Albright was born in Coquimbo, Chile, the eldest of six children of American evangelical Methodist missionaries Wilbur Finley Albright and Cornish American Zephine Viola Foxwell.[3] Albright was an alumnus of Upper Iowa University.[4] He married Dr. Ruth Norton (1892–1979) in 1921 and had four sons. He received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1916 and took a professorship there in 1927, remaining as W. W. Spence Professor of Semitic Languages from 1930 to his retirement in 1958. He was also the Director of the American School of Oriental Research in Jerusalem, 1922–1929, 1933–1936, and did important archaeological work at such sites in Israel as Gibeah (Tell el-Fûl, 1922) and Tell Beit Mirsim (1933–1936).[5]