Richard Wright (author)

For other people named Richard Wright, see Richard Wright (disambiguation).

Richard Nathaniel Wright
Born	(1908-09-04)September 4, 1908 Roxie, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	November 28, 1960(1960-11-28) (aged 52) Paris, France
Occupation	Novelist, Writer, Poet, Essayist
Nationality	United States

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28,1960) was an American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction, informed by his status as a gifted but often discriminated against African-American.

Biography

Early life

Wright, the grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, a tiny town located about 22 miles east of Natchez, in Franklin County.

Wright's family soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee. While in Memphis, his father Nathaniel, a former sharecropper, abandoned them. Wright, his brother, and mother soon moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with relatives. In Jackson, Wright grew up and attended public high school.

At the age of fifteen, Wright penned his first story, 'The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre'. It was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper. Here, he formed some lasting impressions of American racism before moving back to Memphis in 1927.

Chicago

Wright moved to Chicago, where he began to write and became active in the John Reed Club. As the club was dominated by the Communist Party, Wright established a relationship with a number of party members. A power struggle within the Chicago chapter of the John Reed Club led to the dissolution of the club's leadership, Wright was told he had the support of the club's party members if he was willing to join the party. He accepted, and was promptly elected leader of the club.

Through the club, Wright edited Left Front, a magazine that the Communist Party ultimately shut down in 1937, despite Wright's repeated protests. Throughout this period, Wright also contributed to the New Masses magazine.

While Wright was at first pleased by the positive relations with white communists in Chicago, he was later humiliated in New York City by white communists who rescinded an offer to find housing for Wright because of his race. To make matters worse, Wright was quickly denounced as a bourgeois intellectual by black communists who were perturbed that Wright did not speak as they did, even though he had been forced, by circumstance, to end his public education after the completion of grammar school.

Ultimately, Wright's insistence that young communist writers be given space to cultivate their talents and his working relationship with a Black nationalist communist led to a public falling out with the party and the leading African American communist, Buddy Nealson. Wright was threatened at knife point by fellow-traveling coworkers, denounced as a Trotskyite in the street by strikers and physically assaulted by former comrades when he tried to join them during the 1936 May Day march.

New York

In 1937, Richard Wright moved to New York. While he had fallen out with the Chicago chapter of the Communist Party, Wright forged new ties with the party after establishing himself in New York. 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. He also became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine, New Challenge.

Wright quickly gained national attention for his collection of four short stories, Uncle Tom's Children (1938). This work fictionalized the incidents of lynching in the Deep South. The collection earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to complete his first novel, Native Son (1940).

Native Son was the first Book of the Month Club selection by an African American author. The lead character, Bigger Thomas, served to represent the limitations that society placed on African Americans, and illustrated that Thomas could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge by committing heinous acts. Wright was criticized for both works' concentration on violence, and, in the case of Native Son, for portraying a black person in ways which might seem to confirm whites' worst fears.

Wright is also renowned for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his troubles with white employers and social isolation. American Hunger, (published posthumously in 1977) was originally intended as the second book of Black Boy and is restored to this form in the Library of America edition.

This book details his involvement with the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, though the book implies that it was earlier, and the fact was not made public until 1944. In its restored form, its diptych structure mirrors the certainties and intolerance of organized communism, (the "bourgeois" books and condemned members) with similar qualities in fundamentalist organized religion. Due to McCarthyism, Wright was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.

In 1942, Wright formally broke with the Communist Party, as he was frustrated by the party's theoretical rigidity and disapproved of purges in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Wright continued to believe in far-left democratic solutions to political problems.

Paris

Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and became a permanent American expatriate. In Paris, he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus while going through an Existentialist phase well depicted in his second novel, The Outsider (1953) which describes an African American character's involvement with the Communist Party in New York. In 1954 he published a minor novel, Savage Holiday (1954). After becoming a French citizen in 1947, he continued to travel through Europe, Asia, and Africa, and these experiences led to many nonfiction works. One of these nonfiction works is Black Power (1954), a commentary on the emerging nations of Africa.

In 1949, Wright contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; his essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier. This led to an invitation to become involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. That organization, with the FBI, had Wright under surveillance from 1943.

