Richard Wright

• Born: September 4, 1908
• Birthplace: Roxie, Mississippi
• Died: November 28, 1960
• Place of death: Paris, France

Writer

An author of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, Wright defined in his books on racism the oppressed life of African Americans in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Area of achievement: Literature

Early Life

Richard Nathaniel Wright, grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908. His father, Nathaniel, was an illiterate sharecropper, and his mother, Ella, was a schoolteacher. When Wright was five, his father abandoned the family, and his mother worked various jobs outside the home. For a time, Wright and his brother were placed in an orphanage, and later they were shifted among various relatives in Mississippi and Arkansas. Around 1920, Ella suffered a paralytic stroke, necessitating the family’s move to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with Ella’s parents. Wright’s stern grandmother was a devoted, if fanatical, Seventh-day Adventist who subjected Richard to daily prayer and meditation, all-night revival meetings, and her restrictive belief that all things nonreligious, specifically fictional writings, were “the devil’s work.” Wright refused to be subdued by her efforts, maintaining throughout his life a hostility toward religion and espousing instead a humanistic philosophy.

The upheaval of Wright’s childhood did not allow for much regular schooling. He was enrolled at the Seventh-day Adventist school in Jackson at the age of twelve and attended a public school for a short time. His first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre,” written when he was fifteen, was published in 1924 in The Southern Register, a local black newspaper. At the age of sixteen, in 1925, he graduated as valedictorian of the ninth grade at Smith Robertson Junior High School. The following year, he went to Memphis. After working numerous menial jobs, Wright in 1927 joined countless other African Americans desperate to escape the fear, frustration, and violence of the South and migrated north to Chicago on the eve of the Great Depression.

Perceiving a connection between his experience as an African American and the plight of other oppressed working-class people in the world, Wright became involved with the Communist Party. In New York, he became the Harlem editor of the party’s publication The Daily Worker and helped initiate New Challenge. Wright’s collection of four stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, won first place in a Story magazine contest open to Federal Writers’ Project authors and was published in 1938. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship that enabled him to finish Native Son (1940), a best seller and the first Book-of-the-Month selection by an African American author. Wealthy and well-respected, Wright was the recipient of the prestigious Spingarn Medal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1941.

Life’s Work

Because of the enormous popularity of Native Son, Wright collaborated with Paul Green on its stage adaptation, produced by John Houseman and Orson Welles in the spring of 1941. During this time, Wright’s brief first marriage came to an end and he married Ellen Poplar, a white member of the Communist Party. The couple had two daughters: Julia, born in 1942 and Rachel, born in 1949. In 1941, Wright published his pictorial folk history of African Americans in the United States, Twelve Million Black Voices, which expressed his view of the capitalistic exploitation of African Americans and ended with a call for a united black and white workers’ revolution.

Because of personal and political differences, Wright left the Communist Party in 1944, writing an essay published that same year in The Atlantic Monthly, “I Tried to Be a Communist.” The piece was later republished in The God That Failed (1949), a collection of essays by former communists. Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy, appeared in 1945 and also became a best seller and Book-of-the-Month selection. The book recounted Wright’s childhood and adolescence in the South; however, the U.S. Senate, aware of Wright’s Communist Party affiliation, deemed it “obscene.”

In 1946, Wright was invited to France by noted anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who, along with intellectuals including Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus, welcomed him to Paris. There, Wright enjoyed relief from the racism he could not escape even in New York; he settled permanently in France in 1947. He became interested in existentialism, a philosophy focusing on the plight of the individual in an unfathomable universe, and explored it in his second novel, The Outsider (1953), which is considered the first American existential novel. The book concerns a black man who exists in a disintegrating society with essentially no place for him. The following year, Wright published Savage Holiday, an unpopular novel whose characters all were white.

During the 1950’s, Wright traveled to Africa, Indonesia, and Spain, observing different races and cultures and interviewing individuals about major social concerns. From these travels he wrote sociological and political nonfiction discussions of topics regarding race relations in predominantly nonwhite areas far from America and, through the inclusion of documented sources, advanced factors he believed determined policy in those areas. Although Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957) are accounts of journeys to the Gold Coast, Africa, Indonesia, and Spain, they reflect Wright’s growing international concerns and his vision of a rational, unified world. During his travels and activities, Wright was constantly under surveillance by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

White Man, Listen!(1957), a group of essays that originated as lectures Wright gave in Europe between 1950 and 1956, includes “The Literature of the Negro in the United States.” In this overview, Wright considers American writings beginning with those of black colonial poet Phillis Wheatley and extending into the 1940’s as reflective of the transition from common themes to those of protest. Although poor and ill in his later years, he wrote approximately four hundred English haikus and a novel, The Long Dream (1958). The story, set in a middle-class community in Mississippi in the 1940’s, concerns Tyree Tucker, a black father, and his son, Fishbelly. Wright intended this novel as the first in a trilogy, and although he completed the second novel, it was not published. Critics were harsh in their evaluation of Wright’s novel, insisting he had been away from creative writing too long to write anything meaningful.

While hospitalized in a Paris hospital for amoebic dysentery, contracted during his travels, Wright died suddenly of a heart attack on November 28, 1960, at the age of fifty-two. His wife, Ellen, effected the posthumous publication of Eight Men (1961), a second collection of short stories he had finished a few years earlier, which contained a nihilistic existential novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground.” Also published posthumously were Lawd Today (1963), written in 1934, and American Hunger (1977), a treatise on his membership in and disillusionment with the Communist Party that was removed from Black Boy before its publication in 1945.

Significance

In the years after his death, Wright’s status as a writer dwindled, but in the militant 1960’s his work was rediscovered. His inability to find sustaining values in his own African American heritage and his insistence that being black was the same as being nothing alienated him from many other black writers, including James Baldwin, who countered with his conception of the richness of the African American experience. However, Wright’s early life in the Deep South had permanently shaped his identity. His books drew attention to the corrosive effects of oppressive, violent racism and served to stoke militant rage. A rebellious person, Wright wanted to communicate to white America the anger and hatred that propelled him to speak out about man’s injustice to man. His voice continued to compel readers long after his death.

Bibliography

Andrews, William L., and Douglas Taylor, eds. Richard Wright’s “Black Boy (American Hunger)”: A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A collection of critical responses to Black Boy. Includes various reviews, an interview of Wright in 1945, and essays that examine a wide range of topics.

Brignano, Russell Carl. Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Interesting account of Wright’s attraction to Marxism, his attempt to exchange Marxism for existentialism, and the writings that were engendered by both. Also addresses Wright’s travel books.

Graham, Maryemma, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Sumptuous history of African American novelists spanning from slave narratives to modern novelists. Contains a significant chapter on Wright and the protest novel.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Detailed biography of Wright, including family background, life in the South during the first quarter of the twentieth century, and his lifelong efforts to fight racism.

Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. Reprint. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008. Excellent introduction to Wright’s visceral fiction about white racism and oppression in the South. Four novellas first published in 1938.