Richard Wright

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Wright, Richard (1908–1960), novelist, short story writer, and political commentator. Richard Wright changed the landscape of possibility for African American writers. Wright's defiance, his refusal to give the reading public what it had hitherto demanded of the African American writer, his insistence on the expression of an African American voice, allowed later writers to do the same, allowed Toni Morrison, for example, to write as she would—without concern for explaining her sometimes obscure meanings (e.g., her references to news events from long ago or words or phrases from African American vernacular speech) to a mainstream reading public. For other African American writers, positioning themselves against Wright allowed them to write about African American culture in a more positive way, to assume a posture not requiring that the subject of the fiction, the African American, be seen as victim.

Richard Wright's influence began primarily with the publication of Native Son in 1940. The significance of the novel's publication lay in the new and daringly defiant character of its content and in its adoption by the Book-of-the-Month Club, which signaled for the first time since the nineteenth-century fugitive slave narratives the willingness of a mainstream reading public to give ear to an African American writer, even one who appeared unapologetic in his bald and forthright representation of a large segment of African American culture.

Wright's understanding of African American life is rooted in his southern background. His first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of short stories, comes out of his understanding and knowledge of the meaning of being a young black male growing up in the South. Its introduction, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” (added along with a fifth short story in 1940), forms the core for his later autobiography, Black Boy (1945). The ligature between the two is Native Son. It is no happenstance that Bigger Thomas, the novel's hero, though living in Chicago at the time of the narrative, was born in Mississippi, the birthplace of Richard Wright. Bigger Thomas is conceived in Uncle Tom's Children as the character Big Boy, the titular hero of “Big Boy Leaves Home,” who by the end of that story flees north to escape a lynch mob. In practically all of Wright's fiction, the hero faces capture and subsequent mutilation or death from some wrongfully avenging agency.

Richard Wright was born on 24 September on a farm near Natchez, Mississippi. His mother, Ella Wilson Wright, was a schoolteacher and his father, Nathan, a tenant farmer. Though Black Boy differs in important respects from his life, the general tenor of Wright's narrative is true. The desertion of his father when Wright was only six years old, the constant moves from one house, town, or state to another and back reflect the instability of his life. Poverty and illness were his family's lot; hunger, if we count the number of times the word appears in his autobiographical narrative, a more constant companion than any playmate.

As Wright matured and began to understand his circumstances as a black person in Mississippi in the early twentieth century, he came to know the fear and dread associated with racism and its narrow circumscription of black lives. He is frequently aware of the possibility of being killed or otherwise injured because of anything he might or might not say or do if that might inadvertently violate the “ethics of living Jim Crow.” The most frequent mood in his early life is tension, if not the tension arising from direct contact with whites, then tension resulting from the pressures brought to bear on African Americans stemming from the racial climate. Wright makes abundantly clear that the most intimate interactions (involving friends, family members, lovers) among African Americans are largely influenced by the pervasive impact of race. Wright keenly felt, as all his fiction reveals, that in interracial social relations, in both North and South ultimately, race is an omnipresent factor.

His autobiographies Black Boy and American Hunger give particular attention to his development as a writer. Black Boy claims that the author had something of dramatic significance to write about: the career of a black person, a male citizen within the American democratic commonwealth, growing up in the South. It points also to Wright's early sensitivity, to an awarness and predisposition to respond to the forces mediating the relation between self and social environment. It speaks of a youthful early interest in narrative, especially in the gothic children's story “Bluebeard,” which prompted his earlier publication, the unrecovered” Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre.”

Shortly before he “escapes” from the South (as he in part does because he is afraid to tell the whites who question his motives for moving north why he is leaving), Wright discovered a completely new perspective on American life provided by such national journals as Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the American Mercury. A northern white who managed an optical company where Wright was employed in Memphis, Tennessee, allowed him to use his library card to borrow books (a forbidden act), and he became acquainted with the writers who were most germane to the shaping of his literary career. These include Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Frank Harris, Alexandre Dumas, and O. Henry.

The two major events of Wright's life in Chicago are his employment at the post office and his involvement with the Communist Party. Though employed only intermittently by the post office, he had done extremely well on the competitive civil service examination. At the post office he met others, both black and white, also using the job as a steppingstone to higher status. It was at the post office that he first interacted with whites on a basis of equality, meeting, for example, Abraham Aaron, himself an aspiring writer, who eventually introduced him to the John Reed Club and thence to the Communist Party. In his relations with the Chicago Post Office, Wright finally had the last word. In 1937 he declined a job at $2,000 annually and went to New York to become a writer. The post office and figures he knew there supplied the characters, scenes, and action of his first written (though posthumously published) novel, Lawd Today (1963).

