Richard Wright

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Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American writer of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction.

Much of his literature is concerned with racial issues, particularly in connection with African Americans' plight in the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who were victims of sex and violence in the South and North.

Literary commentators claim that his book helped to resolve race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.

Early life and education

Black Boy, Richard Wright's book, chronicles the period in his life from 1912 to May 1936. Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908 at Rucker's Plantation, between the train town of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. He was the son of Nathan Wright (c. 1880-1978) and was the son of a young Nathan Wright (c. 1880-c. Ella (Wilson) was a 1940) who was a sharecropper and Ella (b. ). 1884 Mississippi (d. January 13, 1959 Chicago, Illinois) was a schoolteacher. His parents were born free after the Civil War; both sets of his grandparents were born into slavery and released as a result of the war. Each of his grandfathers had been active in the United States Civil War and gained independence through service: his paternal grandfather, Nathan Wright (1842–1921) moved from slavery to the Navy as a Landsman in April 1865.

Richard's father died when Richard was six years old, but he didn't know Richard for 25 years. Ella and her parents moved to Natchez, Mississippi, in 1911 or 1912. He mistakenly set the house on fire when living in his grandparents' house. Wright's mother was so angry that she beat him until he was unconscious. Ella's sons were in 1915, after a brief period of Methodist orphanage. He was enrolled at the Howe Institute in Memphis from 1915 to 1916. In 1916, Richard and his younger brother travelled to live with Maggie (Wilson) and Maggie's husband Silas Hoskins (born 1882) in Elaine, Arkansas. This section of Arkansas was located in the Mississippi Delta, where former cotton plantations had been located. After Silas Hoskins "disappeared," the Wrights were forced to leave, a white man who adored his lucrative saloon industry was said to have been compelled to leave. Richard was estranged from his younger brother and spent a brief time in Greenwood, Mississippi, after his mother became incapacitated by a stroke. He had not completed year of schooling at the age of 12. Richard and his younger brother and mother returned to the home of his maternal grandmother, who lived in Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived from early 1920 to late 1925. His grandparents, who are still angry at him for destroying their house, regularly beat Wright and his brother. However, although he was still living there, he was finally able to attend classes on a regular basis. He attended the local Seventh-day Adventist school from 1920 to 1921, with his aunt Addie as his tutor. He began his first year at the age of 13, and in 1921, he was admitted to the Jim Hill public school for the sixth grade after just two weeks. Richard was miserable in his grandparents' Seventh-day Adventist home, mainly because his controlling aunt and grandmother tried to compel him to pray in order to build a relationship with God. When she would not allow Wright to serve on the Adventist Sabbath, she threatened to move out of his grandmother's house. His uncle's and grandparents' overbearing attempts to control him prompted him to go beyond hostility toward biblical and Christian teachings to solve life's challenges. Throughout his life, the theme would appear in his books.

Wright wrote his first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre," in the local Black newspaper Southern Register at the age of 15. There are no copies of the book that have survived. He referred to the story as about a robber who wanted a widow's house in Chapter 7 of Black Boy.

Wright earned the position of class valedictorian of Smith Robertson Junior High School in 1923, after excelling in grade school and junior high. He was supposed to write a speech for graduation in a public auditorium. He was called to the principal's office, where the principal gave him a prepared address to deliver in place of his own. Richard wrote a "student" who wants to hear the students, but I would not make a speech that you've written." Despite passing all of the examinations, the principal threatened Richard, warning that if he persisted, he would not be allowed to graduate if he did not. He also tried to lure Richard with the opportunity to become a tutor. Richard refused to give the principal's address, which was intended not to offend the white school district officials. He was able to convince everybody that he should read the words he had written himself.

Wright registered for mathematics, English, and history at the new Lanier High School, which was built for black students in Jackson, in September of this year, but he had to suspend attending classes after a few weeks of irregular attendance because he had to earn money to care for his family.

Wright moved to Memphis, Tennessee, on his own in November 1925 at the age of 17. He satisfied his appetite for reading. Wright invented a hit tactic to borrow books from the segregated white library, satisfying his hunger for books. Wright was able to find and read books in the Jim Crow South using a library card lent by a white coworker, who posed with fake notes that said he was buying books for the white man. In addition, this strategem gave him access to Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and American Mercury.

