ife. 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.
He moved to Chicago in 1927. By the mid-1930s he was a well-known figure in Chicago literary circles. He started work on his first novel, Lawd Today, in 1935 and published a series of short stories that would become Uncle Tom's Children. He also started work on Native Son, which would be published in 1940. In the early 1930s, Wright became interested in Marxism and did not break with the Communists until 1942. He made a public disavowal of communism in an article in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944. In 1945 he published Black Boy, a shortened version of his autobiography covering his childhood and adolescence in the South. From 1946 to 1947, Wright exiled himself to France, and he developed close ties with a number of European literary figures during this time. From 1949
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