Wright, Richard

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Wright, Richard

September 4, 1908
November 28, 1960

The writer Richard Wright was born near Roxie, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and a rural schoolteacher who supported the family when her husband deserted her. Wright's childhood, which he later described in his classic autobiography, Black Boy (1945), was horrific. His mother, Ella Wilson Wright, was never healthy, and she had become completely paralyzed by the time her son was ten. Wright and his family were destitute, and their lives were sharply constricted by pervasive segregation and racism. Wright and his brother Leon moved several times to the homes of relatives in Natchez and in Memphis, Tennessee, and then to their grandmother's house in Jackson. A staunch Seventh-Day Adventist, Wright's grandmother discouraged his reading, destroyed a radio he had built, and unwittingly alienated him from religious practice. Wright had already had his first story published in a local newspaper, however, by the time he completed the ninth grade, in 1925. He found employment in Memphis, where he discovered the work of H. L. Mencken. Mencken's essays spurred Wright's writing ambitions. Determined to escape the segregated South, which had plagued his childhood, Wright moved to Chicago in 1927.

Marxism

Over the next several years, during the worst of the Depression, Wright supported himself and his family, which had joined him in Chicago, through menial labor and through work at the post office, and he wrote when he could find the time. He became acquainted with contemporary literature through Mencken's essays and through friends at the post office, and in 1932 he began meeting writers and artists, mostly white, at the communist-run John Reed Club. Impressed by Marxist theory, Wright became a leader of the Chicago club and published revolutionary

verse in New Masses and in small magazines like Anvil, Left Front (whose editorial board he joined), and Partisan Review. Recruited by communists eager to showcase African Americans in their movement, Wright became active in the party as much for literary reasons as for political ones. He wished, he later explained, to describe the real feelings of the common people and serve as the bridge between them and party theorists. Wright participated in party literary conferences, wrote poetry and stories, and gave lectures. Wright's first novel, Lawd Today, written during this period, was published posthumously, in 1963. In 1935, the same year he started as a journalist for New Masses, Wright joined the Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), helping write a guide to Illinois; he was transferred to the local Negro Theater unit of the Federal Theater Project the next year. By this time, Wright was having doubts about the Communist Party, which he believed was promoting him only because of his skin color. He insisted on freedom from the party line for his creative work, but he remained publicly committed to the party. In 1937, eager to find a publisher for his work, Wright moved to New York, where he worked as Harlem reporter for the Communist Party newspaper the Daily Worker and wrote the Harlem section of the WPA's New York City Guide (1939).

In the autumn 1937 issue of the leftist magazine Challenge, Wright wrote his influential "Blueprint for Negro Writing," in which, within a larger Marxist perspective, he asserted and tried to encourage black nationalism among writers. Wright called on black writers to make use of folklore and oral tradition in their work, but also to pay attention to psychological and sociological data in framing their work. Wright's own short stories, whose unsparing treatment of racism and violence in the South was couched in poetic style, were winning competitions in Story magazine and elsewhere, and were collected under the title Uncle Tom's Children (1938). Although the work was a success, Wright was dissatisfied. He thought that while he had generated sympathy for victims of racism, he had not shown its effects on all of society.

Native Son (1940), Wright's first published novel, became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and called national attention to his compelling talent, although his unrelenting depiction of racism aroused controversy. In fact, editors had already toned down some controversial material (it was not until 1992 that the unexpurgated version of the novel was published). Native Son is the story of a ghetto youngster, Bigger Thomas. Trapped by white racism and his own fear, Bigger accidentally murders a white woman. He tries to cover up his deed but is arrested, put on trial, and sentenced to death. Bigger's white communist lawyer argues that he is not responsible for his crimes, but Bigger feels that the murder and cover-up were his first creative acts, through which he has found a new freedom. The book's success won Wright the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s prestigious Spingarn Medal in 1941, and a dramatization by Wright and Paul Green was produced by Orson Welles. It was adapted for film twice, once as a Brazilian film, Sangre Negra (1950), in which Wright himself played the part of Bigger Thomas, and as Native Son (1986), starring Victor Love, but neither was commercially successful.

