Richard Wright

Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, to a sharecropper father who abandoned the family when Richard was six and a schoolteacher mother whose own parents had been enslaved. What followed was chaos: repeated moves, beatings from relatives, and by his own account not one full year of schooling by age twelve. He caught up fast once the family settled in Jackson, graduating valedictorian of his junior high and refusing, at the ceremony, to deliver the tame speech the principal had written for him. At seventeen he moved to Memphis alone, borrowed a white coworker's library card to read past the segregated library's limits, and in 1927 joined the Great Migration north to Chicago.

In Chicago, Wright joined the Communist Party in 1932 and helped found the South Side Writers Group the next year, but the alliance soured — he was threatened at knifepoint by fellow travelers and assaulted at a 1936 Labor Day march, and he quietly broke with the Party by the mid-1940s. The writing, meanwhile, moved fast: Uncle Tom's Children in 1938, four novellas built around Southern lynching; Native Son in 1940, the first novel by a Black author chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club, which made him nationally famous and gave American fiction a character, Bigger Thomas, it had not had before; and Black Boy in 1945, a memoir that became an immediate bestseller. In 1946 Wright left for Paris and never came back to live in the United States.

Wright judged America itself to be the trap his fiction described, and he built a life to prove it: in Paris he found Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir rather than the racial ceiling he had grown up under, wrote the existentialist novel The Outsider in 1953, and traveled to newly independent Ghana and to the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia to watch a wider decolonizing world take shape. His second wife, Ellen Poplar, was a white Communist organizer from Brooklyn — a marriage illegal in much of the country he had left — and their daughters, Julia and Rachel, grew up largely in French, not American, schools.

Wright died suddenly in a Paris clinic in November 1960, officially of heart failure while being treated for amoebic dysentery he likely contracted in Ghana. His daughter Julia and his friend Ollie Harrington suspected he had been poisoned, and pointed toward the CIA — a claim that has never been substantiated. Native Son and Black Boy shaped the writers who followed him, including James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both of whom later argued in print with the very legacy they had built on. He was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame in 2010 and honored on a U.S. postage stamp the year before.

Richard Wright's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Uncle Tom's Children book
  Four novellas built around Southern lynching 1938
• Native Son book
  First Book-of-the-Month Club novel by a Black author 1940
• Black Boy book
  Memoir, an immediate bestseller 1945
• The Outsider book
  His existentialist novel, written in Paris 1953
• Black Power book
  Travel writing from his trip to the Gold Coast 1954

• September 4, 1908 aged 0 Born near Roxie, Mississippi
• 1925 aged ~17 Moves to Memphis alone at seventeen
• 1927 aged ~19 Joins the Great Migration to Chicago
• 1932 aged ~24 Joins the Communist Party in Chicago
• 1938 aged ~30 Publishes Uncle Tom's Children
• 1940 aged ~32 Publishes Native Son
• 1945 aged ~37 Publishes Black Boy
• 1946 aged ~38 Moves permanently to Paris
• November 28, 1960 aged 52 Dies suddenly in a Paris clinic

• Ralph Ellison 1913–1994
  Author of Invisible Man, a landmark exploration of race, identity, and democracy. best man to
• James Baldwin 1924–1987
  Essayist and novelist whose searing explorations of race, sexuality, and identity remain profoundly relevant. influenced
• Zora Neale Hurston 1891–1960
  Novelist and folklorist whose work preserved Black Southern speech and culture and became central to the American canon. rival
• Langston Hughes 1901–1967
  Harlem Renaissance poet and writer whose work celebrated Black life and challenged racial injustice. contemporary of