His relation to the Communist Party was the subject of most of Wright's fiction and the center around which his life turned even, seemingly, after his break with the party. Though a communist and a marxist, Wright's was never a doctrinaire commitment. He unfailingly challenged the party's interpretation and understanding of marxism, especially as these involved black people. Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son both instruct the party about its failures in addressing African Americans, thus implying its pathetic lack of knowledge and understanding of black history, culture, and life. Uncle Tom's Children shows the depths of blacks' submersion in black history and culture, suggesting that African Americans cannot be politically addressed outside of that context. Native Son shows two significant levels of the failure of communication: on one level Mary Dalton fails to understand her class relation to Bigger Thomas, and Bigger's sense of his class and racial relation to Mary Dalton results in her death. The other more complicated level finds Max, the sophisticated marxist, as unable as Mary Dalton to see and communicate with Bigger Thomas on a totally human level. He understands Bigger's class situation but nothing about how that intersects with race, thus explaining the otherwise enigmatic line at the close of the novel, “Max groped for his hat like a blind man.”

“The Man Who Lived Underground” reflects Wright's increasing disaffection with the Communist Party and with marxism. The loneliness and isolation of Fred Daniels, his discovery of the subjectivity of experience, shows Wright looking at the world in a far more psychological and existentially philosophical rather than dialectically materialistic way. Fred discovers the relativity of value, seeing that what he heretofore had seen as the truths and facts of the world are not truths and facts at all but merely arbitrarily assigned values. When the policeman at the conclusion of the novella says of Fred, “You've got to shoot his kind. They'd wreck things,” his reference is not to race at all but to any who see behind appearances. With his 1944 article in Atlantic Monthly, “I Tried to Be a Communist,” extracted from American Hunger, Wright made his final break with the party.

In 1947 Richard Wright left the United States for France with his wife, Ellen, and daughter, Julia, in order to further distance himself from Mississippi. Despite his success as the most famous black author ever to have published, Wright still felt beset by tensions arising out of racism. Even in New York it was not possible for him to live freely and easily wherever he chose. Still he was viewed not as a great author but as a great black author. He felt that in Europe, especially France, he could live unhampered by those feelings that harked back to the fear and misery he experienced growing up in the South. Paris had been home to other disillusioned American writers; perhaps it could become home for him, too.

Negative responses to him and to his work were not infrequent after his French exile. Was it because his creative powers did indeed diminish after he left the United States or was the American response to his work related to his politics? Did he indeed “lose touch” with his country when he remained away so long as was often asserted? His work was much better received in France than in the United States, so obviously the French did not see him as an author in decline. His income decreased considerably during the 1950s as the result of his loss of popularity in the United States. It is not clear whether his difficult relations with the State Department might have had something to do with that. (The FBI began a file on Wright in 1943 when an investigation was launched to determine whether his picture essay 12 Million Black Voices was evidence of sedition. He had difficulty obtaining a passport because of his previous relations with the Communist Party. United States surveillance of his activities while he lived in France was maintained largely because of his political views.) The novels published while he lived in France are The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and The Long Dream (1958). In The Outsider, a tale much influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Cross Damon tries to function outside the constraints of law and morality. Its existential orientation derives in part from the influence of European existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl, and inpart from Wright's understanding of his own experiences in Mississippi. Savage Holiday, a novel whose major characters are not African Americans, was published in the United States but only in paperback by Avon. More than any other of his writings it was intended to entertain rather than to effect social change. The Long Dream, set in Mississippi, seems an attempt on Wright's part to return to his major theme, social protest against a punishing, unfair racist society.

Nonfiction works published during these years include Black Power, Wright's diary written when he visits the Gold Coast (1954); The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung Conference, an account of the Bandung Conference, in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955, an international conference of people of color (1956); Pagan Spain, a wonderfully written and very readable travelogue (written following an extended motor tour) that reveals much of Wright's intelligence, knowledge, and sensitivity (1956); and White Man, Listen, a collection of four lectures delivered between 1950 and 1956 that contains in its author's introduction a sentiment that describes very accurately a sense one gets reading Wright: “I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment, of aloneness;… it seems the natural, inevitable condition of man, and I welcome it…. I've been shaped to this mental stance by the kind of experience I have fallen heir to” (1957).

When Wright died unexpectedly at the age of fifty-two, he was separated from his family, who were in London, where he wanted to live; he was in dire financial straits; and he was in conflict with the black expatriate community for a complex of reasons. The circumstances of his death excited questions of foul play. He was not known to suffer any heart malady; he seemed in better physical condition than he had been of late; he died in a hospital shortly after receiving an injection, his family was not notified of his death; and he was cremated almost immediately afterward without their consent, thus no autopsy was possible. Wright biographer Michel Fabre concludes that if Wright was killed, it was indirectly-through the pressures brought to bear on him at the time by his critics—and probably not by the CIA.

