Richard Wright (1908–60) was an American novelist, best known for his novels Native Son (1940) and The Outsider (1953,) both of which deal with racial trauma and tragedy of American life.
Wright was born on a cotton plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents were slaves. His father deserted the family when Wright was five. He moved with his mother to Memphis. He lived with numerous relatives and attended school occasionally, but he taught himself to read by covertly borrowing books from a whites-only library in Memphis.
In 1927, as part of the Great Migration of rural blacks to northern cities, Wright relocated to Chicago and worked variously as a ditch-digger, delivery boy, dishwasher, postal clerk, and insurance sales clerk. He began writing short stories; his first book was the collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938.) He joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, but left in the 1940s—he recorded this experience in The God that Failed (1950.)
Wright’s masterpiece, Native Son (1940,) is the tale of a black man in Chicago’s South Side ghetto named “Bigger Thomas” who gets a job as a driver for a beautiful, young white woman and then unintentionally murders her. Bigger adapts to the role of an outlaw and a murderer in defiance of the conformist role he is required to assume as an obedient black person. Wright based his central character on every bully, agitator, and fugitive he had ever known. Native Son sold 215,000 copies in three weeks and became the first bestselling novel by an African American author. The uncut text of the novel was ultimately published in 1991.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Richard Wright
I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly, I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.
—Richard Wright
Topics: Writing
Man can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as… from a lack of bread.
—Richard Wright
Topics: Aptness, Self-Knowledge, Appropriateness, Self-Discovery
Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.
—Richard Wright
Topics: Reality
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Langston Hughes American Poet, Writer
Louis L’Amour American Novelist
John Irving American Novelist
Norman Mailer American Novelist, Journalist
Raymond Chandler American Novelist
John Updike American Author
Paul Auster American Novelist, Poet
Mark Van Doren American Poet, Critic
Stephen Vincent Benet American Poet
Lloyd Alexander American Writer