Wright, Richard

Novelist, short-story writer, and essayist Richard Wright (1908–1960) was instrumental in the development of urban, African American protest fiction. Through his [Page 902]writing, he challenged the obstacles facing African Americans as a direct result of racism and influenced subsequent writers who advanced the genre of protest literature into the 1960s.

Richard Nathaniel Wright, born September 4, 1908, on Rucker's Plantation, a farm near Natchez, Mississippi, has recounted much of his childhood and early adulthood in his autobiographies, Black Boy (1945) and American Hunger (1977). Wright's father deserted the family when Wright was five years old, and his mother, unable to support herself and her two sons, was forced to leave him with various family members throughout the South. As a young adult in 1927, Richard Wright moved to Chicago, settling on the city's South Side. Although Chicago lacked the Jim Crow laws of the South, the North soon proved to have its own series of racial practices and restrictions, which often left him confused and dismayed.

While working at the Clark Street post office, Wright was convinced by a coworker to join the Chicago chapter of the John Reed Club, a literary association working in conjunction with the Communist Party to cultivate promising leftist talent. Encouraged by its members, Wright began to study Communist literature, which led him to publish his early work in Communist magazines and to officially join the Communist Party in 1934. The following year, he was hired by the Federal Writer's Project to research the history of African Americans in Chicago for the Illinois volume of the American Guide Series.

In 1934, Wright left Chicago for New York to pursue writing. While there, he published two of his most famous essays, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” But it was with the 1940 publication of his first novel, Native Son, that he gained worldwide attention. The first novel by an African American author to be offered as a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in Chicago's Black Belt, who, while working for a wealthy white philanthropist, accidentally kills the philanthropist's daughter. After Bigger attempts to hide his crime and flees the scene, he is forced to confront the true omnipresence of white oppression. Native Son was an immediate best seller and was later adapted as a Broadway play by Orson Welles in 1941 and as a film in 1951, wherein Richard Wright was cast in the role of Bigger Thomas.

Attempting to escape America's virulent racism, Richard Wright and his family moved to Paris's Latin Quarter in 1947 and remained in France—where his work was well received despite his waning reputation in the United States—until his death in 1960. Although he never duplicated the critical and commercial success of Native Son, Richard Wright left an indelible mark on American literature. His explorations of how race and the urban environment shape an individual's consciousness make him one of the great American novelists.