Richard Wright's influence on American literature is nearly inestimable. He demonstrated for the first time that an African American could indeed be a major writer of international fame and stature. He modeled possibilities hitherto not seen or known for African American writers. His influence extended well beyond the writing community, demonstrating that success was possible and that militancy in the face of racism constituted a valuable response. It was not Richard Wright alone who influenced the progressive social changes that occurred in the 1960s, whose effects are yet pervasive, but surely his was a great influence on the time. Because of his place in literary history and because of the widespread influence of his work, many see him as among the greatest writers of the century.

Bibliography

• Richard Abcarian, Richard Wright's “Native Son”: A Critical Handbook, 1970.
• Keneth Kinnamon, The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society, 1972.
• Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, 1973.
• Yoshinobu Hakutani, Critical Essays on Richard Wright, 1974.
• Richard Macksey and Frank Moorer, eds., Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1984.
• Joyce Ann Joyce, Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy, 1986. James C. Trot-man,ed., Richard Wright: Myths and Realities, 1988.
• Margaret Walker, Richard Wright,Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, 1988.
• Eugene Miller, Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright, 1990.
• Robert J. Butler, Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero, 1991.
• Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds., Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, 1993. Arnold Rampersad, ed., Richard Wright, 1995. Robert J. Butler, ed., The Critical Response to Richard Wright, 1995.
• Robert Felgar,Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy, 1998

Donald B. Gibson

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The works of Richard Wright (1908-1960), politically sophisticated and socially involved African American author, are notable for their passionate sincerity. He was perceptive about the universal problems that plague mankind.

Richard Wright was born in Natchez, Miss., on Sept. 4, 1908. His mother was a country school teacher and his father an illiterate sharecropper. The family moved to Memphis, Tenn., in 1914, and soon the father abandoned them. Richard's schooling was spotty, but he had experiences beyond his years. He knew what it was to be a victim of racial hatred before he learned to read, for he was living with an aunt when her husband was lynched by a white mob. Richard's formal education ended after the ninth grade in Jackson, Miss. The fact that his "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-acre" had been published in the local black paper set him apart from his classmates. He was a youth upon whom a "somberness of spirit" had already settled.

At 19 Wright decided he wanted to be a writer. He moved to Chicago, where he had access to public libraries. He read all he could of Dostoevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and Henry and William James. His interest in social problems led to an acquaintance with the sociologist Louis Wirth. When Richard's mother, brother, and an aunt came to Chicago, he supported them as a postal clerk until the job ended in 1929. After months of living on public welfare, he got a job in the Federal Negro Theater Project in the Works Progress Administration, a government relief agency. Later he became a writer for the Illinois Writers' Project.

Meantime, Wright had joined the John Reed Club, beginning an association with the Communist party. His essays, reviews, short stories, and poems appeared regularly in Communist papers, and by 1937, when he became Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, he enjoyed a considerable reputation in left-wing circles. Four novellas, published as Uncle Tom's Children (1938), introduced him to a large general audience.

Native Son

Wright's first novel, Native Son (1940), a brutally honest depiction of black, urban ghetto life, was an immediate success. The story's protagonist embodies all the fear, rage, and rebellion, all the spiritual hunger and the undisciplined drive to satisfy it, that social psychologists were just beginning to recognize as common elements in the personality of the underprivileged and dispossessed of all races.

Wright's intention was to make the particular truth universal and to project his native son as a symbol of the deprived in all lands. Contemporary critics, however, un-impressed by the universal symbol, were interested instead in Wright's passionate indictment of white racism and the life-style it imposed upon blacks. Wright's implication that there was another and a better way of social organization than democracy, and that communism was perhaps that better way, also impressed them. This implication was toned down in the stage version (1941). In 1941 Wright also published Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro of the United States.

Black Boy

By 1940 Wright had married and divorced; and a few months after his second marriage, he broke with the communist party. (His "I Tried To Be a Communist," published in the Atlantic in 1944, was reprinted in 1949 in The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman.) The break freed him from social and ideological commitments that were beginning to seem onerous. In Black Boy, a fictionalized autobiography, his only commitment is to truth. The book was published in January 1945, and sales reached 400,000 copies by March. Wright accepted an invitation from the French government to visit France, and the three-month experience, in sharp contrast to his experience in his own country, "exhilarated" him with a "sense of freedom." People of the highest intellectual and artistic circles met him "as an equal."