In 1926, he planned to have his mother return and live with him as long as he could help her, and his older brother returned to her in 1926. Richard decided to leave the Jim Crow South and head to Chicago right away. When tens of thousands of blacks left the South to seek jobs in the more thriving northern and mid-western industrial cities, his family joined the Great Migration.

Wright's childhood in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas influenced his lasting impressions of American racism.

Wright and his family immigrated to Chicago in 1927, where they began working as a United States postal clerk. He studied H.L., a novelist who worked in between shifts to read other writers. Mencken, whose vision of the American South as a version of Hell, made an appearance. Wright was forced to leave 1931 after he lost his career during the Great Depression. In 1932, he began attending meetings of the John Reed Club, a Marxist Party literary group. Wright formed friendships and networks with party leaders. Wright joined the Communist Party and the John Reed Club in late 1933, at the behest of his friend Abraham Aaron. For example, he wrote proletarian poems ("We of the Red Leaves of Red Books") for New Masses and other communist-leaning periodicals. A power struggle within the John Reed Club's Chicago chapter resulted in the dissolution of the club's leadership; Wright was told he had the help of the club's members if he wanted to join the club.

Arna Bontemps and Margaret Walker were among Wright's members in 1933 when the South Side Writers Group was formed. Wright created and edited Left Front, a literary journal, as a result of the association's involvement in the John Reed Club and his membership in the John Reed Club. In 1934, Wright began to write his poetry ("A Red Love Note" and "Rest for the Weary," for example). Despite his protests, Wright blamed the Communist Party for the demise of Left Front Magazine in 1935. The John Reed Club is, however, likely due to the resolution made by the 1934 Midwest Writers Congress that the First American Party Congress should replace it with a Communist Party-sanctioned First American Party Congress. Wright continued to contribute to New Masses magazine throughout this period, revealing that his writings would eventually follow.

Wright had finished the manuscript of his first book, Cesspool, which was rejected by eight publishers and published posthumously as Lawd Today (1963). Autobiographical anecdotes about working at a Chicago post office during the great depression were included in this first collection.

In January 1936, his book "Big Boy Leaves Home" was accepted for publication in the anthology New Caravan and Uncle Tom's Children, focusing on black life in the rural American South.

He began working with the National Negro Congress in February of this year, and spoke at the Chicago convention on "The Role of the Negro Artist and Writer in the Age of Transition." His main aim (as inspiration by other labor unions) was the creation of NNC-sponsored publications, exhibits, and conferences as part of the Federal Writers' Initiative, encouraging black artists to work.

He took over The Daily Worker's Harlem editor in 1937. This assignment collected excerpts from interviews preceding an introduction paragraph, freeing him ample time for other pursuits such as the publication of Uncle Tom's Children a year later.

Wright, who was so grateful for his Chicago friendships with white Communists, was later humiliated in New York City by some white party members who rescinded an invitation to find housing for him after they discovered his ethnicity. Wright was dubbed a "bourgeois intellectual," by some black Communists. Wright was essentially autodidactic. After finishing junior high school, he was forced to discontinue his public education to assist his mother and brother.

Wright continued to concentrate on racial in the United States throughout the Soviet pact with Nazi Germany in 1940. He would ultimately leave the Communist Party when they came from a tradition of segregation and bigotry and bigotry, and joined Stalinists in the support of WWII.

Young communist writers, Wright, should be encouraged to develop their skills. In his essay "I tried to be a Communist," Wright later characterized this episode through his fictional character Buddy Nealson, an African-American communist, who was a Communist." This text was a sample of his autobiography set to be published as American Hunger, but the Book of the Month Club ordered that it be removed from Black Boy's actual publication. Wright was actually wounded in the struggle with the party; he was assaulted by fellow travelers on the street and physically assaulted by former comrades when attempting to join them during the 1936 May Day march.

Personal life

Wright married Dhimah Rose Meidman, a modern-dance teacher of Russian Jewish descentstry, in August 1939, with Ralph Ellison as the best man. It was a short-lived marriage that ended a year later.

He married Ellen Poplar (née Poplowitz), a Brooklyn Communist organizer, on March 12, 1941. Julia and Rachel, both born in 1942, and Rachel, born in 1949, had two daughters Julia, who was born in 1942.

