Richard Wright
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Richard Wright was born in 1908 and died suddenly from a heart attack in 1960. His birthplace was a plantation outside Natchez, Mississippi. His father, Nathan Wright, was a sharecropper, and his mother, Ella, was a country schoolteacher. The boy grew up in one of the most poverty-stricken and rigidly segregated parts of the South, an experience that certainly marked his work as a writer. The family moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1914 in search of better employment. Nathan then worked as a night porter in a hotel, while Ella worked as a cook for a white family. The family was left destitute when Nathan left Ella for another woman, and in 1915 Ella contracted an illness that eventually made her an invalid for the rest of he life. The family--Richard, his other and brother--moved to Jackson, Mississippi to live with Ella's mother, and later to Elaine, Arkansas to live with Ella's sister and her husband, Silas Hoskins. The family was forced to move again when Silas was murdered by whites who also threatened to kill the entire family. Richard's schooling during all these moves and the subsequent period of moving from place to place was sporadic. He also became acutely aware during this period of Southern fascism and violence (Butler xi). From 1918 to 1925 there was a period of serious and widespread racial discrimination against blacks, and the Klan was revived throughout the South. Richard managed to attend, with many interruptions, public and Seventh Day Adventist
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ised Wright for the depth of his social and political vision (Butler 17). Richard Fabre would say of the novel,
. . . we must not forget that Richard Wright was attempting more than entertainment or even political enlightenment. Uncertainly at times, but more often quite consciously, he was grappling with a definition of man (Fabre 531).
Richard Wright first came to the attention of the literary world with the series of short stories collected in the book Uncle Tom's Children. Native Son is set in the North, while these stories and other of Wright's works are set in the South:
. . . it is in these stories that the reader may find the theme, the structure, the plot, and the ideational content of all his later fictional work. . . Here, for example, one finds Wright's incipient Negro nationalism as each of his protagonists rises to strike out violently at white oppressors who would deny him his humanity (Margolies 75).
Wright was an avowed Communist when he wrote these stories, but his Marxism seldom intrudes in a didactic sense. Stylistically, the stories in this volume make use of the complexities of their narrative line, the twists and turns of the plot, as an essential element for an understanding of the feelings of
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1583
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)
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