Expatriate Years

Wright and his wife and daughter moved permanently to Paris. Within a year and a half Wright was off to Argentina, where he "starred" in the film version of Native Son.

The Outsider, the first of three novels written in France, was deeply influenced by the existentialists, whose most famous spokesmen, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, were Wright's warm friends. Following Savage Holiday (1954), a potboiler, The Long Dream (1958) proved that Wright had been too long out of touch with the American reality to deal with it effectively. None of the novels written in France succeeded. His experiments with poetry did not produce enough for a book.

Nonfiction Works

In 1953 Wright visited Africa, where he hoped to "discover his roots" as a black man. Black Power (1954) combines the elements of a travel book with a passionate political treatise on the "completely different order of life" in Africa. In 1955 he attended the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung and published his impressions in The Color Curtain (1956). Pagan Spain (1956), based on two months in Spain, is the best of his nonfiction works. White Man, Listen (1957) is a collection of four long essays on "White-colored, East-West relations."

In 1960, following an unhappy attempt to settle in England, and in the midst of a rugged lecture schedule, Wright fell ill. He entered a hospital in Paris on November 25 and died three days later. Eight Men (1961), a collection of short stories, and Lawd Today (1963), a novel, were published posthumously.

Further Reading

Constance Webb, Richard Wright (1968), is a "definitive" but dull biography. Full-length critical works are Edward Margolies, The Art of Richard Wright (1969), which emphasizes Wright's role in paving the way for a new generation of Negro authors; Dan McCall, The Example of Richard Wright (1969), a fascinating critique; and Russell C. Brignano, Richard Wright: An Introduction to the Man and His Works (1970). See also Robert Bone, Richard Wright (1969), a brief perspective. James Baldwin's "Alas, Poor Richard" in his Nobody Knows My Name (1961) is not to be trusted as a delineation of an episode in Wright's life, and its condescending tone spoils it as literary criticism. David Littlejohn's discussion of Wright in his Black on White: A Critical Survey of Writing by American Negroes (1966) is worth reading if only to see how misprized a major black novelist can be.

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Personal Information

Born September 4, 1908, in Adams County, MS; died of a heart attack November 28, 1960, in Paris, France; son of Nathan "Nate" (a farmer) and Ella Wilson (a schoolteacher) Wright; married Rose Dhimah Meadman, 1939; married Ellen Poplar, 1941.

Career

Published first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," 1924; worked variously as a dishwasher, busboy, porter, street sweeper, and group leader for a Chicago Boys Club; worked for U.S. Postal Service, Chicago, beginning in 1932; wrote poetry for leftist publications; attended American Writers' Congress, New York City, 1935; prepared guidebooks for Federal Writer's Project, mid-1930s; worked for Federal Theater Project, 1936; wrote for the Daily Worker, late 1930s; published Uncle Tom's Children, 1938; published Native Son, 1940; published autobiography Black Boy, 1945; lectured, appeared on radio and television, and contributed to periodicals, late 1940s; attended Bandung Conference in Indonesia, 1955.

Life's Work

As a poor black child growing up in the Deep South, Richard Wright suffered poverty, hunger, racism, and violence--experiences that later became central themes of his work. Wright stands as a major literary figure of the 1930s and '40s, his writings a departure from those of the Harlem Renaissance school. Steeped in the literary naturalism of the Depression era, Wright's work expresses a realistic and brutal portrayal of white society's oppression of African Americans. Anger and protest served as a catalyst for literature intended to promote social change by exposing the injustices of racism, economic exploitation, and imperialism. Through his art, Wright turned the torment of alienation into a voice calling for human solidarity and racial advancement.

Wright was born on September 4, 1908, in the backwoods of Mississippi, on a plantation 25 miles north of Natchez, to a farmer and a schoolteacher. Descended from a family lineage of black, white, and Choctaw Indian, he spent the early years of his life playing among the "moss-clad" oaks along the Mississippi River. After failing to make a profit on his rented farm, Wright's father decided to move the family to Memphis, Tennessee. Upon arrival by paddleboat steamer in 1911, the Wrights took residence in a two-room tenement not far from Beale Street. To Wright, the concrete pavement appeared hostile and dreary compared to the pastoral serenity of his former home. In a city filled with brothels, saloons, and storefront churches, Wright encountered the terrors of violence, vice, and racism.

