WRIGHT, Richard (Nathaniel)

Nationality: American. Born: Near the city of Natchez, Mississippi, 4 September 1908; brought up in an orphanage. Education: Local schools through junior high school. Family: Married 1) Rose Dhima Meadman in 1938; 2) Ellen Poplar; two daughters. Career: Worked in a post office in Memphis, Tennessee, at age 15; later moved to New York; worked for Federal Writers Project, 1937, and Federal Negro Theatre Project; Harlem editor, Daily Worker, New York. Lived in Paris from 1947. Awards: Guggenheim fellowship, 1939; Spingarn medal, 1941. Member: Communist Party, 1932-44. Died: 28 November 1960.

Publications

Collections

The Wright Reader, edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. 1978.

Short Stories

Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas. 1938; augmented edition, 1940.

Eight Men. 1961.

The Man Who Lived Underground (story; bilingual edition), translated by Claude Edmonde Magny, edited by Michel Fabre. 1971.

Novels

Native Son. 1940.

The Outsider. 1953.

Savage Holiday. 1954.

The Long Dream. 1958.

Lawd Today. 1963.

Plays

Native Son (The Biography of a Young American), with PaulGreen, from the novel by Wright (produced 1941). 1941; revised version, 1980.

Daddy Goodness, from a play by Louis Sapin (produced 1968).

Screenplay:

Native Son, 1951.

Other

How Bigger Was Born: The Story of "Native Son." 1940.

The Negro and Parkway Community House. 1941.

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.

Bandoeng: 1.500.000.000 Hommes, translated by Hélène Claireau.1955; as The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, 1956.

Pagan Spain. 1957.

White Man, Listen! 1957.

Letters to Joe C. Brown, edited by Thomas Knipp. 1968.

American Hunger (autobiography). 1977.

Conversations with Richard Wright, edited by Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. 1993.

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Bibliography:

Wright: A Primary Bibliography by Charles T. Davis and Michel Fabre, 1982; A Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933-1983 by Keneth Kinnamon, 1988.

Critical Studies:

Wright: A Biography by Constance Webb, 1968; Wright by Robert Bone, 1969; The Art of Wright by Edward Margolies, 1969; The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Wright by John A. Williams, 1970; Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Native Son edited by Houston A. Baker, Jr., 1972; The Emergence of Wright: A Study of Literature and Society, 1972, and New Essays on Native Son, 1990, both by Keneth Kinnamon; Wright by David Bakish, 1973; The Unfinished Quest of Wright by Michel Fabre, translated by Isabel Barzun, 1973, The World of Wright, 1985, and Wright: Books and Writers, 1990, both by Fabre; Wright: Impressions and Perspectives edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth, 1973; Wright's Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim by Katherine Fishburn, 1977; Wright: The Critical Reception edited by John M. Reilly, 1978; Rebels and Victims: The Fiction of Wright and Bernard Malamud by Evelyn Gross Avery, 1979; Wright by Robert Felgar, 1980; Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son by Addison Gayle, Jr., 1980; The Daemonic Genius of Wright by Margaret Walker, 1982; Critical Essays on Wright edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani, 1982; Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer, 1984; Wright's Art of Tragedy by Joyce Ann Joyce, 1986; Wright, 1987, and Wright's Native Son, 1988, both edited by Harold Bloom; Wright, Daemonic Genius by Margaret Walker, 1988; Voice of a Native Son: ThePoetics of Wright by Eugene E. Miller, 1990; Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero by Robert Butler, 1991; Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank by James Campbell, 1995; Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Arnold Rampersad, 1995; Richard Wright and Racial Discourse by Yoshinobu Hakutani, 1996; Critical Essays on Richard Wright's Native Son, edited by Keneth Kinnamon, 1997; Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents by Robert Felgar, 1998.

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Richard Wright's stature as a major American writer rests primarily on his novels of social protest concerning the violence, hostility, and oppression experienced by African Americans in northern urban environments. The most famous of these novels is Native Son, a novel having generated so much critical interest as to obscure the fact that Wright began his career as a short story writer with the publication of Uncle Tom's Children in 1936.

