Wright, Richard (1908–1960)

Early Life

Richard Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi. He was the son of Nathan Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson Wright, a well-educated schoolteacher. The family's extreme poverty forced them to move to Memphis, Tennessee, when Wright was six years old. Wright's father deserted the family for another woman soon after moving to Memphis, leaving Richard's mother to support him and his brother with her earnings as a cook.

For a short period, Wright and his brother stayed in an orphanage, but they were later sent to live with their grandmother in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright eventually graduated as valedictorian of his junior high school class, but his formal schooling had been erratic, and he was forced to take on various jobs, including delivering newspapers and selling insurance, while still only a teenager.

In the spring of 1924, when Wright was fifteen years old, his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre,” was published in the Southern Register, a black newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. After working in Jackson and Memphis between 1925 and 1927, he moved to Chicago, where he became a postal clerk. While in Chicago, Wright began writing serious fiction and reading many of the social-realist novels then in vogue, including works by Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis.

A Struggling Writer

During the Great Depression, Wright began to see some of his stories in print, but he was forced to work as a manual laborer to earn money. In the early 1930s, he joined the Communist Party after becoming involved with the John Reed Club, a Communist group that attracted other literary figures. For the rest of the 1930s, Wright contributed poetry to such leftist publications as Partisan Review, New Masses, International Literature, and Left Front. He also was hired by the Federal Writers' Project, a program of the New Deal, to contribute material on African Americans to the Illinois volume of the American Guide Series.

In 1937, Wright moved to Harlem and became an editor for the Daily Worker, the national Communist Party publication. He was a cofounder of the short-lived New Challenge magazine, a progressive journal for Negro intellectuals, and also contributed to the Harlem section for the guidebook to New York City, published by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

Wright first came to mainstream attention in 1938, when his short story “Fire and Cloud” won the [Page 901]O. Henry Memorial Award after garnering first prize in a Story Magazine competition. In 1939, Harper and Brothers, a prominent New York publishing house, published Wright's first story collection, Uncle Tom's Children. While left-wing critics praised the book, others, such as African American writer Zora Neale Hurston, thought the stories were spoiled by their ideological bent.

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