Richard Wright
Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28,1960) was an American author of novels, short stories and non-fiction.
Biography
Wright, the grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, a tiny town located about 22 miles east of Natchez, in Franklin County. Wright's family soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee. While in Memphis, his father Nathaniel, a former sharecropper, abandoned them. Wright, his brother, and mother Ella, a schoolteacher, soon moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with relatives. In Jackson, Wright grew up and attended public high school. Here, he formed some of his most lasting early impressions of American racism before eventually moving back to Memphis in 1927, where he became acquainted with the works of such literary figures as H. L. Mencken.
Eventually, he moved to Chicago, where he began to write and became active in the John Reed Clubs, eventually joining the Communist Party. He moved to New York City to become the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper, also contributing to the New Masses magazine. Wright gained positive contact with whites during his communist activity—which he had only experienced on one occasion in the south—but became frustrated by the party's theoretical rigidity and disapproved of purges in the Soviet Union.
Wright first gained attention for his collection of (originally) four short stories, Uncle Tom's Children (1937). In this work he fictionalised the incidents of lynching in the Deep South. He followed with a novel Native Son (1940), which was the first Book of the Month Club recommendation by an African American author. Here the lead character, the murderer Bigger Thomas, was intended by Wright to be a representation of the limitations that society placed on African Americans, that Thomas could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge through the heinous acts that he commits. Wright was much criticized for both works' concentration on violence, and, in the case of Native Son, for a portrayal of a black person which might be seen as confirming whites' worst fears.
Wright is also renowned for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his difficulties with white employers and social isolation. American Hunger, (published posthumously in 1977) was originally intended as the second book of Black Boy and is restored to this form in the Library of America edition. This details his involvement with the John Reed Clubs and then (ambivalently) the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, though the book implies that it was earlier, and the fact was not made public until 1944. In its restored form, its diptych structure mirrors the certainties and intolerance of organised communism, (the "bourgeois" books and condemned members) with similar qualities in fundamentalist organized religion. During McCarthyism, his membership in the Communist Party resulted in him and his works being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.
In May 1946 he travelled to France as a guest of the French government, where he was well-received by French intellectuals. It was after this visit that he settled in Paris to become a permanent American expatriate. Wright had a mixed marriage and he had become frustrated by the attitudes of people they came in contact with as a couple.
In 1949 he contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; the essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier. This led to an invitation to become involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. That organization, with the FBI, had Wright under surveillance from 1943.
Other works include The Outsider (1953) and White Man, Listen! (1957), as well as a collection of short stories, Eight Men, published after his death in 1961. His works primarily deal with the poverty, anger, and protest of northern and southern urban Blacks.
In the last years of his life, Richard Wright became enamored with the Japanese poetry form haiku and he wrote over 4,000 of them. In 1998 a book was published ("Haiku: This Other World" ISBN 0-385-72024-6) with the 817 haiku that he preferred.
Wright contracted amoebic dysentery on a visit to the British Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, and despite various treatments, his health continued to deteriorate over the next three years. He died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He is interred there in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Quotations
- "'If laying down my life could stop the suffering in the world I'd do it. But I don't believe anything can stop it,' I told him. He heard me but he did not speak. I wanted to say more to him, but I knew that it would have been useless. Though older than I, he had neither known nor felt anything of life for himself; he had been carefully reared by his mother and father and he had always been told what to feel." - From 1945 Black Boy
- "All my life I have done nothing but feel and cultivate my feelings; all their lives they had done nothing but strive for petty goals, the trivial material prizes of American life. We shared a common tongue, but my language was a different language from theirs." - From 1945 Black Boy
- "This business of saving souls had not ethics; every human relationship was shamelessly exploited. In essence, the tribe was asking us whether we shared its feelings; if we refused to join the church, it was equivalent to saying no, to placing ourselves in the position of moral monsters." - From 1945 Black Boy
- "All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them."
- "[...] hurling words into the darkness [...]"
- "Living in the past with regret is like killing yourself on the inside and throwing them to darkness."
- "I only got one life to live and all I want to do is spend the rest of my life with you."
- "People say good things come to those who wait, well I've waited 16 years and now it seems too late."
- "And still when the delicate and unconscious machinery of race relations slips, there will be murder again. How can law contradict the lives of millions of people and hope to be administered successfully?" - From 1940 Native Son
- "Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. - From 1940 Native Son
Publications
Drama
- "Native Son: The Biography of a Young American" with Paul Green (New York: Harper, 1941)
Fiction
- Uncle Tom's Children (New York: Harper, 1938)
- Bright and Morning Star (New York: International Publishers, 1938)
- Native Son (New York: Harper, 1940)
- The Outsider (New York: Harper, 1953)
- Savage Holiday (New York: Avon, 1954)
- The Long Dream (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958)
- Eight Men (Cleveland and New York: World, 1961)
- Lawd Today (New York: Walker, 1963)
Nonfiction
- "How “Bigger” Was Born; the Story of Native Son" (New York: Harper, 1940)
- "12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States" (New York: Viking, 1941)
- "Black Boy" (New York: Harper, 1945)
- "Black Power" (New York: Harper, 1954)
- "The Color Curtain" (Cleveland and New York: World, 1956)
- "Pagan Spain" (New York: Harper, 1957)
- "White Man, Listen!" (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957)
- "Letters to Joe C. Brown" (Kent State University Libraries, 1968)
- "American Hunger" (New York: Harper & Row, 1977)
See also
External links
- Richard Wright's Biography at the Mississippi Writers Page
- Richard Wright at the Independent Television Service
- Richard Wright's Photo & Gravesite
Credits
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