Richard Wright has been called one of America’s greatest black writers. He was certainly the first black American writer to achieve the level of literary fame and fortune previously enjoyed only by his white peers. The grandson of slaves, Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on Sept. 4, 1908, on a plantation near Roxie, a town not far from the city of Natchez, Miss. His early life was spent growing up as the son of a dirt poor, illiterate sharecropper in a racist, rural South. It was a hard life, one which formed many of the lasting impressions he had about racism that would influence at least two of his most important works: the novel Native Son (1940), and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945).

When he was six, his family’s extreme poverty forced them to flee Roxie for Memphis, Tenn., in search of work. Later, when his mother became too ill to work, the family moved to Jackson, Miss., to live with relatives. He attended several schools there, including a public school and one run by the Seventh Day Adventists. His mother, who had once been a school teacher, gave him the thirst for reading and encouraged him to write. In 1924, his first story was printed in the Southern Register, a local black paper. He soon discovered the writings of H.L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser, and drew on them for inspiration.

In 1927, he moved to Chicago, where he became involved with the John Reed Clubs, which were clubs aligned with the American Communist Party that courted primarily leftist artists and writers. Wright, who for the first time in his life enjoyed treatment as an equal to whites, felt at home among its talented ranks. He wrote for the American Communist papers Daily Worker and New Masses, and he eventually became a member of the Communist Party. In 1937, he moved to New York and continued his communist involvement. But he became increasingly disillusioned, and in 1944 he broke with the Party and never looked back.

As a writer of the black experience, Wright was unequalled. He had first gained national attention for his collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1937), which earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship. He next wrote Native Son (1940), which became the first Book of the Month Club recommendation by a black author. This was followed by his nationally acclaimed autobiography Black Boy (1945). In 1946, he traveled to France on the invitation of the French government and settled in Paris. He went through a period of existential thinking and became friends with Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. He became a French citizen in 1947 and traveled to Africa, Asia, and throughout Europe. His works during this period, such as The Outsider (1953) and White Man, Listen! (1957), primarily dealt with poverty, anger and protest of urban blacks. In the latter years of his life, he turned to the Japanese poetry form “haiku.” He eventually wrote more than 4,000 haiku poems, 811 of which have been posthumously published in the 1998 book Haiku: This Other World.

Richard Wright’s literary vision transcended American race relations, and his development as a writer was marked by his ability to respond to the sociopolitical and intellectual undercurrents of his time. His main contribution to literature, however, was in his ability to portray black people to white readers, destroying once and for all the stereotypes of the happy, subservient black man. While many of his works may not hold up to the strictest standards of literary criticism, the importance of his writing lay not in any style or language, but in the seminal ideas and attitudes he portrays about American life, and the struggle of the black man to confront the world and have a part in shaping its future.

In the last years of his life, Wright was plagued by financial hardship and illness; he contracted amoebic dysentery during a 1957 trip to Africa and never fully recovered. He died of a heart attack in Paris on Nov. 28, 1960, at the age of 52 and is buried in Le Pere Lachaise Cemetery.

by Stephen Enzweiler

Tennessee Williams	Ellen Gilchrist	John Grisham	Margaret Walker Alexander
Clifton Taulbert	Eudora Welty	Richard Wright	Shelby Foote
Jimmy Buffett	Greg Iles	William Faulkner	Jill Conner Browne
	Walker Percy	Willie Morris