Wright, Richard Nathaniel

(1908-1960)

   The grandson of slaves, Richard Wright was born in Mississippi. Abandoned by his father, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, and then back to Jackson, Mississippi, where Wright went to school. After leaving school, he worked from 1925 to 1927 for an optical company. He moved to Chicago, Illinois, in 1927, where he worked a number of different jobs, including for the post office. He joined the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) and edited Left Front magazine, which the party briefly produced. Wright also contributed to New Masses magazine. After a disagreement with some of the CPUSA party members, Wright moved to New York City in 1937 and found work in the Federal Writers’ Project. He was also the Harlem editor of the newspaper Daily Worker. His collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1937), won a Guggenheim Prize that enabled him to write the powerful novel, Native Son (1940). It was the first book by an African American author selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and was an immediate best seller. The stage adaptation of the novel, directed by Orson Welles, ran on Broadway from 1941 to 1943.

   In 1941, Wright produced a photographic history/social study entitled 12 Million Black Voices. He left the CPUSA in 1942, and his essay “I Tried to be a Communist” was published in the Atlantic Monthly magazine in 1944 and reprinted in the book The God That Failed in 1949. In 1945, he achieved another major success with the autobiographical account of growing up in the South, Black Boy. Disillusioned with life in the United States, Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and having taken French citizenship in 1947, he became a permanent exile. He continued to write, helping to found the magazine Paris Review in 1949 and writing among others The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), and his collection of essays and lectures, White Man, Listen! (1957). None of these, however, had the success of his earlier writing, but he remained one of the most influential African American authors of his day.

   See also Literature and theater.