Richard Wright

Born: September 4, 1908
Natchez, Mississippi
Died: November 25, 1960
Paris, France
African American writer

The works of Richard Wright, a politically sophisticated and socially involved African American author, are notable for their passionate sincerity. He was perceptive about the universal problems that had the ability to destroy mankind.

Southern upbringing

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born in Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908. His mother was a country school teacher and his father an illiterate (a person who is unable to read or write) sharecropper, a poor farmer who shares land with other farmers. The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, in 1914, and soon the father abandoned them. From then on Richard's education was inconsistent, but he had attained experience beyond his years. He bounced from school to school and desperately tried to make friends and fit in with his fellow classmates.

Wright knew what it was to be a victim of racial hatred before he learned to read, for he was living with an aunt when her husband was lynched (brutally attacked or killed because of one's race). Richard's formal education ended after the ninth grade in Jackson, Mississippi. The fact that his "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-acre" had been published in the local black paper set him apart from his classmates. He was a youth upon whom a dark spirit had already settled.

Becoming a writer

At nineteen Wright decided he wanted to be a writer. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he had access to public libraries. He read all he could of Feodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945), Henry James (1843–1916), and William James (1842–1910). His interest in social problems led to a friendship with the sociologist (a person who studies the interactions of a society) Louis Wirth. When Richard's mother, brother, and an aunt came to Chicago, he supported them as a postal clerk until the job ended in 1929. After months of living on public welfare, he got a job in the Federal Negro Theater Project in the Works Progress Administration, a government relief agency. Later he became a writer for the Illinois Writers' Project.

Meantime, Wright had joined the John Reed Club, beginning an association with the Communist Party, a political party that believes goods and services should be owned and distributed by a strong central government. His essays, reviews, short stories, and poems appeared regularly in communist papers, and by 1937, when he became Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, he enjoyed a considerable reputation in left-wing circles. Four novellas (short novels), published as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), introduced him to a large general audience.

Native Son

Wright's first novel, Native Son (1940), a brutally honest depiction of black, urban, ghetto life, was an immediate success. The story's protagonist, or main character, represents all the fear, rage, rebellion, spiritual hunger and the undisciplined drive to satisfy it, that social psychologists (people who are trained to study the mental and behavioral characteristics of people) were just beginning to recognize as common elements in the personality of the poor people of all races.

Wright's intention was to make the particular truth universal (all around) and to project his native son as a symbol of the poorly treated in all lands. Critics, however, unimpressed by the universal symbol, were interested instead in Wright's passionate criticisms of white racism (belief that one race is superior to another) and the lifestyle it imposed upon African Americans. Wright believed that there was a better way of social organization different from democracy (government by the people), and that Communism could be the better way. These ideas were toned down in the stage version. In 1941 Wright also published Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro of the United States.

By 1940 Wright had married and divorced; and a few months after his second marriage, he broke with the Communist Party. (His "I Tried To Be a Communist," published in the Atlantic in 1944, was reprinted in 1949 in The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman.) The break freed him from social commitments that were beginning to seem troublesome. In Black Boy, a fictionalized autobiography (book written about oneself), his only commitment is to truth. The book was published in January 1945, and sales reached four hundred thousand copies by March. Wright accepted an invitation from the French government to visit France, and the three-month experience, in sharp contrast to his experience in his own country, "exhilarated" (excited and refreshed) him with a "sense of freedom." People of the highest intellectual and artistic circles met him "as an equal."

Years overseas

Wright, his wife, and daughter moved permanently to Paris, France. Within a year and a half Wright was off to Argentina, where he "starred" in the film version of Native Son. The Outsider, the first of three novels written in France, was deeply influenced by existentialism, a philosophy that stresses the individual experience in the universe, whose most famous spokespersons, Jean Paul Sartre (1905–1980) and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), were Wright's close friends. Following Savage Holiday (1954), a potboiler (a book, that is usually of poorer quality, written to make money), The Long Dream (1958) proved that Wright had been too long out of touch with the American reality to deal with it effectively. None of the novels written in France succeeded. His experiments with poetry did not produce enough for a book.

Nonfiction works

In 1953 Wright visited Africa, where he hoped to "discover his roots" as a black man. Black Power (1954) combines the elements of a travel book with a passionate political treatise, or formal writing, on the "completely different order of life" in Africa. In 1955 he attended the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, and published his impressions in The Color Curtain (1956). Pagan Spain (1956), based on two months in Spain, is the best of his nonfiction works. White Man, Listen (1957) is a collection of four long essays on "White-colored, East-West relations."

