This study will examine the life, writing and politics of African-American author Richard Wright, focusing on his development as an artist and as a believer in Marxism as a means to right the injustices in modern society, especially injustices rooted in racism. He left the Communist Party in the 1940s after a ten-year membership,. but these racial and political concerns continued to dominate Wright's life and writing.
Wright was born in 1908 in Natchez, Mississippi, raised in Memphis, which he left for Chicago at the age of 19, and died in 1960. He was almost entirely self-educated. He held numerous menial jobs in Memphis and Chicago, and was forced onto relief during the Depression. His writing for the Federal Writers' Project won him a prize, for his story collection Uncle Tom's Children in 1938. After the 1940 publication of Native Son, Wright
was considered not only the leading black author of the U.S. but also a major heir of the naturalistic tradition in his story of the tragedy of a black boy reared in the Chicago slums (Hart, 1983, p. 850).
In 1945, he wrote the autobiography of his youth, Black Boy, migrated to the more liberal and tolerant atmosphere of Paris after World War II, and wrote several more books, some of which were published after his death in 1960, including American Hunger (the sequel to Black Boy), published in 1977.
Along with his autobiography Black Boy, Wright's novel Native Son was one of his most famous and powerful works. The novel effectively combined his views on race and politics in ways which appealed to both the mind and heart, the reason and emotions of the reader. The story is about the personal, social and political evolution of the black protagonist Bigger Thomas. In this book as in his other works, fiction, essays and autobiography, Wright is not merely a black man writing about blacks living and suffering in a racist society. The author is also a man sympathetic to the Marxist ...