The increasing absence of his father fueled Wright's growing sense of anger and estrangement. By the time the boy was six years old, his father had deserted the family to live with another woman. At first, he was elated to be free from his father's abusive behavior, but he soon realized that this newfound freedom brought severe poverty. "The image of my father became associated with the pangs of hunger," wrote Wright in his autobiography Black Boy. "Whenever I felt hunger, I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness." Left with two children to support, Wright's mother went to work as a housemaid and cook. After a brief period in an orphanage around 1915, Wright attended school for a short time at Howard Institute. "This period in Memphis was the beginning of adult suffering," wrote poet Margaret Walker in her book Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, "the beginning of a terrible rage that he himself did not always understand."

Around 1919 the failing health of Wright's mother forced her to take the children to live with relatives in Arkansas. A year later, the Wrights moved to Richard's devoutly religious grandparents' home in Jackson, Mississippi. The household was dominated by Wright's grandmother and Aunt Addie, both of whom were Seventh-Day Adventists. Because of his rebellious attitude toward evangelical teachings, Wright lived as an outsider within the family. Although nonreligious literature was forbidden, he managed to acquire pulp magazines, newspapers, and detective stories. Inspired by local folklore, country sermons, and popular literature, Wright's first story "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," was published in 1924 by a local black newspaper. Undaunted by the family's criticism of his work, Wright aspired to become a writer.

To pursue this dream, Wright shifted his attention northward, to a place where he could escape the hostility of southern rural evangelical culture. With only a ninth-grade education and little money in his pocket, Wright fled to Memphis at the age of 17. There he became acquainted with the work of H. L. Mencken. In the fiery prose of Mencken, Wright learned that words could serve as weapons with which to lash out at the world. Soon afterward, Wright discovered such naturalist writers as Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. As Arnold Rampersad stated in the introduction to Wright's Lawd Today, the author's avid study of serious literature in Memphis became "the most effective counter to both his profound sense of isolation and the dismal education he received as a boy in Mississippi."

Unfortunately, Wright did not find the atmosphere of Memphis as enlightening as his private studies. Violence and hatred perpetrated by whites reinforced his dim view of the South. In November of 1927, Wright boarded a train bound for Chicago. His departure symbolized the end of a stay in an alien land where he existed as a "non-man" within the chasm of the black and white worlds.

Wright's family soon joined him in Chicago. Together they lived in a cramped apartment on the city's South Side. Bored with his studies, Wright left high school to help support the family. He took a number of odd jobs, working as a dishwasher, porter, busboy, street sweeper, and group leader at a South Side Boys Club. In 1932 Wright worked as a clerk at the Chicago post office. Nicknamed "the University," the post office employed numerous radical intellectuals, some of whom invited Wright to attend the meetings of the John Reed Club, a revolutionary writers' organization. While exposing him to Communist literature and Marxist ideology, club members encouraged Wright to pursue a professional writing career. Inspired by their support and enthusiasm, Wright began to write poetry for various left-wing publications.

Around this time, Wright's interest in race relations and radical thought led him to join the Communist party. Within the Communist ranks, he found, for the first time, a formidable peer group sharing a common goal of promoting racial and social equality. "It seemed to me that here at last, in the realm of revolutionary expression," Wright stated in his contribution to the book The God That Failed, "Negro experience could find a home, a functioning value and role." For a brief period, Wright's sense of loneliness subsided. Communism appeared to offer an alternative that could not only quell his own inner conflict, but the threat of poverty and racism confronting the disinherited peoples of all nations.

In 1935, after the Communist party disbanded the John Reed Clubs, Wright hitchhiked to New York, where, along with prominent writers like Langston Hughes, Malcolm Cowley, and Dreiser, he attended the American Writers' Congress. Back in Chicago that year, he found employment preparing guidebooks for the Federal Writer's Project, a New Deal relief program for unemployed writers. Early in 1936, Wright was transferred for a short time to the Federal Theater Project. Wright also wrote for the Daily Worker and started work on a collection of short stories and a novel, posthumously published as Lawd Today in 1963.

Wright's burgeoning literary career, however, soon conflicted with his membership in the Communist party. In Chicago, his study of sociology, psychology, philosophy, and literature led him to question the rigid policies of Stalinism and the aesthetic aspects of socialist realism. He found that recruiting, organizing, and distributing party literature interfered with his writing assignments. Moreover, the expulsion of many fellow members and the constant questioning concerning his loyalty alerted Wright to the duplicitous and paranoid nature of the organization. Accused of betraying the party by several Chicago Communists in 1937, Wright--tired of the Chicago scene--decided to leave for New York.

Not long after arriving in New York City, Wright won a Works Progress Administration award for his collection of novellas, published as Uncle Tom's Children in 1938. Based on Wright's Mississippi boyhood, "these stories were almost unbearable evocations of cruel realities," explained poet Arna Bontemps in Anger and Beyond. "His purpose was to force open closed eyes, to compel America to look at what it had done to the black peasantry in which he was born."

