James Wright was born in 1927 in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a small industrial town in the southeastern part of the state. Located just across the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia, Martins Ferry shares with its bordering neighbor rows of factories and steel mills where most of the towns' men worked when Wright was growing up. His own father dropped out of school at an early age and spent fifty years at Hazel-Atlas Glass, a factory that would appear in several of Wright's poems. Wright loved his father but detested the life his father lived and vowed not to fall victim to it himself. He used education as a means to escape Martins Ferry, earning his bachelor's degree from Kenyon College in 1952 and his master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Washington in 1954 and 1957. At Kenyon, he studied under John Crowe Ransom, a well-known and highly...