John Kirtland Wright

author

John Kirtland Wright

1891–1969

A pioneering American geographer, he explored how maps, imagination, and human perception shape the way people understand the world. His writing helped open geography to ideas that reached beyond measurement alone.

2 Audiobooks

The Leardo Map of the World, 1452 or 1453 In the Collections of the American Geographical Society

The Leardo Map of the World, 1452 or 1453 In the Collections of the American Geographical Society

by John Kirtland Wright

The geographical lore of the time of the Crusades : A study in the history of medieval science and tradition in Western Europe

The geographical lore of the time of the Crusades : A study in the history of medieval science and tradition in Western Europe

by John Kirtland Wright

About the author

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on November 30, 1891, he became an American geographer known for cartography, geosophy, and the history of geographical thought. He came from a notably literary and scholarly family: his father was the classicist John Henry Wright, his mother was novelist Mary Tappan Wright, and his brother was Austin Tappan Wright.

Much of his career was tied to the American Geographical Society, where he served for decades as librarian, director, and historian of the institution. He studied at Harvard and is especially remembered for bringing imagination and intellectual history into geographic study, most famously through ideas associated with "terrae incognitae" and geosophy.

He died in Hanover, New Hampshire, on March 24, 1969. Today he is often remembered as a thoughtful, wide-ranging scholar who helped broaden what geography could ask and explain.