Richard Wright (author) (1908-1960), American writer, whose novels
and short stories helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in
the mid-20th century. Wright publicly opposed racial prejudice and was perhaps
the most eloquent spokesperson in the United States for his generation of
blacks. His most acclaimed works are the novel Native Son (1940) and the
autobiographical memoir Black Boy (1945).
Richard Nathaniel Wright was born outside of Natchez, Mississippi.
His father left the family when Wright was still young and his mother, a
schoolteacher, was stricken with a paralyzing illness when he was a child.
Raised mostly by relatives, Wright left school at the age of 17. He
subsequently moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked at odd jobs and began
to educate himself.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright worked on various
writing and editing projects for the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago.
Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938; revised 1940),
consisted of four novellas that dramatize racial prejudice. The book won first
prize in a writing competition sponsored by the Writers’ Project. In 1937
Wright moved to New York City. He worked there on a Writers’ Project guidebook
to the city entitled New York Panorama (1938) and wrote the book’s essay
on the Harlem neighborhood. Wright had joined the Communist Party while in
Chicago, and once in New York he published reviews and political essays in
Communist Party publications such as New Masses. Wright remained an
active member of the party into the 1940s before leaving over ideological
issues.
After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, Wright completed
his novel Native Son. The book explores the violent psychological
pressures that drive Bigger Thomas, a young black man, to murder. In the story,
Thomas, a 20-year-old from the largely black South Side of Chicago, takes a job
as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family whose fortune is based on real estate
dealings in black neighborhoods. The daughter of the family seduces Bigger, and
he accidentally smothers her to death when he fears they will be discovered
together in bed. The quick-paced melodrama of the first half of the novel then
yields to a more deliberate treatment of Bigger’s trial for murder. In the
second half of the book, Wright presents a careful psychological and social
examination of the story’s events—and of American race relations. Native Son
was an immediate sensation with white and black readers, and this wide appeal
helped make Wright the first black American writer to have a Book-of-the-Month
club selection. With dramatist Paul Green, Wright adapted the story for the
stage in 1941. In 1950 he produced a film version.
Wright moved to France in the late 1940s. He published several
more novels during his lifetime, including The Outsider (1953), which
describes an African American character's involvement with the Communist Party
in Chicago; and The Long Dream (1958), about a boy’s childhood in
Mississippi. The short-story collection Eight Men (1961) and the novel Lawd
Today (1963) were published after Wright’s death. Haiku: This Other
World (published posthumously, 1998) is a collection of haiku poems that
Wright wrote shortly before his death.
Wright also produced a considerable body of nonfiction. His first
autobiographical work, Black Boy, reveals in bitter personal terms the devastating
impact of racial prejudice on young black males in the United States. Black
Boy points out the many psychological and cultural similarities between
20th-century racism and its predecessor, slavery. Wright’s other nonfiction
works include Black Power (1954), a commentary on the emerging nations
of Africa; The Color Curtain (1956), which focuses on the so-called
Third World; Pagan Spain (1957), which addresses the Fascist rule in
that country; and American Hunger (1977), a second autobiographical work.
In 1941 Wright collaborated with photographer Edwin Rosskam on 12 Million
Black Voices, a folk history of blacks in America.