For the better part of a year, Wright took time off from his jobs at the Writer's Project and the Daily Worker to work on a novel. Published in 1940, Native Son became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, selling over a quarter of a million copies in six months. By far Wright's most famous and financially successful book, Native Son is a militant racial manifesto exposing the evils of racism and the capitalist oppression of blacks in urban society. Based on the actual criminal case of convicted killer Robert Nixon, the book describes the story of Bigger Thomas, a street-hardened black youth who murders the daughter of a well-to-do white family while working as their chauffeur. Hunted down by white society, Bigger is sentenced to death by the very power structure responsible for his alienation, subjugation, and ultimate impulse to commit murder.

In 1941, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People awarded Wright the Spingarn Medal for Native Son. Another great honor was bestowed on Wright when actor-producers John Houseman and Orson Welles mounted a stage adaption of Native Son, featuring the outstanding actor Canada Lee in the role of Bigger. Also in 1941, Wright published his third book, Twelve Million Black Voices, a folk history featuring photographs by Edwin Rosskam. Following his formal break with the Communist party in 1944, Wright wrote an essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled "I Tried to Be a Communist," explaining his reasons for leaving the party. Wright's finest work of the decade, however, was his autobiography Black Boy. Published in 1945, Black Boy is a harrowing record of Wright's early years in the South. In a review in the Nation, noted literary scholar Lionel Trilling described Black Boy as a "remarkable book" of great "distinction" and "purpose." Social scientists and historians continue to study the book's impact on black and white society long after its publication.

Encouraged by avant-garde writer Gertrude Stein, Wright expressed an interest in visiting France. In the spring of 1946, he embarked for Paris on an ocean steamer. The city's colorful streets and cultured citizenry greatly impressed Wright. Stein introduced him to a number of leading French intellectuals, including Claude Magny and Maurice Nadeau. Wright went back to New York in January of 1947. He intended to resume work there, but rampant racism and the anti-radicalism of the Cold War era made him restless to return to France. In May of 1948, Wright moved into an apartment on Paris's Left Bank.

In permanent exile in Paris, Wright enjoyed celebrity status. He spent a great deal of time lecturing throughout Europe and appearing on radio and television. Besides his close association with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the members of the Les Temps Modernes group, Wright became an active member of the Pan-African organization Presence Africaine. His 1953 novel, The Outsider, exemplifies the increasing influence of existentialism on his work. Black Power, completed following his trip to Ghana in 1954, presents a Pan-African perspective. After attending a 29-nation gathering of representatives of African and Asian countries at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia, Wright wrote The Color Curtain, which appeared in 1956. A year later, he produced a travelogue, Pagan Spain, based on his observations of Spanish culture, politics, and religion. Up until his death from a heart attack in Paris in 1960, Wright continued to work on several literary projects, including a collection of short stories, Eight Men, published posthumously in 1961.

From the depths of the Mississippi Delta to the cities of Europe, Africa, and Asia, Richard Wright emerged an international literary figure championing the cause of social and racial justice. Poet, writer, social critic, and journalist, Wright authored about a dozen books and numerous poems and essays, most of which address the evils of racism and man's inhumanity to man. "Wright's unrelentingly bleak language was not merely of the Deep South or Chicago," commented writer James Baldwin in an essay titled "Alas Poor Richard," "but that of the human heart." It was Wright's destiny, as he himself wrote in The God That Failed, "to hurl words into the darkness and wait for an echo ... no matter how faintly." Decades after his death, Wright's words still reverberate across the world--their dark and ominous tone embodying a message of hope for all humanity.

Awards

Guggenheim Fellowship, 1939; Works Progress Administration award, late 1930s; Spingarn Medal, NAACP, 1941, for Native Son.

Works

Writings

• Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas, Harper & Brothers, 1938.
• Native Son, Harper & Brothers, 1940.
• Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, Viking, 1941.
• Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, Harper & Brothers, 1945.
• The Outsider, 1953.
• Black Power, Harper & Brothers, 1954.
• Savage Holiday, Avon, 1954.
• The Color Curtain, World, 1956.
• Pagan Spain, Harper & Brothers, 1957.
• White Man Listen, Doubleday, 1957.
• Long Dream, Doubleday, 1958.
• Eight Men, World, 1961.
• Lawd Today, Walker, 1963.
• (Contributor) The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman, Books for Libraries Series, 1972.
• American Hunger, Harper & Row, 1977.

