Richard Wright Biography and List of Works

American short story writer and novelist, who's best-known work, NATIVE SON, was published in 1940. The book immediately established Wright as an important author and a spokesman on conditions facing African-Americans. It gained a large multiracial readership and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Wright's work drew on the poverty and segregation of his childhood in the South and early adulthood in Chicago.

"And, curiously, he felt that he was something, somebody, precisely and simply because of that cold threat of death. The terror of the white world had left no doubt in him about his worth; in fact, that white world had guaranteed his worth in the most brutal and dramatic manner. Most surely he was something, in the eyes of the white world, or it would not have threatened him as it had. That white world, then, threatened as much as it beckoned. Though he did not know it, he was fatally in love with that white world, in love in a way that could never be cured. That white world's attempt to curb him dangerously and irresponsibly claimed him for its own."
(from The Long Dream, 1958)

Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. He grew up in poverty. His grandparents had been slaves and his father, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was five. His mother was a schoolteacher. The family moved to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. In 1915-16 Wright attended school for a few months, but his mother's illness forced him to leave. He attended school sporadically, living with his relatives in Arkansas and Mississippi. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in Memphis.

Wright had various jobs, among them a newspaper delivery boy and as an assistant to an insurance agent. His spare-time employment enabled Wright to buy schoolbooks, pulp magazines, and dime novels, all of which he read avidly. Wright attended junior high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated in 1925. From 1925 to 1927 Wright lived in Memphis, where he worked for an optical company.

During these years he read widely and decided to become a writer. Tired of segregation laws, he moved to Chicago, hoping that life would be better there. He worked as a post office clerk and held several other jobs in the following years. Wright was given the opportunity to write through the Federal Writers' Project. By the time he moved to New York City he had written most of the novel LAWD TODAY, which was published posthumously in 1963. It centres on the life of Jake Jackson, a violent man from Chicago, whose mean environment offers little opportunity and little hope. Social environment also plays a central role in his later novel Native Son, (1940).

In 1932 Wright joined the Communist Party and was an executive secretary of the local John Reed Club of writers and authors of Chicago. He wrote poetry for such journals as Left Front, Midland Left, Anvil, International Literature, Partisan Review, and New Masses. In 1937 he moved to New York City becoming editor of Daily Worker and later the vice president of the League for American Writers. In 1938 Wright published UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN, a collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story 'Fire and Cloud' was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938. Uncle Tom's Children helped Wright win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to devote the rest of his life to writing.

In the late 1930s Wright appointed to the literature editorial board of New Masses, and was denounced by the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the Federal Writers' Project. In 1940 Wright's Native Son became an instant best seller. In some bookstores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks. Many white Americans saw Bigger Thomas, the central character, as a symbol of the entire black community, and Wright later stated that 'there are meanings in my books of which I was not aware until they literally spilled out upon the paper.' For the most part the book was rendered in the present. Wright was an avid filmgoer and he explained "I wanted the reader to feel that Bigger's story was happening now, like play upon a stage or a movie..." In the first film version, directed by Pierre Chenal, and adapted by Chenal and Wright, the author himself acted the role of Bigger Thomas. The 1986 version was directed by Jerrold Freedman and adapted by Richard Wesley. Oprah Winfrey played the role of Bigger's mother. "The second adaptation even goes so far as to eliminate Bigger's murder of Bessie, in order to reinforce the idea that Bigger is a mild-mannered victim, thus robbing the story of any controversy, and dialectic, and any philosophical significance. It also robs the story of the complexities of gender relations between black men and black women that are touched upon by Wright." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbetts and James M. Welsh, 1999)

After his breakthrough as a writer, Wright collaborated with Paul Green on a stage adaptation of the book, which was directed by Orson Welles and ran successfully on Broadway from 1941-43. After his marriage to Rose Dhima Meadman ended, Wright married Ellen Poplar, a daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants and a fellow leftist, in 1941. They had two daughters. The Autobiographical BLACK BOY appeared in 1945 and received good reviews. The book is set in the 1920s and begins as the protagonist accidentally burns his house down. Subsequently the readers learn how he became a drunkard in his sixth year and how begging drinks became his obsession. His mother and grandmother beat him so hard that sometimes he loses consciousness.

