Historian, librarian, scholar, teacher, facile author, and a citizen of several worlds, Louis B. Wright is recognized and respected among men of letters for the giant steps his contributions have made to mankind’s understanding and appreciation of history and literature.
Taught good manners, piety, the classics, and “something solid whether the pupils liked it or not” in the country schools of South Carolina, and polished under inspiring tutelage at Chapel Hill, he survived the early rigors of correspondent and city editor of the hometown newspaper, delivering the mail to the Dark Corner in a dilapidated airplane, and even the teaching of English to engineering students at the University of North Carolina.
Emerging as a lucid and prolific spokesman of the life and times of William Shakespeare during the first of his many periods of study in England, he was invited to be Visiting Scholar of the Hunting- ton Library, San Marino, California, where he remained for 17 years researching and writing in the fields of the English Renaissance and American civilization of the Colonial period. In addition to his research, leading to the authorship of myriad articles and books, he also carried administrative responsibility for the advancement of the Huntington Library as a research institution. He was the principal force in developing the fabulous collection of Henry E. Huntington from a repository of literary treasures of the past into one of the most effective research libraries in the world. At the same time, with characteristic zeal, shrewd judgment, and energetic enterprise, he encouraged the work of hundreds of promising scholars through the Library’s fellowship program.
In 1948, at the invitation of the Board of Trustees of Amherst, he assumed the directorship of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, where during his next 20 years he transformed it from a rare book collection into an intellectual center of world renown. As a “doughty, fearless, sometimes pugnacious scholar and administrator he has brought books to life and has brought light, life, and air to books…intellectual air-conditioning which blew out the mustiness of literary and scholarly disuse.” And, of course, he continued to add to an already impressive list of books and papers on Elizabethan England and Colonial America. But more than this, he also gave us for our enlightenment and enjoyment such delightful pieces as the readable annual reports of the Folger Library and his newsletter observations in welcoming each Chinese new year.
Self-styled as one of gay pessimism—”We don’t expect much, and when good things happen we are vastly pleased”—he is known by his friends, students, and colleagues to be an indefatigable student of the past, an omnivorous seeker of the new, and a kindly, sentimental, humane man with a hard head over a very soft heart.
For his distinction as a keen student, observer, and eloquent exponent of the beauties of history and literature and of the vagaries of the contemporary scene, the Club is honored to honor Louis Booker Wright as the tenth recipient of the Cosmos Club Award.