Further Reading

Books

• Alexander, Charles C., Nationalism in American Thought: 1930-1945, Rand McNally, 1969.
• American Writers: A Collection of Literary Biographies, Vol. IV, edited by Leonard Unger, Scribner's, 1974.
• Anger and Beyond, edited by Herbert Hill, Harper & Row, 1966.
• Baldwin, James, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (includes "Alas Poor Richard"), Dial Press, 1961.
• Bell, Bernard W., The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
• Crunden, Robert, From Self to Society: 1919-1941, Prentice Hall, 1972.
• The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman, Books for Libraries Series, 1972.
• Richard Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre, Harper & Row, 1978.
• Walker, Margaret, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, Warner Books, 1988.
• Wright, Richard, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, Harper & Brothers, 1945.
• Wright, Richard, Lawd Today, introduction by Arnold Rampersad, Northeastern University Press, 1986.
• Wright, Richard, Native Son, Harper & Brothers, 1940.

Periodicals

• Nation, April 1945.

— John Cohassey

(1908-1960), African-American novelist and social critic. His father's desertion of the family, coupled with his mother's crippling illness, which left her and her two sons in poverty, made Wright's early years unhappy ones. Growing up in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas, Wright felt isolated and rebellious against authority. Self-taught following his graduation from junior high school, and embittered by segregation and racism, he was drawn to the acerbic social criticism of H. L. Mencken and the naturalistic novels of Theodore Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis.

In 1927, he left the South for Chicago, where he entered the postal service. Attracted by communist organizers, he became executive secretary of the John Reed Club of Chicago and joined the party around 1933. He published radical poetry, essays, and short fiction in such leftist magazines as Anvil and New Masses. He also had other, often conflicting literary interests. Influenced by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and James T. Farrell, he completed in 1934 his first novel, "Cesspool" (published posthumously as Lawd Today), which offered a bleak and pessimistic view of humanity.

His first book, Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas (1938), won praise for its harsh depiction of the South, but led to his first disagreements with the party over the question of his freedom as a writer. The estrangement grew with the appearance of his landmark novel Native Son (1940), a story of crime and punishment that revolutionized the depiction of blacks in America by emphasizing their despair and the will to violence. His autobiography, Black Boy (1945), recounted his bitter childhood in the South and confirmed his reputation as the finest black writer in America.

By this time Wright had broken with the party, an episode he explored in 1944 in his Atlantic Monthly essay "I Tried to Be a Communist." After visiting France, he moved there in 1947 with his wife, Ellen Poplar, and their daughter. Welcomed by leading intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as by black writers such as Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and Alioune Diop, he developed strong interests in existentialism and in Africa and colonialism. The first led to his longest novel, The Outsider (1953), about an arrogant, godless black man fatally caught between fascism and communism. The second resulted in Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), written after a visit to Africa that confirmed his anticolonialism but left him critical of many African attitudes and practices. Wright also published provocative books on the 1953 Bandung conference of nonaligned nations (The Color Curtain, 1956) and on atavistic impulses in Spain (Pagan Spain, 1957), as well as a collection of hard-hitting essays on race and culture, White Man, Listen! (1957).

Wright's early and persisting radical estrangement from American culture, black or white, together with his exposure to Marxism and the techniques of naturalism in American fiction, enabled him to isolate and depict some of the harshest truths about the consequences of slavery, segregation, and racism in America--truths often evaded in more genteel approaches to literature. As a result, Native Son remains a major literary landmark in the racial history of the United States, and Black Boy one of the most compelling documents about the struggle of an artistic individual for identity and achievement on the American scene.

In his last novel, The Long Dream (1958), Wright returned to the issue of race and the South, but the book enjoyed only moderate success. Disillusioned about life in France, he tried to settle in England but was officially rebuffed. In 1960, following an attack of amoebic dysentery, he died in a Paris hospital.

Bibliography:

Michael Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973); Addison Gayle, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son (1980).

Author:

Arnold Rampersad

See also Expatriates and Exiles; Literature.

Wright, Richard, 1908-60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in 1927 and in the 1930s joined the city's Federal Writers' Project and wrote Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of four novellas dealing with Southern racial problems. His novel Native Son (1940), which many consider Wright's most important work, concerns the life of Bigger Thomas, a victimized African American struggling against the complicated political and social conditions of Chicago in the 1930s. In 1932, Wright joined the Communist party but later left it in disillusionment. After World War II, Wright moved to Paris. His Black Boy (1945), also regarded as one of his finest works, is an account of his childhood and youth. Other works include Twelve Million Black Voices (1941), a folk history of African Americans; American Hunger (1977), a two-part autobiography; The Outsider (1953) and The Long Dream (1958), two novels; Black Power (1954), an account of his trip to the Gold Coast (Ghana); and Eight Men (1961), a collection of stories published posthumously. Originally censored by his publishers due to their racial, political, or sexual candor, Wright's works were reissued unexpurgated in 1991.

