He was born on Sept. 4, 1908, just under 50 years from the end of slavery and into a segregated South.
Wright was an American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Wright was born on the Rucker Plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, the first of two sons to Ella Wilson, an elementary schoolteacher, and Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate, alcoholic sharecropper.
In late 1912, the family relocated to Memphis and Nathaniel abandoned the family several months later. In 1914, when Ella became ill, Wright and his brother were placed in the temporary care of the Settlement House, a Methodist orphanage. That was a period in his life where young Richard was begging for food.
In 1916, the boys were reunited with their mother, and they relocated to Jackson, Mississippi to move in with his maternal grandmother Margaret Wilson.
Later, the family moved in with Wright's aunt and uncle in Elaine but left after racists murdered Wright's uncle, Silas Hoskins, in 1916.
Hoskins owned a properous saloon catering to black lumbermen who, with companies like Chicago Mill, were deforesting Phillips County of vast tracts of its valuable timber resources. As the story goes, some Elaine white men jealous of Hoskins prosperity murdered his uncle to confiscate his property
At least two of his works -- Black Boy and Long Black Song - are a reflection on his life and times in Elaine. He left Elaine just three years before the "Red Summer" race riots in 21 American cities, including Elaine. Those works and others also reflect the racial tensions in both Memphis and Jackson.
The family then fled to West Helena, where they lived in fear in rented rooms for several weeks.
At the age of fifteen, Wright penned his first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre". It was published in Southern Register, a local black newspaper in Jackson.
In 1923, Wright excelled in grade school and was made class valedictorian of Smith Robertson junior high school. Determined not to be called an Uncle Tom, he refused to deliver the assistant principal's carefully prepared valedictory address that would not offend the white school officials and finally convinced the black administrators to let him read a compromised version of what he had written.
In September of the same year, Wright registered for mathematics, English, and history courses at the new Lanier High School in Jackson, but had to stop attending classes after a few weeks of irregular attendance because he needed to earn money for family expenses. His childhood in Memphis and Mississippi shaped his lasting impressions of American racism.
The aspiring writer moved to Chicago in 1927 and, among other things, joined the Communist Party.
Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and became a permanent American expatriate.
In Paris, he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His Existentialist phase was depicted in his second novel, The Outsider (1953), which described an African-American character's involvement with the Communist Party in New York. In 1954 he published a minor novel, Savage Holiday. After becoming a French citizen in 1947, Wright continued to travel through Europe, Asia, and Africa. These experiences were the basis of numerous nonfiction works. One was Black Power (1954), a commentary on the emerging nations of Africa.
In 1949, Wright contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; his essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier and was derived from the unpublished portion of Black Boy. He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA.
The CIA and FBI had Wright under surveillance starting in 1943. Due to McCarthyism, Wright was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio executives in the 1950s, but he starred as teenager Bigger Thomas (Wright was 42) in an Argentinian film version of Native Son in 1950.
In 1955, Wright visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference and recorded his observations in The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Wright was upbeat about the possibilities posed by this meeting between recently oppressed nations.
Other works by Richard Wright included White Man, Listen! (1957); a novel The Long Dream in 1958; as well as a collection of short stories, Eight Men, published in 1961, shortly after his death in 1960. His works primarily dealt with the poverty, anger, and protests of northern and southern urban black Americans.
His agent, Paul Reynolds sent overwhelmingly negative criticism of Wright's four-hundred page "Island of Hallucinations" manuscript in February 1959. Despite that, in March Wright outlined a novel in which Fish was to be liberated from his racial conditioning and become a dominating character.
By May 1959, Wright wanted to leave Paris and live in London. He felt French politics had become increasingly submissive to American pressure. The peaceful Parisian atmosphere he had enjoyed had been shattered by quarrels and attacks instigated by enemies of the expatriate black writers.
On June 26, 1959, after a party marking the French publication of White Man, Listen! Wright became ill, victim of a virulent attack of amoebic dysentery probably contracted during his stay on the Gold Coast. By November 1959 his wife had found a London apartment, but Wright's illness and "four hassles in twelve days" with British immigration officials ended his desire to live in England.
On February 19, 1960 Wright learned from Reynolds that the New York premiere of the stage adaptation of The Long Dream received such bad reviews that the adapter, Ketti Frings, had decided to cancel other performances. Meanwhile, Wright was running into additional problems trying to get The Long Dream published in France. These setbacks prevented his finishing revisions of Island of Hallucinations, which he needed to get a commitment from Doubleday.
In June 1960, Wright recorded a series of discussions for French radio dealing primarily with his books and literary career. He also covered the racial situation in the United States and the world, and specifically denounced American policy in Africa. In late September, to cover extra expenses for his daughter Julia's move from London to Paris to attend the Sorbonne, Wright wrote blurbs for record jackets for Nicole Barclay, director of the largest record company in Paris.
In spite of his financial straits, Wright refused to compromise his principles.
He declined to participate in a series of programs for Canadian radio because he suspected American control over the programs. For the same reason, Wright rejected an invitation from the Congress for Cultural Freedom to go to India to speak at a conference in memory of Leo Tolstoy.
Still interested in literature, Wright helped Kyle Onstott get Mandingo (1957) published in France. His last display of explosive energy occurred on November 8, 1960 in his polemical lecture, "The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States", delivered to students and members of the American Church in Paris. Wright argued that American society reduced the most militant members of the black community to slaves whenever they wanted to question the racial status quo. He offered as proof the subversive attacks of the Communists against Native Son and the quarrels which James Baldwin and other authors sought with him.
On November 26, 1960, Wright talked enthusiastically about Daddy Goodness with Langston Hughes and gave him the manuscript. Wright contracted Amoebic dysentery on a visit to Africa in 1957, and despite various treatments, his health deteriorated over the next three years.
He died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He was interred in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. However, Wright's daughter Julia claimed that her father was murdered.
A number of Wright's works have been published posthumously. Some of Wright's more shocking passages dealing with race, sex, and politics were cut or omitted before original publication. In 1991, unexpurgated versions of Native Son, Black Boy, and his other works were published. In addition, his novella Rite of Passage was published in 1994 for the first time.
In the last years of his life, Richard Wright became enamored with the Japanese poetry form haiku and he wrote over 4,000. In 1998 a book was published ("Haiku: This Other World" ISBN 0-385-72024-6) with 817 haiku which he preferred.
A collection of Wright's travel writings, edited by Virginia Whatley Smith, was published by the Mississippi University Press in 2001. At his death, Wright left an unfinished book, A Father's Law. It dealt with a black policeman and the son he suspected of murder. Wright's daughter Julia Wright published A Father's Law in January 2008. Julia also wished to give his political nonfiction to the public and HarperCollins worked in agreement by issuing an omnibus containing all three works under the title Three Books from Exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen! The omnibus was published in February 2008.
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