In 1960, following an unhappy attempt to settle in England, and in the midst of a rugged lecture schedule, Wright fell ill. He entered a hospital in Paris on November 25 and died three days later. Eight Men (1961), a collection of short stories, and Lawd Today (1963), a novel, were published after his death.

For More Information

Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, a Critical Look at His Work. New York: Warner Books, 1988.

Webb, Constance. Richard Wright; a Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968.

Richard Wright

The works of Richard Wright (1908-1960), politically sophisticated and socially involved African American author, are notable for their passionate sincerity. He was perceptive about the universal problems that plague mankind.

Richard Wright was born in Natchez, Miss., on Sept. 4, 1908. His mother was a country school teacher and his father an illiterate sharecropper. The family moved to Memphis, Tenn., in 1914, and soon the father abandoned them. Richard's schooling was spotty, but he had experiences beyond his years. He knew what it was to be a victim of racial hatred before he learned to read, for he was living with an aunt when her husband was lynched by a white mob. Richard's formal education ended after the ninth grade in Jackson, Miss. The fact that his "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-acre" had been published in the local black paper set him apart from his classmates. He was a youth upon whom a "somberness of spirit" had already settled.

At 19 Wright decided he wanted to be a writer. He moved to Chicago, where he had access to public libraries. He read all he could of Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry and William James. His interest in social problems led to an acquaintance with the sociologist Louis Wirth. When Richard's mother, brother, and an aunt came to Chicago, he supported them as a postal clerk until the job ended in 1929. After months of living on public welfare, he got a job in the Federal Negro Theater Project in the Works Progress Administration, a government relief agency. Later he became a writer for the Illinois Writers' Project.

Meantime, Wright had joined the John Reed Club, beginning an association with the Communist party. His essays, reviews, short stories, and poems appeared regularly in Communist papers, and by 1937, when he became Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, he enjoyed a considerable reputation in left-wing circles. Four novellas, published as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), introduced him to a large general audience.

Native Son

Wright's first novel, Native Son (1940), a brutally honest depiction of black, urban ghetto life, was an immediate success. The story's protagonist embodies all the fear, rage, and rebellion, all the spiritual hunger and the undisciplined drive to satisfy it, that social psychologists were just beginning to recognize as common elements in the personality of the underprivileged and dispossessed of all races.

Wright's intention was to make the particular truth universal and to project his native son as a symbol of the deprived in all lands. Contemporary critics, however, un-impressed by the universal symbol, were interested instead in Wright's passionate indictment of white racism and the life-style it imposed upon blacks. Wright's implication that there was another and a better way of social organization than democracy, and that communism was perhaps that better way, also impressed them. This implication was toned down in the stage version (1941). In 1941 Wright also published Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro of the United States.

Black Boy

By 1940 Wright had married and divorced; and a few months after his second marriage, he broke with the communist party. (His "I Tried To Be a Communist," published in the Atlantic in 1944, was reprinted in 1949 in The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman.) The break freed him from social and ideological commitments that were beginning to seem onerous. In Black Boy, a fictionalized autobiography, his only commitment is to truth. The book was published in January 1945, and sales reached 400,000 copies by March. Wright accepted an invitation from the French government to visit France, and the three-month experience, in sharp contrast to his experience in his own country, "exhilarated" him with a "sense of freedom." People of the highest intellectual and artistic circles met him "as an equal."

Expatriate Years

Wright and his wife and daughter moved permanently to Paris. Within a year and a half Wright was off to Argentina, where he "starred" in the film version of Native Son.

The Outsider, the first of three novels written in France, was deeply influenced by the existentialists, whose most famous spokesmen, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, were Wright's warm friends. Following Savage Holiday (1954), a potboiler, The Long Dream (1958) proved that Wright had been too long out of touch with the American reality to deal with it effectively. None of the novels written in France succeeded. His experiments with poetry did not produce enough for a book.

Nonfiction Works

In 1953 Wright visited Africa, where he hoped to "discover his roots" as a black man. Black Power (1954) combines the elements of a travel book with a passionate political treatise on the "completely different order of life" in Africa. In 1955 he attended the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and published his impressions in The Color Curtain (1956). Pagan Spain (1956), based on two months in Spain, is the best of his nonfiction works. White Man, Listen (1957) is a collection of four long essays on "White-colored, East-West relations."