In 1941 Wright wrote a lyrical Marxist "folk history" of African Americans, Twelve Million Black Voices. The following year, he finally left the Communist Party. Although still a Marxist, Wright felt that the communists were unrealistic, self-serving, and not truly interested in the liberation of African Americans. During the war years, Wright worked on Black Boy (1945), "a record of childhood and youth," which brought him money and international fame. In Black Boy, Wright gives a precise, unrelenting account of how he was scarred by the poisons of poverty and racism during his early years in Mississippi. American Hunger (1977), a version that included Wright's Chicago years, was published posthumously.

The same year Black Boy appeared, Wright wrote an introduction to Black Metropolis, the sociological study by St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton of African Americans in Chicago, in which Wright first expounded his major political theories. White American racism, Wright argued, was a symptom of a deeper general insecurity brought about by the dehumanizing forces of modernity and industrialization. He considered the condition of African Americans a model, and an extreme example, of the alienation of the human individual by modern life.

Exile in France

Wright was invited to France by the French government in 1945, and during the trip he found himself lionized by French intellectuals as a spokesperson for his race. Wright had married a white woman, Ellen Poplar, in 1941, and the couple had a daughter, Julia. They wished to escape America's racial discrimination. He was delighted by France's apparent freedom from racial prejudice and impressed by the central role that literature and thought enjoyed in French society. Wright decided to "choose exile," and moved to Paris permanently in 1947, although he kept his American passport.

While in France, Wright became friendly with the French existentialists, although he claimed that reading Dostoyevsky had made him an existentialist long before he met Jean-Paul Sartre and the others. Wright's thesis novel, The Outsider (1953), explores the contemporary condition in existentialist terms, rejecting the ideologies of communism and fascism. A posthumously published novella Wright wrote during the period, The Man Who Lived Underground (1971), also makes use of existential ideas. Neither The Outsider nor Wright's next novel, Savage Holiday (1954), was well received.

Wright shared the French intellectuals' suspicion of America and participated with Sartre and the existentialists in political meetings in 1948 with the idea of producing a "third way" to preserve European culture from the Cold War struggle between American industrial society and Soviet communism. Ironically, Wright was harassed for his leftist background in America, despite his repudiation of communism. The Communist Party's hostility to Wright grew after he published his essay "I Tried to Be a Communist" in the important anticommunist anthology The God That Failed (1950).

Wright had been an original sponsor of the review Présence Africaine in 1946, and he turned his primary attention to anticolonial questions during the 1950s. After visiting Africa's Gold Coast in 1954, he wrote Black Power (1954), "a record of reactions in a land of pathos," in which he approved of Kwame Nkrumah's Pan-Africanist policies but stressed his own estrangement from Africa. Wright's introduction to George Padmore's Pan-Africanism or Communism? (1956) further disclosed his Pan-African ideas. In The Color Curtain (1956) he reported on the First Conference of Non-Aligned Countries held in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, and explored the importance of race and religion in the world of politics. The same year, he helped organize, under Présence Africaine 's auspices, the First Conference of Black Writers and Intellectuals. Papers from the conference, along with texts from the numerous lectures on decolonization Wright gave in Europe, were published as White Man, Listen! in 1959.

Final Works

Wright's last works include Pagan Spain (1958), a report on Franco's Spain, which included a discussion of the Catholic impact on European culture; The Long Dream (1959), the first novel of an unfinished trilogy dealing with the lasting effects of racism; Eight Men (1960), a collection of short stories; and thousands of unpublished haiku. Wright died unexpectedly in 1960 in Paris of a heart attack. He was under emotional and mental stress at the time, partly due to spying by U.S. intelligence agents on African Americans in Paris. His sudden death fostered lasting rumors that he had been poisoned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) because of his persistent fight against racial oppression and colonialism.

Wright was the first African-American novelist of international stature, and his violent denunciation of American racism and the deprivation and hatred it causes was uncompromising. Wright inspired both African-American novelists such as Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes, and foreign writers such as the novelists Peter Abrahams and George Lanning and the political theorist Frantz Fanon. Wright's legendary generosity to other writers was both moral and sometimes financial, through the grants and jobs he found them. Wright also created for himself a role as expatriate writer and international social critic. His intellectual interests and earnestness, through which he melded Freudian, Marxist, and Pan-African perspectives, were matched by a deep spirituality—despite his rationalist suspicion of religion—and occasional humor and comedy in his works.