Uncle Tom's Children is a collection of four novellas depicting the lives of African Americans in the South. Even though these stories were written while Wright was interested in communist ideology, most of the characters in this collection lash out against their oppressors from a desire for freedom and personal dignity rather than as advocates of any political ideology or collective philosophy. The result is a collection of stories free from lapses into political rhetoric one finds in the later novels. In Uncle Tom's Children, and virtually all of Wright's fiction, one encounters a world where violence and racial hatred render life chaotic and meaningless. As a result his African American characters feel outside of and excluded from the American dream of progress, dignity, and opportunity, and they are forced to come to terms with life on their own. Because of the effects of racism, including lack of education, Wright's characters are unable to express themselves in conventional ways and often resort to violent acts against whites and other African Americans. Because Wright deals largely with uneducated and inarticulate characters, he focuses on what they do rather than what they think or feel. Wright is concerned with their reactions to specific situations. Violence is frequently the central action of the story, and he portrays it as deliberate and senseless when it is perpetuated by white characters; it is depicted as a last resort, a reflex reaction, or revenge motivated when perpetuated by black characters. The obvious exception is Wright's novel Savage Holiday, which contains only white characters.

In "Long Black Song" a white salesman seduces the wife of a black farmer named Silas. When Silas returns home he discovers her infidelity and attempts to whip her. She flees from him but sneaks back the next day for her infant child. She watches as two white men return to their farm, where one of them is whipped by Silas and the other is killed. A lynch mob surrounds the house and burns Silas alive inside because he refuses to be taken by them. Silas achieves a sense of dignity and control over his destiny only after choosing to control the manner of his own death. Silas's acts of violence are motivated by revenge, and his refusal to surrender announces his refusal to be exploited any longer by the values of racist, white culture in the South.

In the most famous story in this collection, "Big Boy Leaves Home," Big Boy witnesses the murder of three of his friends, and while he is hiding, waiting to make his escape, he fantasizes about killing white people in the same manner he had earlier killed a snake—by whipping them and kicking their heads against the sand. Revenge or flight are not the only responses of black characters to racial oppression. In "Bright and Morning Star" the two central characters are murdered, but they die believing that the cause for which they have been sacrificed will some day be realized. In "Fire and Cloud" the progression of the central character Reverend Taylor moves from a simple, unassuming, God-fearing minister to one of active social participation. Central here is the theme of the relationship between the white power structure and black leadership, a theme Wright explores in greater detail in his novel The Long Dream.

Wright's second collection of short stories, Eight Men, published two months after his death in 1961, is a collection of fiction previously unpublished in book form. One of these stories, "The Man Who Went to Chicago," is an excerpt from an unpublished chapter of his autobiographical novel Black Boy. Two stories deal with the oppression of African Americans in the South and were written in the 1930s. "The Man Who Saw the Flood" was originally published in 1938 in New Masses under the title "Silt." The other piece, "The Man Who Was Almost a Man," was first published in Harper's Bazaar in 1939 as "Almo's a Man." His stories written during the 1940s and collected in Eight Men deal with the African American as an outsider, whom Wright places in an urban environment. These stories are "The Man Who Went to Chicago," "The Man Who Lived Underground," and "The Man Who Killed a Shadow." In his stories of the 1950s Wright focuses on black nationalism and portrays blacks as virile and proud in the face of whites, displaying pride in their African American identity. These stories are "Man of All Work," "Man, God Ain't Like That," and "Big Black Good Man."

This collection reveals Wright's range of experimentation and movement away from actions with clearly identifiable motives to a world of arbitrary, meaningless, almost unavoidable violence. These portrayals have led many critics to describe this perspective as Wright's "existentialism."

In "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" a black janitor "inadvertently" kills a white librarian. The blond, blue-eyed, white woman attempts to seduce the janitor by demanding he look at her legs. When he refuses she screams, causing him to panic. He brutally beats her in an attempt to silence her. Finally he stabs her in the throat, hides the body, and flees. The story is a bit contrived in that Wright goes to great lengths to portray the protagonist as a victim of a racist society, but he appears to be as much a victim of his own stupidity. While trying to drag the woman's body away, her wedding ring falls off her hand and he places it in his pocket. When he discovers it in his pocket while at home, he places it in his drawer. He also hides his bloody clothes and the knife he used to kill her in the corner of his closet. While at home he places his gun in his pocket, "for he was nervously depressed." Consequently, this character fails in comparison to Bigger Thomas in Native Son, who is far more frightening and more believable.

Wright's short stories display a wide range of plot, setting, and characterization, as well as revealing in embryonic form characters and subject matter appearing in many of his novels. In addition to affinities with other African American writers, he has much in common with Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell. Wright's career transformed the limitations and expectations imposed on black writers while still managing to expose the violence, hatred, and frustration experienced by African Americans to a larger audience of white readers than any of his predecessors.

—Jeffrey D. Parker

See the essays on "Big Boy Leaves Home" and The Man Who Lived Underground.