In 1960, following an unhappy attempt to settle in England, and in the midst of a rugged lecture schedule, Wright fell ill. He entered a hospital in Paris on November 25 and died three days later. Eight Men (1961), a collection of short stories, and Lawd Today (1963), a novel, were published posthumously.

Further Reading

Constance Webb, Richard Wright (1968), is a "definitive" but dull biography. Full-length critical works are Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (1969), which emphasizes Wright's role in paving the way for a new generation of Negro authors; Dan McCall, The Example of Richard Wright (1969), a fascinating critique; and Russell C. Brignano, Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works (1970). See also Robert Bone, Richard Wright (1969), a brief perspective. James Baldwin's "Alas, Poor Richard" in his Nobody Knows My Name (1961) is not to be trusted as a delineation of an episode in Wright's life, and its condescending tone spoils it as literary criticism. David Littlejohn's discussion of Wright in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes (1966) is worth reading if only to see how misprized a major black novelist can be. □

WRIGHT, RICHARD 1908-1960

Going North

Richard Wright came from the rural South and became the first African American to write of ghetto life in the North. His formal schooling ended at age fifteen, yet he became the foremost black author in American history up to his death. Wright was the first black novelist/essayist in American history to achieve the status of a major American writer. He was a remarkable man from humble beginnings who began the process of self-education in the mid 1920s as a teenager. He read H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Crane, and Dreiser. In the late 1920s he went to Chicago and discovered Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and the Chicago school of sociologists (led by Robert Park and Louis Wirth). Wright also discovered the Communist Party and officially joined in 1932. He was active in the party, writing poems, stories, and essays for leftist magazines. He clashed with the rigid party dictates, was branded an intellectual, and finally quit in 1944, by which time he was already famous.

First Fiction

Two books brought him fame and critical notice. In 1938 he entered a book-length manuscript of four stories into a Story magazine contest for writers associated with the Federal Writers' Project. He won. The book was called Uncle Tom's Children and served notice to the literary world that a new talent had arrived. The stories are harsh and violent, melodramatic with a Communist bent, but the anger and energy behind them impressed most critics. All of the stories deal with the oppression of blacks, violence against blacks, and how the two lead in turn to black violence born of frustration.

Native Son

Wright was not happy with himself. He sensed the melodrama in Uncle Tom's Children and decided to write his next book "so hard and deep" that "no one would weep over it." Native Son was just that book. The novel relates the story of Bigger Thomas, a Chicago black man who commits murder. Bigger is not a likable protagonist. He is a force, a fury of energy who ultimately finds murder has freed him, has defined him. The man who was less than a man commits murder, burns the corpse, and attempts blackmail, until the charred body is found. But the acts are his first conscious acts, and he is condemned for them. The novel put Wright at the upper echelons of the social realist writers of his time.

Black Boy

Wright then stepped away from fiction. His next story was his own. Black Boy, an autobiography, was published in 1945. Many critics call it his best book. He again looks at human will, oppression of the southern black, and blacks' acceptance of oppression. The story evokes the rural South of the early part of the century and condemns the black church as complicit in black oppression. For Wright, Christianity was a form of white hegemony. The book is sometimes viewed as a nonfiction novel in which Wright invented some scenes. Completely true or not, it is his strongest statement, not simply of black life, but of his developing sensibility and personality as an artist.

To Paris

In 1946, his position among American writers firmly set, Wright traveled to France at the invitation of the French government. In 1947 Wright returned to Paris and made it his home until his death in 1960. He entered the existentialist circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and began to incorporate their themes into his work. The social realist was approaching modernism just as younger writers such as Saul Bellow and John Hawkes had begun doing in the United States. His next novel, The Outsider (1953), was among the first existential novels written by an American. The story moves away from Wright's themes of race. He is interested in the individual in The Outsider. Protagonist Cross Damon is believed killed in a subway accident and is suddenly free of his entire past. He must reinvent himself and proceeds to join the Communist Party and commit three murders. It is a novel of ideas, of modern man, but it was not well received. Many thought Wright was dabbling too much in philosophy and not writing true fiction. His 1944 novella, "The Man Who Lived Underground," may have been a better statement of similar themes.

To Africa

Wright remained busy writing nonfiction. He became active in Ghana and other newly independent African nations. His books Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957) are considered excellent works of reporting about the Third World and colonial powers. Wright overtly stated that race was the major conflict between the new nations and the former colonial powers. The books were well received with some reservations. Many thought he overstated his claims, but his uncomfortable truths were not likely to be socially accepted.