In 1955, he visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference and recorded his observations about the event in his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Wright was upbeat about the possibilities posed by this meeting between recently-oppressed nations.

Other of Richard Wright's works include White Man, Listen! (1957), and another novel, The Long Dream in 1958 as well as a collection of short stories, Eight Men, published after his death in 1961. His works primarily deal with the poverty, anger, and the protests of northern and southern urban black Americans.

In the last years of his life, Richard Wright became enamored with the Japanese poetry form haiku and he wrote over 4,000 of them. In 1998 a book was published ("Haiku: This Other World" ISBN 0-385-72024-6) with the 817 haiku that he preferred.

Wright contracted amoebic dysentery on a visit to Africa in 1957,[1] and despite various treatments, his health deteriorated over the next three years. He died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He is interred there in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. Wright's daughter Julia has claimed that her father was murdered. Upon his death, Wright left behind an unfinished book A Father's Law on French West Africa. His travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, appeared in 2001, published by the Mississippi University Press.

Some of the more candid passages dealing with race, sex, and politics in Wright's books had been cut or omitted before original publication. But in 1991, unexpurgated versions of Native Son, Black Boy, and his other works were published.

Family

In 1939, he married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white dancer, but the two separated shortly thereafter. In 1941, he married Ellen Poplar, a white member of the Communist Party, and they had two daughters: Julia in 1942 and Rachel in 1949.

Publications

A Remembrance of Richard Wright in Natchez

Collections

• Richard Wright: Early Works (Arnold Rampersad, ed.) (Library of America, 1991) ISBN 978-0-94045066-6
• Richard Wright: Later Works (Arnold Rampersad, ed.) (Library of America, 1991) ISBN 978-0-94045067-7

Drama

• "Native Son: The Biography of a Young American" with Paul Green (New York: Harper, 1941)

Fiction

• Uncle Tom’s Children (New York: Harper, 1938)
• Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940)
• The Outsider (New York: Harper, 1953)
• Savage Holiday (New York: Avon, 1954)
• The Long Dream (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958)
• Eight Men (Cleveland and New York: World, 1961)
• Lawd Today (New York: Walker, 1963)
• Rite of Passage (New York: Harper Collins, 1994)

Nonfiction

• How “Bigger” Was Born; the Story of Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940)
• 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (New York: Viking, 1941)
• Black Boy (New York: Harper, 1945)
• Black Power (New York: Harper, 1954)
• The Color Curtain (Cleveland and New York: World, 1956)
• Pagan Spain (New York: Harper, 1957)
• Letters to Joe C. Brown (Kent State University Libraries, 1968)
• American Hunger (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
• Big Boy Leaves Home2007

Essays

• I Choose Exile (1951)
• White Man, Listen! (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957)

Poetry

• Haiku: This Other World. (Eds. Yoshinobu Hakatuni and Robert L. Tener. Arcade, 1998)

Literary Influences

Wright discusses a number of literary influences in Black Boy. As a young man living in Memphis, Tennessee, he began an intense reading period in which he became familiar with a wide range of authors, many of them contemporary American authors. Of that period in his life he wrote: Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.

The following are some of authors read by Wright in that period:

• H.L. Mencken - I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean sweeping sentences. I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen...

• Gertrude Stein - Under the influence of Stein's Three Lives I spent hours and days pounding out disconnected sentences for the sheer love of words.

• Sinclair Lewis - It made me see my boss..and identify him as an American type..

• Marcel Proust - on Remembrance of Things Past: the vast, delicate, intricate, and psychological structure...

External links

• Richard Wright Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
• RICHARD N. WRIGHT - BLACK BOY
• Richard Wright's Biography at the Mississippi Writers Page
• Richard Wright at the Independent Television Service
• Richard Wright's Photo & Gravesite
• Summary of Richard Wright's Novels
• Synopsis of Wright's Fiction
• Biography of Wright and his later papers
• Reviews of Wright's Work
• Online text of 12 Million Black Voices
• Biography of Wright and his works
• Critical Reception of Wright's Travel Writings
• Excerpt from Black Power
• Online Text of The Color Curtain
• Online Text of Pagan Spain
• Online text of The Long Dream
• Excrept from The God That Failed
• Review of The Outsider
• Blueprint for Negro Literature