Bibliography

See biographies by C. Webb (1968), M. Fabre (tr. 1973), A. Gayle (1980), M. Walker (1988), and H. Rowley (2001); studies by D. McCall (1969), K. Kinnamon (1973), and D. Ray and R. M. Farnsworth, ed. (1973).

(1908-1960)

1936	"Big Boy Leaves Home." First published in the anthology New Caravan and later in his collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938), this harrowing story tells of a black adolescent who is forced to shoot a white man in self-defense after he watches his friend being lynched, burned alive, and mutilated. It is the first of Wright's works to receive wide critical attention. Wright was born in rural Mississippi, raised in Memphis, and migrated to Chicago at the age of nineteen.
1938	Uncle Tom's Children. Winner of the Story magazine prize for the best work from anyone connected with the Federal Writers' Project, Wright's first book of long short stories graphically details violent racial conflict in the South. Wright would expand the volume in 1940, adding the essay "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," which helps contextualize the book's theme of the rejection of passive suffering.
1940	Native Son. Wright's groundbreaking and controversial depiction of the African American experience features the self-destructive Bigger Thomas, whose murder of a white woman is depicted as an act of liberation in the dehumanized, segregated Chicago of the 1930s. The first book by an African American writer selected as a Book-of-the-Month-Club Main Selection, it sells more than 200,000 copies in its first few weeks. James Baldwin would later declare that "no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull."
1941	Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. Wright provides text and a Marxist commentary on African American experience, with photographs by Edwin Rosskam.
1941	Native Son. Although considered powerful, groundbreaking theater, the dramatic adaptation of Wright's novel, directed by Orson Welles, fails to attract an audience and closes after only 114 performances.
1945	Black Boy. Wright's autobiography of his Southern childhood and youth up to the age of nineteen, when he went north, is one of the landmark memoirs of life in Jim Crow America, a brutally honest look at a climate of oppression and persecution. It also portrays the author's liberation as an individual and as an artist.
1953	The Outsider. Published while Wright was living in Paris, the book employs elements of autobiography and concerns an African American man in Chicago whose mistaken identity and falsely reported death permit him to take up a new life in New York. After joining the Communist Party there, he is manipulated into performing a murder before he himself is killed by the party. Granville Hicks calls the work "one of the first consciously existentialist novels to be written by an American."
1954	Savage Holiday. Wright's psychological thriller treats the violent explosion of a repressed white insurance salesman, a symbol of modern alienation. Forgoing racial themes, Wright attempts to embody existential and Freudian ideas in what most consider his least effective work.
1954	Black Power. Wright records his impressions of a tour of Africa's Gold Coast (later Ghana) and his analysis of what must be done for the emerging African nations to survive. Despite overgeneralizations and a simplistic solution, the book contains some of Wright's finest nonfiction writing.
1956	The Color Curtain. Wright reports on the Asian-African Bandung Conference in Indonesia, expanding his thesis, presented in Black Power (1954), concerning the exploitation of nonwhites.
1957	Pagan Spain and White Man, Listen! The first of Wright's two prose works of 1957 is a bitter series of impressions he gathered while touring Spain, then under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco. The second, Wright's last book of nonfiction, consists of lectures delivered between 1950 and 1956 throughout Europe, recapitulating his ideas about race. Included is "The Literature of the Negro in the United States," a survey of African American writing.
1958	The Long Dream. Wright's final novel issued during his lifetime is the only completed volume of a projected trilogy set in the Jim Crow South of Wright's boyhood. It concerns the liberation of a young black man from the control of his corrupt father and racist repression. Critics are hostile, complaining that the book is crudely conceived and shows that Wright is out of touch with contemporary African American experience.
1961	Eight Men. Wright's posthumously published collection offers a series of portraits of black men attempting to cope with living in a white world. Included are "The Man Who Was Almost a Man" (written in the 1930s), "The Man Who Went to Chicago" (from the 1940s), and what many consider Wright's most artistically accomplished work, "The Man Who Lived Underground."
1963	Lawd Today. Written before Native Son (1940), this posthumously published novel records a day in the life of a desperate black postal worker in Chicago during the Depression. One of Wright's most naturalistic works, the novel features an unsympathetic black protagonist who has been called a black George Babbitt.
1977	American Hunger. This posthumously published memoir continues Wright's account of his life begun in Black Boy (1945), describing the period 1927 to 1937 in Chicago as he struggles as a writer and as a member of the Communist Party.