In 1944 Wright left the Communist Party. He spent the summer of 1945 as an artist-in-residence at the Bread Loaf School for writers in Middlebury, Vermont, and then went to France. There, Wright met among others Gertrude Stein, André Gide, and Léopold Senghor. He returned to the United States only briefly, before settling in Paris, where he associated with existentialists and such American writers as James Baldwin. Wright helped Baldwin win a prestigious literary fellowship, and Baldwin repaid him four years later by criticizing the tactics of Native Son in his career-launching essay 'Everybody's Protest Novel'.

In 1949 Wright joined George Plimpton and others in founding the Paris Review. He acted in the film based on the novel Native Son - the American release was not successful and the film was banned in several cities. Wright's existentialist novel THE OUTSIDER, depicting a black intellectual's search for identity, appeared in 1952 to mixed reviews.

During his years in France Wright spent much of his time supporting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for BLACK POWER (1954). Among his works in the 1950s was SAVAGE HOLIDAY (1954), THE COLOR CURTAIN (1956), about Asia PAGAN SPAIN (1957), a travel book, WHITE MAN, LISTEN! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice, and THE LONG DREAM (1958), a novel set in Mississippi. AMERICAN HUNGER, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.

Wright distanced himself from his associates in the last years of his life. He suffered from poor health and financial difficulties and grew suspicious of the CIA and its activities in Paris - a suspicion that in later years would prove to be well founded. Wright's plans to move to London were rejected by British officials. In 1959 he began composing haikus, producing almost four thousand of them. Wright died at the age of fifty-two in Paris, on November 28, 1960. His daughter Julia has since claimed that her father was murdered.

Native Son (1940) - The protagonist is a young black, Bigger Thomas, who lives in a one-room apartment in Chicago's South Side Black Belt, with his mother, his young sister, Vera, and younger brother, Buddy. He is hired by a wealthy family named Dalton as their chauffeur. Mr. Dalton donates money for social welfare but at the same time owns the rat-infested building in which Bigger lives. The family's daughter Mary befriends him - with her he visits Communist headquarters, where she meets her boyfriend Jan Erlone. Mary has had too much drink. Bigger carries Mary back to her room. When her blind mother enters the room he accidentally smothers her. In panic he burns the body in the basement and attempt to implicate Jan. Mary's bones are discovered and Bigger also kills his own girlfriend, Bessie, to cover his tracks. He is captured and in jail Bigger feels for the first time a sense of freedom: "Seems sort of natural-like, me being here facing that death chair. Now I come to think of it, it seems like something like this just had to be." He is then condemned to death and faces his destiny unrepentantly, affirming that 'what I killed for, I am!' Yet in prison he also comes to terms with the need for a common brotherhood. The last third of the book is largely a speech given by Boris A. Max, a party attorney, in Bigger's defence at his trial. Wright clearly used Maz to convey his own Marxist assessment of the racial situation in the United States. The speech is based upon Clarence Darrow's defence of Leopold and Loeb. Wright's leftist friends were troubled because the novel is primarily from an African-American point of view rather than an exploited worker's perspective. The widespread fear of communism incited by the Cold War and McCarthyism led to the diminished popularity of Native Son during the 1950s. - The sexually explicit scenes were removed from the Book-of-the-Month Club publication and Thomas did not show such obvious interest in the white character, Mary Dalton.

For further reading: Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin (1955); Richard Wright by Robert Bone (1969); Richard Wright's Native Son by Richard Abcarian (1970); Richard Wright by David Bakish (1973); by Robert Felgar (1980); Critical Essays on Richard Wright, ed. by Yashinobu Hakutani (1982); Richard Wright: A Primary Biography by C.T. Davis and M. Fabre (1982); Richard Wright by Addison Gayle (1983); The World of Richard Wright by Michel Fabre (1985); Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy by J.A. Joyce (1986); Richard Wright's Native Son, ed. by H. Bloom (1988); Richard Wright's Black Boy, ed. by H. Bloom (1988), ed. by K. Kinnamon (1990) Voice of a Native Son by E. Miller (1990); The Critical Response to Richar Wright, ed by Robert J. Butler (1995); Richard Wright and Racial Discourse by Yashinobu Hakutani (1996) - NOTE: Wright's Native Son was main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1949. It took nearly 30 year before the next novel by a black author became a main selection. The book was Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - See also other American writers in Paris: Chester Himes, James Baldwin.

UNCLE TOM'S CHILDREN, (1938)