Wright, Richard

Wright, Richard (1908–1960), writer.Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, to Nathan and Ella Wright, he a sharecropper and she a deeply religious schoolteacher. Nathan deserted the family when Richard was five years old. The resulting hardship emerges in Wright's autobiography, Black Boy (1945), with its descriptions of childhood hunger and family disruption. In 1925, Wright moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he read widely among contemporary American writers. In 1927 he migrated to Chicago's South Side where, his reading told him, he could live in freedom and dignity. There he held odd jobs and was aided by the John Reed Club, the Communist party's organization for young writers. He joined the party in 1934, both to further his literary ambitions and because of its acceptance and support. He published widely, both poetry and prose, in leftist journals. The New Deal's Federal Writers' Project provided support as well.

Breaking with the Chicago party in 1937, Wright moved to New York City and became Harlem editor of the party's newspaper, The Daily Worker. Uncle Tom's Children (1938), four novellas about southern racism, won wide acclaim. His best‐known novel, Native Son (1940), enjoyed even broader acclaim as a Book‐of‐the‐Month Club selection. Set in Chicago, it told the searing story of an uneducated young black slum dweller, Bigger Thomas, who becomes a murderer and rapist. Arrested after a massive manhunt, he is tried and executed. Like no previous novel, Native Son evoked the realities of black oppression and racism in the urban North. Increasingly disillusioned with communism, Wright publicly broke with the party in the 1944 Atlantic Monthly essay I Tried to be a Communist, reprinted in the influential anticommunist manifesto The God that Failed (1950).

In 1947 he moved to France to escape the racial hostility he and his family confronted in New York. His writings from this period include The Outsider (1953), a philosophical novel influenced by Existentialism, and the autobiographical The Long Dream (1958). Active on many fronts, he nurtured in his writing and speaking a growing interest in Africa and in the Third World. A figure of international prominence, he lived in Paris until his death.

Richard Wright brought to literature contemporary understandings of human nature and social relations. His knowledge of society derived not only from experience, but also from the insights of sociologists and social psychologists. Discarding older modes of thinking about the African American experience and U.S. race relations, he blazed new paths of understanding. Many have seen his work as a harbinger of the civil rights movement and as the fountainhead of subsequent African American literature.
See also African Americans; Communist Party—USA; Literature: Since World War I; New Deal Era, The.

Bibliography

Michel Fabre , The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 1973.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K.A. Appiah, eds., Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993.
Richard Wright , Native Son and How “Bigger” Was Born, with an introduction by Arnold Rampersad, 1993.

Donald B. Gibson