Nathalia Wright was born on March 29, 1913, in Athens, Georgia.[1] She was the only child of Elizabeth (née MacNeal) and Hilliard Carlisle Wright,[1] the latter of whom ran a store in Maryville, Tennessee.[2] After going to Maryville High School,[2] she obtained a BA with honors from Maryville College in 1933.[1] She then attended Yale University, where she obtained an MA in 1938 and PhD in 1949;[1] her doctoral dissertation was titled Melville's Use of the Bible.[2] She also published a poetry volume through Hawthorne House, The Inner Room, in 1938.[1]
After working at her alma mater Maryville as a librarian and instructor in the 1930s and 1940s (sources conflict on the exact years),[1][3] Wright joined the University of Tennessee as an assistant professor in 1949.[1] She was promoted to associate professor in 1955 and full professor in 1962.[1] A faculty member of the Department of English, she was also associate director of graduate studies from 1970 to 1976.[4] In 1972, she became the first woman named as UT's Macebearer.[4] She was a 1975 UT Alumni Distinguished Service Professor and won the Notable UT Woman Award in 2000.[2] She retired from UT in 1982.[2]
Wright specialized in American literature, with The Daily Times calling her "one of the foremost scholars on the works of Herman Melville".[2] She published several books and edited volumes, including Melville's Use of the Bible (1949), Horatio Greenough: The First American Sculptor (1963), American Novelists in Italy (1965), The Complete Works of Washington Irving: Journals and Notebooks, Volume I, 1803-1806 (1969), Letters of Horatio Greenough: American Sculptor (1972), Questionnaire for the Investigation of American Regional English (1972), A Word Geography of England (1974), and The Correspondence of Washington Allston (1993).[1] She also edited four Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints editions, two of which were Greenough works, as well as editions of Mary Noailles Murfree's In the Tennessee Mountains and Herman Melville's Mardi.[1] She was an editorial board member of Publications of the Modern Language Association from 1970 to 1975.[1]
In 1953,[5] Wright was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to do research on sculptor Horatio Greenough.[3] She was president of the Melville Society from 1956 to 1957 and 1972 to 1973,[6] as well as of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association from 1978 until 1979 and the Modern Language Association's American Literature section in 1977.[4][2] She was a member of the American Council of Learned Societies board of directors.[2] She was also a 1959-1960 American Association of University Women fellow.[4]
Wright was a resident of Maryville for more than six decades, and she was also part of the local St. Andrew's Episcopal Church.[2]
Wright died on November 22, 2004, at Blount Transitional Care Center in Maryville, following years of declining health.[2] She was aged 91.[2] The John C. Hodges Library has a plaque dedicated to her in one of the faculty study rooms.[4]
