Arthur Frederick Wright (December 3, 1913 – August 11, 1976) was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 academic, sinologist, editor and professor of history at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

. He specialized in Chinese social and intellectual history of the pre-modern period.

Early life

Wright's undergraduate degrees at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

 and Oxford University were followed by further studies at Harvard. He earned a Master's degree in 1940; and he was awarded a doctorate in 1947.

Career

Wright and his wife, Mary C. Wright, joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1947; and both were made full professors in 1958. In 1959, Wright and his wife joined the faculty at Yale. In 1961, Wright became the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale.

Wright believed that the scholar "should occasionally stand back and contemplate the whole continuum of time and of problems which give meaning to his specialized studies."

Selected works

In a statistical overview derived from writings by and about Arthur Wright, OCLC

OCLC

OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc. is "a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purposes of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs"...

/WorldCat

WorldCat

WorldCat is a union catalog which itemizes the collections of 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories which participate in the Online Computer Library Center global cooperative...

encompasses roughly 70+ works in 200+ publications in 6 languages and 8,800+ library holdings.

• Studies in Chinese Thought (1953)
• Buddhism in Chinese History (1957)
• Confucian Personalities (1962)
• Confucianism and Chinese civilization (1964)
• Perspectives on the Tʻang (1973)
• The Sui Dynasty (1978)
• The Confucian Persuasion (1980)
• Studies in Chinese Buddhism (1990)