early modern Folio and Quarto editions of the works with modern editions.[5]
Retirement
After his retirement from the Folger in 1968, Wright continued to serve in a variety of organizations as advisor and board member, including the Modern Language Association and the National Geographic Society. He was a trustee for the Harry S. Truman Institute for National and International Affairs, and spoke in 1955 at a Cleveland, Ohio fundraiser for the development of the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum.
Wright died on December 26, 1984, in Chevy Chase, Maryland, of cardiovascular disease.
Notes
<references>
- ↑ Charles Frederick Hard, Louis B. Wright: A Bibliography and an Appreciation (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1968), page 3.
- ↑ Hard 1969, pages 10-11.
- ↑ Hard 1968, pages 13-15.
- ↑ "Louis Booker Wright," Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, accessed July 30, 2015, http://www.gf.org/fellows/all-fellows/louis-booker-wright/.
- ↑ Louis B. Wright, Of Books and Men (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), pages 136-137.