Ellen Wright, who died on April 6, 2004, age 92, was the executor of Wright's estate. In Wright vs. Warner Books, Inc., she sued a biographer, writer, and writer Margaret Walker. Simone de Beauvoir, Eldridge Cleaver, and Violette Leduc were among her clients.

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Career

Wright started writing with the Federal Writer's Project in Chicago in 1932 and became a member of the American Communist Party. In 1937, he moved to New York and became The Bureau Chief of the communist newspaper The Daily Worker. From 1937 to 1938, he would write more than 200 articles for the journal. With well written prose, he was able to cover news and topics that mattered to him, bringing the depression-era America to life.

He edited Harlem's essay for the book and was a consultant on the Federal Writers' Project in the city (1938). He wrote more than 200 articles for the Daily Worker during the summer and fall and assisted in the editing of a short-lived literary magazine called New Challenge. Wright's year was also a landmark for him because he met and established a long-term friendship with writer Ralph Ellison. For his short story "Fire and Cloud," he was given the Story magazine first prize of $500.

Wright, who won the Story Prize in early 1938, shelved his manuscript of Lawd Today and fired his literary agent, John Troustine. Paul Reynolds, the well-known agent of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, was hired by the man to represent him. Meanwhile, Harper gave Harper all of Wright's award-entry tales for a book, and Harper decided to publish the collection.

Wright's Children (1938) received national attention because of a collection of four short stories. He based a tale on lynching in the Deep South. Uncle Tom's Children's publication and enthusiastic reception increased Wright's position within the Communist party, allowing him to establish a healthy level of financial stability. He was appointed to New Masses' editorial board. Granville Hicks, a Boston literary critic and Marxist sympathizer, was introduced to him at leftist teas. By May 6, 1938, great sales had provided Wright with enough funds to move to Harlem, where he began writing the book Native Son, which was published in 1940.

Based on his collected short stories, Wright applied for and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, giving him a stipend to complete Native Son. He rented a room in Herbert and Jane Newton's home, an interracial couple and prominent Communists who were in Chicago during this period. They had moved to New York and spent 109 Lefferts Place in Brooklyn, in the Fort Greene neighborhood.

Native Son was selected by the Book of the Month Club as the first book by an African-American author after publication. It was a brave decision. Bigger Thomas, the lead actor, is tied to the African American society's limitations. Unlike most in this situation, he gains his own office and self-knowledge only by doing criminal acts. Wright's portrayal of Bigger resulted in his being chastised for his emphasis on violence in his writings. People in the case of Native Son complained that he portrayed a black man in a way that seemed to confirm whites' worst fears. Wright's time following the publication of Native Son was a tumultuous one for him. He went to Chicago in July 1940 to do research for a folk history of blacks to accompany photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam. Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, and Claude McKay all visited the American Negro Exposition in Chicago.

Wright travelled to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to collaborate with playwright Paul Green on a dramatic interpretation of Native Son. Wright was awarded the coveted Spingarn Medal of the NAACP in January 1941 for his services. Native Son opened on Broadway in March 1941, with Orson Welles as the director, earning generally favorable reviews. Wright also wrote the text to accompany a series of photographs obtained by Rosskam that were almost entirely extracted from the Farm Security Administration's archives. The FSA had recruited top photographers to travel around the country and photograph images of Americans. Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, a British book of the Negro, was published in October 1941 to widespread critical acclaim.

Wright's book Black Boy (1945) chronicles his early life from Roxie to his move to Chicago at age 19. It includes his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his struggles with white coworkers, and social alienation. It also chronicles his intellectual journey through these struggles. The American Hunger, which appeared posthumously in 1977, was originally intended by Wright as the second volume of Black Boy. The Library of America's 1991 edition brought the book back to its original two-volume format.

Wright's participation in the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, is given in this section. According to the book, he left earlier but did not announce his resignation until 1944. Wright compared the certainties and intolerance of organized communism, which condemned "bourgeois" books and some members of the book's revivaled form, as well as certain fundamentalist organized religion's strictest features. Wright condemned Joseph Stalin's Great Purge in the Soviet Union.

