James Arlington Wright was born in Martins Ferry, Ohio, one of many steel-producing towns along the heavily industrialized Upper Ohio River Valley as it borders West Virginia and Pennsylvania. His Midwestern working-class roots held firm through three decades of poetic portraits drawn from heartland realities. During the Great War, his father suffered layoffs from the Hazel-Atlas glass factory. Wright thrived on public speaking in grade school and began writing verse in high school. After being drafted into the United States Army during World War II, he wrote his mother to forward copies of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ verse and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. After he was mustered out while serving in occupied Japan, he took advantage of the G. I. Bill and entered the only school that showed interest, Kenyon College.

Wright later attended Yale, from which he graduated cum laude in 1951, after which he received a Fulbright Fellowship and travelled to Rabat, Morocco. After Wright shifted his concentration from vocational education to English and Russian literature, by 1952 he had published in twenty journals and earned the Robert Frost Poetry Prize, election to Phi Beta Kappa, and a B.A. degree. He attended the University of Vienna on a Fulbright Fellowship.

In 1954 he went to the University of Washington where he studied with poets Theodore Roethke and Stanley Kunitz and completed a dissertation on Dickensian comedy. That year, when he was still a graduate student, W. H. Auden selected Wright's manuscript for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. In 1957, when his book of poems, The Green Wall (1957), was published, he joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota as an English instructor, where his colleagues were Allen Tate and John Berryman. In 1959, he earned a PhD from the University of Washington with a dissertation on Charles Dickens and his second collection, Saint Judas, was published in the Wesleyan University Press series. During this period, Wright contributed poetry and book reviews to major publications like The Sewanee 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.

Three years later, he won the Ohiona Book Award for Saint Judas (1960).Wright published The Lion’s Tail and Eyes: Poems Written Out of Laziness and Silence (1962) with William Duffy and Robert Bly. Wright’s break with traditionalism was influenced by his intimate study of German and Spanish masters, as demonstrated in The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather at the River (1968). Throughout this period, he published regularly in some fifteen journals.Wright held subsequent teaching positions at Macalester College, Hunter College, and State University of New York. His Collected Poems (1971) won a Pulitzer Prize. He was active for the remainder of the 1970s, when his elegies were issued in Two Citizens (1973), I See the Wind (1974), Old Booksellers and Other Poems (1976), Moments of the Italian Summer (1976), and To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1978).

Wright married his high-school sweetheart Liberty Kardules, who was a nurse in Texas. The couple had two sons, Franz Wright, also a poet, and Marshall. Wright left his wife in 1959, and they divorced in 1962. In 1966, he took a job at Hunter College in New York where he met Edith Ann Runk, the "Annie" of many of his poems. They were married at the Riverside Church in New York City in April 1967. Annie was very good for Wright and helped him tone down his drinking. Much of the self-pity and despair of his early works disappeared after Wright conquered alcoholism and married Runk. They spent a number of summers in Italy and Paris.

Wright died from throat cancer on March 25, 1980, shortly after being diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. At his death, friends and colleagues eulogized him at Riverside Church where he had married Annie. Posthumous works include This Journey (1982), The Temple in Nîmes (1982), and Above the River: The Complete Poems (1992). Recently, he has been memorialized in a volume entitled From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright, to which many of America's foremost poets have contributed.

Wright's early poetry is relatively conventional in form and meter, especially compared with his later, looser poetry. His work with translations of German and South American poets, as well as the influence of Robert Bly, had considerable influence on his own poems; this is most evident in The Branch Will Not Break, which departs radically from the formal style of Wright's previous book, Saint Judas.

His poetry often deals with the disenfranchised, or the outsider, American; yet it is also often inward probing. Wright suffered from depression and bipolar mood disorder and also battled alcoholism his entire life. He experienced several nervous breakdowns, was hospitalized, and was subjected to electroshock therapy. His dark moods and focus on emotional suffering were part of his life and often the focus of his poetry, although given the emotional turmoil he experienced personally, his poems are often remarkably optimistic in expressing a faith in life and human transcendence. His seminal 1963 volume The Branch Will Not Break is one example of his belief in the human spirit.

His 1972 Collected Poems was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In addition to his other awards, Wright received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.

Published in his lifetime

Unless otherwise noted, year is when published:

• The Green Wall (Yale University Press, 1957)
• Saint Judas (Wesleyan University Press, 1959)
• The Branch Will Not Break (Wesleyan University Press, 1963)
• Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio -- Broadside (1963)
• Shall We Gather at the River (Wesleyan University Press, 1967)
• Collected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1971)
• Two Citizens (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1973)
• Moments of the Italian Summer (Dryad Press, 1976)
• To a Blossoming Pear Tree (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977)

Published posthumously

• This Journey (1982; completed in 1980)
• The Temple at Nîmes (1982)
• James Wright, In Defense Against This Exile. Letters To Wayne Burns., edited with an introduction by John R. Doheny (1985)
• Above the River - the Complete Poems, introduction by Donald Hall (1992)
• Selected Poems (2005)
• A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright (2005)
• The Delicacy and Strength of Lace: Letters Between Leslie Marmon Silko and James Wright., edited by Anne Wright and Joy Harjo (2009)