Richard Wright

• Richard Wright, the grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908.

•His father was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother was a well-educated school teacher.

• The family’s extreme poverty forced them to move to Memphis when Richard was six years old.

•His father left the family for another woman and his mother was forced to work as a cook in order to support the family.

•Richard briefly stayed in an orphanage.

•His mother became ill while living in Memphis, so the family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and lived with Richard’s grandmother.

•Richard’s grandmother, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, enrolled him in a Seventh Day Adventist school near Jackson at the age of twelve.

•He also attended a local public school for a few years.

• In the spring of 1924 the Southern Register, a local black newspaper, printed his first story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre.”

• From 1925 to 1927, he worked several menial jobs in Jackson and Memphis.

• During this time he continued writing and discovered the works of H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis.

• In 1927 he moved to Chicago, where he became a Post Office clerk until the Great Depression forced him to take on various temporary positions.

• During this time he became involved with the Communist Party, writing articles and stories for both the Daily Worker and New Masses.

• In April 1931 he published his first major story, “Superstition,” in Abbott’s Monthly.

• His ties to the Communist Party continued after moving to New York in 1937.

• He became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine, New Challenge.

• In 1938 four of his stories were collected as Uncle Tom’s Children.

• In 1939, he married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white dancer, but the two separated shortly thereafter.

• He completed his first novel, Native Son in 1940.

• In 1941, he married Ellen Poplar, a white member of the Communist Party, and they had two daughters, Julia in 1942 and Rachel in 1949.

• In 1944 he broke with the Communist Party.

• He moved to Paris in 1946.

• After becoming a French citizen in 1947, he continued to travel throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, and these experiences led to a number of nonfiction works.

• In his last years, he was plagued by illness and financial hardship.

• Throughout this period he wrote approximately 4,000 English Haikus and another novel, The Long Dream, in 1958.

• Richard Wright died of a heart attack in Paris on 28th November, 1960.

Publications

Drama: • Native Son (The Biography of a

Young American): A Play in Ten Scenes 1941.

Poetry: • Haiku: This Other World. 1998.

Fiction:

• Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas. 1938. • Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories.

1938. • Bright and Morning Star 1938. • Native Son. 1940. • The Outsider. 1953. • Savage Holiday. 1954. • The Long Dream. 1958. • Eight Men 1961. • Lawd Today. 1963.

Nonfiction:• How “Bigger” Was Born; the Story of Native Son

1940. • 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro

in the United States. 1941. • Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. 1945. • Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of

Pathos. 1954. • The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung

Conference. 1956. • Pagan Spain. 1957. • White Man, Listen! 1957. • Letters to Joe C. Brown. 1968. • American Hunger. (Continuation of Black Boy.) 1977.

Media AdaptationsStage Plays: • Native Son, by Wright and Paul Green. New

York, St. James Theatre, 24 June 1941. • Daddy Goodness, by Wright and Louis Sapin.

New York, St. Mark’s Playhouse, 4 June 1968. Motion Pictures: • Native Son. Dir. Pierre Chenal. Screenplay by

Wright. Classic Films, 1950. (Wright starred as Bigger Thomas.)

• Native Son. Dir. Jerrold Freedman. Cinecom Pictures and American Playhouse (PBS), 1986.