hez, Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper, while his mother taught in a country school. Richard's childhood was spent in one of the most poverty-stricken and rigidly segregated regions of the South. When he was six, his family moved to Memphis, Tennessee, so his father could get a better job, and the father then worked as a night porter in a hotel, while the mother worked as a cook for a white family. Richard's father left the family for another woman son after that, and in 1915 Richard's mother became ill to such a degree that she was an invalid for the rest of her life. Richard, his mother, and his brother then moved to Jackson, Mississippi to live with Richard's grandmother for a time. They later moved to Arkansas and lived with Richard's aunt and her husband. Another move came when the uncle was murdered by whites who also threatened to kill the rest of the family. Richard's education suffered greatly with all these moves, and it was also during this time when Richard became aware of the racism and violence then prevalent in the South (Butler xi).
Wright became one of the leading black writers of his generation and remains a major figure today. He published six novels, his autobiography, a book of short stories, and many stories and articles over the length of his career, and he has been the subject of many books and articles on his works. Native Son remains the most important of his books, a novel that embodies most of the themes that would be the hallmark of his writings. His works expressed the theme of black alienation in white society and showed the effects of racism and discrimination in terms of the violence that was used by racists and the violence that racism created in others. Irving Howe said that Native Son should be seen as the culmination of a tradition of protest in black literature (Butler 16). Wright's critical reputation suffered for a long time because of complaints by Ral
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