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 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.
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