Wright moved to Paris in 1946 after a short stay in Québec, Canada, including a long stay in the village of Sainte-Pétronille on the Île d'Orléans. He became a permanent American expatriate.

Wright and his wife became close with French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, who he had met while still in New York, and he and his wife became close friends with Simone de Beauvoir, who remained with them in 1947. However, Wright's existentialist leanings were more influenced by Soren Kierkegaard, Edmund Husserl, and specifically Martin Heidegger, as Michel Fabre claims. Wright's introduction to Husserl and Heidegger "indirectly result of Sartre's inadequacies of existentialism and Marxism for Wright," he says. In his second book, The Outsider (1953), an African-American character's affiliation with the Communist Party in New York, an Existentialist phase was portrayed. He and fellow expatriate writers Chester Himes and James Baldwin became good friends. Baldwin's friendship with the latter ended in sarconium after Baldwin's book "Everybody's Prosecutors" (collected in Notes of a Native Son), in which he mocked Wright's depiction of Bigger Thomas as stereotypical. Savage Holiday, a 1954 Wright book.

Wright, who became a French citizen in 1947, continued to travel around Europe, Asia, and Africa. He gathered information from several nonfiction books from these trips. Wright contributed to the anti-Communist anthology The God That Failed in 1949; his essay had appeared in the Atlantic Monthly three years before and was derived from Black Boy's unpublished portion. He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, but he declined, mistakenly suspecting that it had ties with the CIA. The FBI had been monitoring Wright since 1943, fearing connections between African Americans and communists. Wright was blacklisted by Hollywood movie studio executives due to the growing communist tremblings in the 1950s. In 1950, Thomas starred in the Argentinian film version of Native Son as the teen Bigger Thomas (Wright was 42).

Wright moved from the Gold Coast, where Kwame Nkrumah was leading the country's independence from British rule, to be established as Ghana in mid-1953. Before returning to Paris, Wright gave the United States consulate in Accra a confidential report on what he had learned about Nkrumah and his political party. After Wright returned to Paris, he worked with an US State Department agent twice. Wright's paper includes information about Nkrumah's plans after independence from Nkrumah's advisor George Padmore. Wright was regarded as a good friend by Padmore, a Trinidadian who lives in London. His many letters in Yale's Beinecke Library attest to this, and the two men's correspondence continued. In 1954, Wright's book Black Power, a black book about his African journey, was published in London; its London publisher, Dennis Dobson, who also published Padmore's book, was published in Padmore's.

Regardless of political motives, Wright was still an American who wanted to live abroad and needed their permission to have his passport renewed. Wright spoke with officials at the American Embassy in Paris a few months later about people he had encountered in the Communist Party; at the time these individuals were being prosecuted in the United States under the Smith Act, Wright biographer Addison Gayle said they were being prosecuted in the United States.

Historian Carol Polsgrove investigated why Wright seemed to have little to say about the growing resistance of the civil rights movement in the United States during the 1950s. Wright discovered that she was under "extraordinary pressure" not to write about the United States, according to her friend Chester Himes. "I Choose Exile," Wright's essay, which had been postponed in a white periodical, was eventually published in an Ebony magazine. "A white periodical will be less vulnerable to charges of disloyalty," he said. He felt the Atlantic Monthly was keen, but the piece was ultimately unpublished.

Wright returned from Indonesia in 1955 for the Bandung Conference. In The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, he related to the conference as well as information on Indonesian cultural conditions. Wright was excited about the prospects offered by this conference of newly independent, former colonial nations. In preparation for writing The Color Curtain, he gave at least two lectures to Indonesian cultural institutions, including the PEN Club Indonesia, and he interviewed Indonesian artists and intellectuals. Many Indonesian artists and intellectuals who Wright met later discussed how he had portrayed Indonesian cultural conditions in his travel writing.

White Man, Listen! was one of Wright's other works. (1957) and a novel The Long Dream (1958), which was adapted as a play and published in New York by Ketti Frings in 1960. It explores a man named Fish's relationship with his father. In 1961, a collection of short stories, Eight Men, was published posthumously, shortly after Wright's death. These books dealt mainly with the ugliness, indignation, and unrest of northern and southern urban black Americans.

