Richard Wright
- Born:
- September 4, 1908, near Natchez, Mississippi, U.S.
- Subjects Of Study:
- United States
- African American
- race relations
Richard Wright (born September 4, 1908, near Natchez, Mississippi, U.S.—died November 28, 1960, Paris, France) was a novelist and short-story writer who inaugurated the tradition of protest explored by other Black writers after World War II. From the late 1930s through the 1950s—most notably in his novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945)—Wright was a dominant voice laying bare the discrimination and injustice that Black people were experiencing in the United States.
Early life
Wright’s father, a sharecropper, abandoned him and the rest of his family in Mississippi when Wright was five, and his mother became paralyzed several years later. Wright, whose grandparents had been enslaved, was often shifted from one relative to another. He grew up in poverty and worked at a number of jobs before moving northward as part of the Great Migration, first to Memphis, Tennessee, and then to Chicago. There, after working in unskilled jobs, he got an opportunity to write through the Federal Writers’ Project.
(Read W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1926 Britannica essay on African American literature.)
In 1932 Wright became a member of the Communist Party, and in 1937 he went to New York City, where he became Harlem editor of the Communist Daily Worker. He left the party in 1944 because of political and personal differences.
Native Son and Black Boy
Wright first came to the general public’s attention with a volume of novellas, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), based on the question: How may a Black man live in a country that denies his humanity? In each story but one the hero’s quest ends in death.
Wright’s fictional scene shifted to Chicago in Native Son. Its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a poor 20-year-old Black man living on the city’s South Side. He accidentally kills a white girl, and in the course of his ensuing flight his previously meaningless awareness of the white world’s antagonism becomes intelligible. The book became a best seller, and it was staged successfully as a play on Broadway in 1941 directed by Orson Welles. Wright himself played Bigger Thomas in a motion-picture version made in Argentina in 1951.
Wright’s Black Boy, published five years later, is a moving account of his childhood and young manhood in the South. The book chronicles the extreme poverty of his childhood, his experience of the prejudice and violence directed against Black people by white Americans, and his growing awareness of his interest in writing and literature.
Move to France
After World War II, Wright settled in Paris as a permanent expatriate. The Outsider (1953), acclaimed as the first American existential novel, warned that the Black man had awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him. Three later novels were not well received.
Among his polemical writings of that period was White Man, Listen! (1957), which was originally a series of lectures given in Europe.
Posthumous publications
Wright’s Eight Men, a collection of short stories, appeared in 1961, after his death in Paris in 1960. The autobiographical American Hunger, which narrates Wright’s experiences after moving to the North, was also published posthumously, in 1977. Some of the more candid passages dealing with race, sex, and politics in Wright’s books had been cut or omitted before their original publication. Unexpurgated versions of Native Son, Black Boy, and his other works were published in 1991, however.
Other posthumously released works include a novella, Rite of Passage (1994), and an unfinished crime novel, A Father’s Law (2008). In addition, The Man Who Lived Underground, a rejected manuscript dating to 1941 that was later condensed into a short story, was released in its entirety in 2021. The novel centers on an African American man who is coerced into confessing to two murders he did not commit.