Final Work

Wright wrote one more novel, The Long Dream (1958). He returns to his roots in the American South in telling the story of Fishbelly, the son of a black crime lord in a small town. The novel was given mixed reviews. Many found faults repeated from his early work—melodrama, lack of synthesis. The faults arose in later criticism, though Wright perhaps is difficult to judge from the usual standards of aesthetics. He was self-educated and, like Jack London, displayed awkward, clumsy technique at times. What drives Wright is sheer energy, anger, and a passion that more than compensates for structural faults. Through the 1950s Wright fell out of favor with new black writers such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. They rejected his naturalism and his philosophical and ideological approach. Baldwin especially felt a need to "kill the father" in a critical assessment of Wright, while also acknowledging his power as a writer. Although he recognized the doors Wright opened for all African American writers, Baldwin refused to put Wright on a pedestal.

Source:

Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1980).

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

Wright, Richard [Nathaniel] (1908–60), self‐educated black author, born near Natchez, Miss., and reared in Memphis. After many menial jobs there and in Chicago, to which he migrated at age 19, he had to go on relief during the Depression. During the 1930s he joined the Communist party but left it in the 1940s, as recorded in the anthology The God That Failed (1950). His Uncle Tom's Children (1938, enlarged 1940), a collection of four long stories, received the Story prize for the best book submitted by anyone associated with the Federal Writers' Project. The stories tell of race prejudice in the South and contain graphic descriptions of lynchings. With the publication in 1940 of Native Son, Wright was considered not only the leading black author of the U.S. but also a major heir of the naturalistic tradition in his story of the tragedy of a black boy reared in the Chicago slums. The novel was successfully dramatized (1941) by Wright and Paul Green, and in 1950 the author made a film of it in Argentina, with himself in the lead role. After his major novel, Wright participated in the creation of 12 Million Black Voices (1941), a text and photo folk history of American blacks, and wrote Black Boy (1945), an autobiography of his childhood and youth. After World War II he became an expatriate in Paris and while there wrote The Outsider (1953), a sensational novel of a black man's life in Chicago and New York City and his fatal involvement with the Communist party, and The Long Dream (1958), a novel about a black boy in Mississippi and his father's corrupt business dealings with both blacks and whites. Other books include Black Power (1954), his reactions to “a land of pathos,” Africa's Gold Coast; The Color Curtain (1956), reporting the Bandung Conference of Asian and African nations; and Pagan Spain (1957), his bitter personal observations of Spain. Posthumously issued works include Eight Men (1961), stories; Lawd Today (1963), a novel written prior to Native Son and dealing in great detail with one unhappy day—February 12, 1936—in the life of a black postal clerk in Chicago; and American Hunger (1977), an autobiographical account written as a sequel to Black Boy.

Richard Wright 1908–60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in 1927 and in the 1930s joined the city's Federal Writers' Project and wrote Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of four novellas dealing with Southern racial problems. His novel Native Son (1940), which many consider Wright's most important work, concerns the life of Bigger Thomas, a victimized African American struggling against the complicated political and social conditions of Chicago in the 1930s. In 1932, Wright joined the Communist party but later left it in disillusionment. After World War II, Wright moved to Paris. His Black Boy (1945), also regarded as one of his finest works, is an account of his childhood and youth. Other works include Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), a folk history of African Americans; American Hunger (1977), a two-part autobiography; The Outsider (1953) and The Long Dream (1958), two novels; Black Power (1954), an account of his trip to the Gold Coast (Ghana); and Eight Men (1961), a collection of stories published posthumously. Originally censored by his publishers due to their racial, political, or sexual candor, Wright's works were reissued unexpurgated in 1991.

Bibliography: See biographies by C. Webb (1968), M. Fabre (tr. 1973), A. Gayle (1980), M. Walker (1988), and H. Rowley (2001); studies by D. McCall (1969), K. Kinnamon (1973), and D. Ray and R. M. Farnsworth, ed. (1973).

Wright, Richard (1908–60), black American writer; he joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, but left in the 1940s, as he records in The God that Failed (1950). His best-known novels are the powerful and violent Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953), both of which deal with tragedy in the lives of black victims of poverty and politics.

Wright, Richard (1908–60) US novelist. He is best known for the novel Native Son (1940), which describes the life of an African-American youth in white-dominated Chicago, and Black Boy (1945), an account of the author's boyhood in the South. He also wrote short stories and non-fiction.