Richard Wilbur was born in New York City, one of two children of Lawrence L. and Helen Purdy Wilbur. His father was an artist, a portrait painter. When Wilbur was two years old, the family moved to a pre-Revolutionary stone house in North Caldwell, New Jersey. Although he did not live far from New York City, he and his brother Lawrence grew up in rural surroundings, which, he later speculated, led to his love of nature.

Wilbur showed an early interest in writing, which he has attributed to his mother's family because her father was an editor of the Baltimore Sun and her grandfather was an editor and a publisher of small papers aligned with the Democratic party. At Montclair High School, from which he graduated in 1938, Wilbur wrote editorials for the school newspaper. At Amherst College he was editor of the campus newspaper, the Amherst Student. He...