"I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears."

Works such as Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) not only opened the eyes of white readers, they set a new standard for black writers. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and other emerging authors of the time were deeply influenced by Wright's approach and by his eloquent exposure of bigotry and racism.

Wright's works include novels, short stories, plays, poems, histories, and a large number of articles. While most focus on the racial situation in the United States, some look at racism and persecution on a wider scale.

A Southern childhood

Richard Nathaniel Wright had a miserable childhood in which he was always hungry, often beaten, and frequently moved from place to place. The son of a sharecropper, he was born on a plantation in Roxie, about twenty miles east of Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908. When he was three, his father, Nathan Wright, took the family to Memphis, Tennessee, where he then deserted them. Richard's mother, Ella Wright, was left to support Richard and his brother on whatever she could earn. After struggling for four years, she took them to live with her sister in Arkansas. This proved to be a disaster for, soon after their arrival, the sister's husband was murdered by whites who wanted his land. Terrified, the family fled to rented rooms in another town.

Wright's teenage years were no better. His mother suffered a stroke when he was eleven, and from then on he lived with various relatives, who were very strict and tried to make him submissive and religious. As a result, he became rebellious and unreligious. The frequent moving from town to town meant that he had very little schooling, and his formal education did not really begin until he entered a fifth-grade class in Jackson, Mississippi. Five years later he dropped out of school and went back to Memphis, where he supported himself by washing dishes, sweeping streets, waiting on tables, and doing other odd jobs.

Passion for reading

Wright spent two years in Memphis, two very important years because he developed a passion for reading. He read Harper's and Atlantic Monthly. He borrowed books from the whites-only library by forging a note that read, "Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger have some books by H. L. Mencken?" Wright was particularly impressed by Mencken's books, especially his writings on prejudice.

Wright continued to read avidly after he moved to Chicago in 1927. There he found a job in the post office and began to write in earnest. His first story had been published three years earlier, in a Jackson newspaper, and he was determined to become a writer. In 1932, he joined a left-wing literary group, and the contacts he made there led to his joining the Communist party. Wright saw communism as a means of battling racial oppression, and for several years he was an active member of the party, writing revolutionary poems and articles. On moving to New York in 1937, he became Harlem editor of the Communist newspaper, The Daily Worker. But as the years passed, he became disenchanted by the rigid views of many of the members, and in 1944 he resigned from the party.

Professional writer

During much of the 1930s, Wright was working on his first novel and trying in vain to get it published. It was not published until after his death as Lawd Today (1963). Meanwhile, he was also writing short stories, and in 1938 he won a $500 prize for a collection of stories based on the life of a black Communist he had known in Chicago, treating the violence inflicted by whites on blacks and on black retaliation. Published later that year as a book entitled Uncle Tom's Children (in reference to Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin), the stories gave the stern message that members of the younger generation would not be passive like Uncle Tom; they would fight back.

Uncle Tom's Children sold so well that Wright was able to support a wife, and in 1939 he married a white woman, Dhimah Meadman. The marriage was not a success, and the couple divorced a year later. In 1941, Wright embarked on a far more successful marriage with another white woman, Ellen Poplar. The first of his two daughters was born the following year.

Best-selling author

Early in 1939, Wright was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, which helped support him while he worked on the novel Native Son (1940). With its shocking account of the life of the murderer Bigger Thomas, Native Son is likely to remain Wright's best-known work. It was an instant success, selling two hundred thousand copies in the first three weeks. Like the stories in Uncle Tom's Children, the book shows how violence begets violence, and it, too, focuses on a black victim who is the hero of a racial war. But the shocking thing about Native Son is that the victim-hero is not a "good" person; the victim-hero is the brutal Bigger.

Native Son was produced as a play in 1941 and later made into a film. While adapting the book for the theater, Wright was also researching and writing Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the U.S. (1941). During the next few years he was very busy working on a variety of projects. The most important of these was his autobiography, which was published in two parts. The first part, about his early life, was Black Boy, which came out in 1945. The second part did not appear until some years after his death, when it was published as American Hunger (1977).

Like Wright's earlier works, Black Boy was concerned with racism and bigotry. While telling his own story, the story of one hungry and unhappy black boy, Wright revealed the larger picture, showing how the legacy of slavery still haunted the South, with its restrictive laws and inhuman attitudes. He portrayed the Southern whites as totally inhuman, but he also criticized Southern blacks, implying that they had cooperated in their own oppression by being so meek and subservient. This drew criticism from some black reviewers, though most were greatly impressed by the book. Wright had put into words what many African Americans had felt for many years.

Moves to France

Black Boy was another best-seller and, like Native Son, it was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice. Black Boy brought Wright international fame, and in 1946 he was invited to France, where he became friends with a number of French intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Finding a less racist atmosphere in France, Wright moved his family to Paris in 1947, and France remained his home base for the rest of his life.

The first book Wright wrote in France, The Outsider (1953), was an existentialist novel that was not primarily concerned with racial matters. Neither was Savage Holiday (1954), but Wright returned to the racist South of his youth in The Long Dream (1958). His most important nonfiction works during the last years of his life were Black Power (1954), about a visit he made to Africa in 1953, and White Man Listen!, a collection of essays. Wright died in Paris on November 28, 1960.

Wright's books have been translated into many languages, bringing the African American experience to people throughout the world. He was one of the most significant American writers of the twentieth century, a strong influence on American culture, and especially on African American literature, which was changed forever after the publication of Native Son.

• Baldwin, James, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son, Dial Press, 1961.
  
• Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
  
• Bloom, Harold, ed., Richard Wright's Native Son, Chelsea House, 1996.
  
• Gayle, Addison, Jr., Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son, Anchor Press, 1980.
  
• Urban, Joan, Richard Wright, Chelsea House, 1989.
  
• Walker, Margaret, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, Warner Books, 1988.
  
• Webb, Constance, Richard Wright: A Biography, Putnam, 1968.
  
• Williams, John Alfred, The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright, Doubleday, 1970.
  
• Wright, Richard, Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, Harper & Brothers, 1945.
  
• Wright, Richard, Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre, University Press of Mississippi, 1993.