Richard Wright in Chicago's Literary Hall of Fame
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His childhood and teen years in Mississippi and Tennessee were wretched as he was bounced from one family member to another to raise. He finally made his escape to Chicago in 1927, at age 19. Wright got on with the post office as a clerk only to have his job wiped out four years later by the Depression.
He then fell in with the John Reed Club and joined the communist party. Wright was in disputes in and out of the party, threatened at knife point at one time and at another beaten by fellow party members when he tried to take part in a May Day March.
He gave up on Chicago in 1937 and moved to New York, only to become angry at party members who refused to help him find a place to live because he was black. In time he landed a reporting job the party’s Daily Worker newspaper, as the newspaper’s Harlem editor.
In 1938, Wright published a collection of short stories – several of the stories dealt with lynching in the Deep South – that brought him national attention and enough income from book sales that he could begin writing his novel, Native Son – the story of Bigger Thomas, a violent young black man in the Chicago slums. A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to finish the book.
The book, published in 1940, became a Book of the Month Club selection, the first by a black writer.
Wright and fellow author Paul Green wrote a stage version of Native Son. It opened on Broadway in March 1941. Orson Welles directed the play, and the reviewers were generally kind to the show.
Wright next wrote the text for Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, a book of photographs drawn largely from the files of the Farm Security Administration. The book came out in October 1941, and the critics loved it.
He then went to work on Black Boy, a book about his early life in the South, his move to Chicago, his clashes with his family over church issues, his disputes with white employers, and the social isolation he experienced. The book came out in 1945.
The next year he gave up on the United States – just felt black people had no place here – and moved to Paris, never to return.
He continued to write – novels, short stories, literary essays, even a book of poetry.
Wright died in 1960, only 52 years old.
His daughter, Julia, found among Wright’s things an unfinished novel, A Father’s Law, about a black policeman and the son he suspected of murder. She pushed it through to publication a lot of years later, in 2008.
Native Son and Wright’s other works, the literary critics say, have been a force in the social and intellectual history of our country in the last half of the last century.
That’s a heavy-duty accomplishment.
His childhood and teen years in Mississippi and Tennessee were wretched as he was bounced from one family member to another to raise. He finally made his escape to Chicago in 1927, at age 19. Wright got on with the post office as a clerk only to have his job wiped out four years later by the Depression.
He then fell in with the John Reed Club and joined the communist party. Wright was in disputes in and out of the party, threatened at knife point at one time and at another beaten by fellow party members when he tried to take part in a May Day March.
He gave up on Chicago in 1937 and moved to New York, only to become angry at party members who refused to help him find a place to live because he was black. In time he landed a reporting job the party’s Daily Worker newspaper, as the newspaper’s Harlem editor.
In 1938, Wright published a collection of short stories – several of the stories dealt with lynching in the Deep South – that brought him national attention and enough income from book sales that he could begin writing his novel, Native Son – the story of Bigger Thomas, a violent young black man in the Chicago slums. A Guggenheim Fellowship allowed him to finish the book.
The book, published in 1940, became a Book of the Month Club selection, the first by a black writer.
Wright and fellow author Paul Green wrote a stage version of Native Son. It opened on Broadway in March 1941. Orson Welles directed the play, and the reviewers were generally kind to the show.
Wright next wrote the text for Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, a book of photographs drawn largely from the files of the Farm Security Administration. The book came out in October 1941, and the critics loved it.
He then went to work on Black Boy, a book about his early life in the South, his move to Chicago, his clashes with his family over church issues, his disputes with white employers, and the social isolation he experienced. The book came out in 1945.
The next year he gave up on the United States – just felt black people had no place here – and moved to Paris, never to return.
He continued to write – novels, short stories, literary essays, even a book of poetry.
Wright died in 1960, only 52 years old.
His daughter, Julia, found among Wright’s things an unfinished novel, A Father’s Law, about a black policeman and the son he suspected of murder. She pushed it through to publication a lot of years later, in 2008.
Native Son and Wright’s other works, the literary critics say, have been a force in the social and intellectual history of our country in the last half of the last century.
That’s a heavy-duty accomplishment.
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