In February 1959, Wright's 400-page Island of Hallucinations manuscript was strongly attacked by his handler, Paul Reynolds. Despite that, Wright wrote a book in which his protagonist Fish was to be freed from societal conditioning and becoming dominant. Wright wanted to leave Paris and live in London by May 1959. He felt that French politics had become more subserved to US pressures. The tense Paris atmosphere he had enjoyed had been shaken by quarries and threats launched by opponents of the expatriate black writers.

Wright became sick on June 26, 1959, after a rally in France commemorating the publication of White Man, Listen! During his 1953 stay on the Gold Coast, he had a virulent bout of amoebic dysentery, presumably contracted during his amoebic dysentery. His wife had found a London apartment by November 1959, but Wright's illness and "four struggles in twelve days" with British immigration authorities sparked his desire to live in England.

Wright learned from his agent Reynolds that the premiere of the Long Dream of The Long Dream in New York received such poor feedback that the producer, Ketti Frings, had to cancel further performances. In the meantime, Wright was having additional difficulties trying to get The Long Dream published in France. These setbacks delayed his completion of his Island of Hallucinations's final revisions, for which he was attempting to obtain a publication commitment from Doubleday and Company.

Wright wrote a series of interviews for French radio in June 1960, primarily focusing on his books and literary careers. He also addressed the political challenges in the United States and the world, as well as the denunciation of African policy in Africa. Nicole Barclay, the head of France's largest record company, wrote blurbs for record jackets in late September to cover extra expenses for his daughter Julia's move from London to Sorbonne.

Despite his financial difficulties, Wright was unable to compromise his principles. He refused to participate in a number of Canadian radio programs because he suspected American influence. He turned down an invitation from the Congress for Cultural Liberty to travel to India to speak at a conference in honor of Leo Tolstoy. Wright, who is also interested in literature, helped Kyle Onstott get his book Mandingo (1957) published in France.

In his polemical lecture, "The Situation of the Black Artist and Intellectual in the United States," Wright delivered to students and members of the American Church in Paris on November 8, 1960. When they wanted to challenge the status quo, he argued that American society converted the most militant members of the black community to slaves. He appeared to be the third in the Communist Party's subpoenas against Native Son and the quarries that James Baldwin and other writers had sought with him. Wright spent a few days with Langston Hughes on November 26, 1960, where he delighted in his Daddy Goodness's work and gave him the book.

Wright died in Paris on November 28, 1960, of a heart attack at the age of 52. He was laid to rest in Père Lachaise Cemetery. Julia Wright's daughter has reported that her father was murdered.

A number of Wright's works have been published posthumously. In addition, some of Wright's most shocking passages dealing with race, sex, and politics were either deleted or entirely deleted before his lifetime was announced. Native Son, Black Boy, and his other works were released in 1991. Rite of Passage, his 1994 novella, was also published for the first time.

Wright had become enamored of the Japanese poetic form haiku in the last five years of his life, releasing more than 4,000 such short stories. A book was published in 1998 (Haiku: This Other World) with 817 of his own favorite haiku. Many of these haiku have an uplifting quality even as they deal with coping with loneliness, death, and the elements of nature.

In 2001, the University Press of Mississippi published a collection of Wright's travel writings. Wright's son, who died without a single word, A Father's Law, dealing with a black policeman and the son he suspects of murder. Julia Wright Wright's daughter published A Father's Law in January 2008. The Exile Book from Exile (Black Power, The Color Curtain, and White Man, Listen!

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Awards and honors

• The Spingarn Medal in 1941 from the NAACP
• Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939
• Story Magazine Award in 1938.
• In April 2009, Wright was featured on a U.S. postage stamp. The 61-cent, two-ounce rate stamp is the 25th installment of the literary arts series, and features a portrait of Wright in front of snow-swept tenements on the South Side of Chicago, a scene that recalls the setting of Native Son.
• In 2010, Wright was inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
• In 2012, the Historic Districts Council and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, in collaboration with the Fort Greene Association and writer/musician Carl Hancock Rux, erected a cultural medallion at 175 Carlton Avenue, Brooklyn, where Wright lived in 1938 and completed Native Son. The group unveiled the plaque at a public ceremony with guest speakers, including playwright Lynn Nottage and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz.