Developed by Paul Reuben at California State University, Stanislaus, this online project offers study materials on a wide array of writers. The chapter on American Modernism and this page on Richard Wright includes a useful bibliography and background information.

BIOGRAPHY
Richard Wright (1908-1960) grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, where his sharecropper father moved the family after he was forced off the farm near Natchez, Mississippi, where Wright was born. When Wright was six, his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to support Wright and his younger brother with whatever jobs she could find. While their mother worked, the boys shifted for themselves. When he was eight, Wright's mother enrolled him in grammar school, but she fell ill and was unable to work. Consequently Wright and his brother were placed in an orphanage; reunited, the family lived with relatives, and Wright was able to resume his education, graduating from high school as valedictorian in 1925.

Wright left the South for Chicago in 1927, hoping, as he said, that "gradually and slowly I might learn who I was, what I might be." After working at odd jobs, his efforts at writing paid off when he received a job as publicity agent for the Federal Negro Theater. Wright joined the Communist party in 1932 and was a member of the Federal Writers' Project from 1935 to 1937. He published his first collection, Uncle Tom's Children, in 1938. About the same time, he began a novel about a poor and angry ghetto youth who accidentally murders the daughter of his white, millionaire employer. The novel, Native Son (1940), was published to much critical and popular acclaim and remains his best-known work.

Unable to accept party discipline, Wright quit the Communist party in 1944, and in the following year published Black Boy, an autobiography of his early years. Discouraged with the racism of America, Wright soon moved his family to France, where he spent the remainder of his life writing and supporting the cause of African independence. His later works include the novels The Outsider (1953) and The Long Dream (1958), and the nonfiction works Black Power (1954) and White Man, Listen! (1957).