In today’s post, we examine the life of Richard Wright, who wrote an extremely influential novel about the Black American experience. This novel is called Black Boy. Wright was a complex figure who participated in communist communities post-World War I. He cared deeply about the treatment of blacks at the hands of white society and wrote for social reform and justice.. Much like other authors in a similar genre, he wrote about his passions and what he believed needed to change in the world around him.
Richard Wright’s Early Years
Wright was born on Sept. 4, 1908 on Rucker’s Plantation near Natchez, Mississippi in Roxie. He was the son of a sharecropper and teacher who had been born free after the Civil War. Both sets of his grandparents had been slaves.
When Wright was six, his father left and did not reunite with his son for 25 years. Wright did not attend school until 1920, when he and his remaining family moved in with his grandparents. Though Wright excelled in his studies, his life at home in a Seventh-Day Adventist household stifled him greatly. .
Wright’s Publishing Career
Wright “worked at a number of jobs before joining the northward migration, first to Memphis, Tennessee, and then to Chicago (in 1927). There, after working in unskilled jobs, he got an opportunity to write through the Federal Writers’ Project” (Britannica). The project allowed him other avenues of expression and he was able to pursue a love of the craft.
The project spurred Wright in his writing interests, and he later joined the Communist Party in 1932. He also acted as the Harlem editor of the Communist Daily Worker in 1937 after he moved to New York City. He would later produce Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938, which was a series of novellas that asks the question: “How may a black man live in a country that denies his humanity?” (Britannica).
His novellas would begin a string of successes:
“More acclaimed followed in 1940 with the publication of the novel Native Son, which told the story of a 20-year-old African American man named Bigger Thomas. The book brought Wright fame and freedom to write.”
(Biography.com)
Then, in 1945, Wright published Black Boy, which depicted “extreme poverty and his accounts of racial violence against blacks” (Biography.com). This novel continues to be his hallmark and shows his adeptness at
Richard Wright’s Final Years
Richard Wright lived in Mexico from 1940 to 1946 and eventually left the Communist Party disenfranchised. He later lived in Paris where he wrote The Outsider (1953), The Long Dream (1958), Black Power (1954) and White Man, Listen (1957). During these years, his books were about “hunger, poverty, race, and various protest movements” (famousauthors.org).
Wright died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52 on Nov. 28, 1960.
Works Cited
Britannica.com
Biography.com
Famousauthors.org
Wikipedia.org
