Richard Wright

Richard Wright was born in rural Mississippi, lived for a time near Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, and was raised mostly by female relatives in his extended family. His father left the family when Wright was a child, and his mother worked a series of menial jobs before suffering strokes between 1918 and 1920, requiring medical care for the rest of her life. Having performed well academically until he was forced, in high school, to drop out and begin working, Wright relocated, in 1927, to Chicago—a city that would allow Wright to develop as a writer and thinker, and in which his novel Native Son was based. One of Wright’s jobs in Chicago was mail sorter at the Post Office. As a young man, Wright read widely in modern English and American literature, as well as translated literature from continental Europe. Wright joined, for a time, the Communist Party in Chicago, and after writing a first novel (Lawd Today, eventually published in 1963), he moved to New York City in 1937 and wrote, in 1938 and 1940, respectively, the short-story collection Uncle Tom’s Children and the novel Native Son, which launched his career. Wright’s Black Boy, a somewhat fictionalized tale of his young life, was released in 1945 and added to his fame. Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and lived there, primarily, until his death in 1960. Wright was an inspiration for other African-American writers, including Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) and James Baldwin; the latter would go on to critique Wright’s work severely, but with the acknowledgment of its influence on his own.