Richard Nathaniel Wright . Well-known American writer. Born on 4 of September of 1908 in the state of Mississippi, United States .
Summary
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- 1 Biography
- 2 Beginnings
- 3 Trajectory
- 4 Publications
- 1 Novel and story
- 2 Drama
- 3 Assay
- 5 Sources
Biography
The grandson of African slaves, Wright was born on the Rucker’s plantation, near Roxie Mississippi, a small town about 20 miles away. east of Natchez in Franklin County. Her family moved shortly after her birth to Memphis, Tennessee, where her father, an illiterate former sharecropper, abandoned them. His mother, a school teacher, had to go to work as a domestic worker until she fell ill, then moved with Wright and his brother to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with their family.
It would be in this city, where he grew up and where he attended school, where Wright had his first and never forgotten impressions of racism, before returning to Memphis in 1927 , where in addition to working various jobs, he became familiar with the works from writers like Henry Louis Mencken or Sinclair Lewis .
the beginning
Determined to get away from the racist and oppressive environment of the South, he moved to Chicago , where he began to write and actively participate in the John Reed clubs, eventually joining the Communist Party of the USA. He moved to New York to be the editor in Harlem from the Daily Worker , a communist newspaper, also contributing to New Masses magazine . During his communist activism in the north, Wright had positive contacts with white people which had only happened to him once in the south but he ended up frustrated both because of the theoretical rigidity of the party and because of the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union. which he could see only as an atrocity.
Wright first gained attention as a writer was with a collection of (initially) four short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children , in 1937 , a play that fictitiously recreates the lynchings of blacks in the Deep South. He then published a novel, Native Son ( 1940).), which was the first written by an African-American author to be considered Book of the Month by the well-known Book of the Month Club. In it the main protagonist, Bigger Thomas, was conceived by Wright as a representation of the limitations that white society imposed on African-Americans, which his protagonist could only overcome through his atrocious behavior. Wright was widely criticized both for his focus on violence and for presenting the portrait of a black man that could be seen as confirmation of the worst fears of whites.
Trajectory
Wright is also well known for his autobiographical novel Black Boy (Boy Black) ( 1945 ), in which he describes his life in Roxie until his transfer to Chicago , religious conflicts with their grandparents who were Adventists, difficulties with white employers and their social isolation. American Hunger (‘ American Hunger ‘, published posthumously in 1977) was initially conceived as the second part of Black Boy , and this is how it appears in the Library of America edition. It details his relationship with the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942 although in the book it seems that it was before, and the fact is that it was not made public until1944 . In the Reformed edition, its diptych structure reflects the dogmatisms and intolerance of organized communism (its contempt for “bourgeois” literature and “estranged” members of the party) showing its similarity to fundamentalist religions. During McCarthyism, his membership in the Communist Party caused both he and his books to be blacklisted by Hollywood studio leaders during the 1950s.
In May 1946 he traveled to France as a guest of the French government, being well received by the French intellectual world, becoming friends with Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus . It was after this visit that he settled in Paris and became a permanently expatriate American. Wright had married a white woman (Ellen Poplar, then also a member of the Communist Party) in 1941 , and it caused him great frustration to feel the rejecting attitude of those with whom they came into contact when they introduced themselves as a couple.
In 1949 his essay I tried to be communist was included in the anthology of anti-communist writings The God That Failed ; This essay had previously been published in 1944 in the Atlantic Monthly magazine . This led to his being invited to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, rightly suspecting that the CIA was behind it. Both this organization and the FBI had Wright under surveillance since 1943 .
During the 1950s, Wright traveled widely through Asia, Africa and Spain , writing several books on sociological and political issues, related to the situation of the countries of what was then already formed as the Third World. Fruit of his trip through Pagan Spain (Pagan Spain) ( 1957 ), heartbreaking story of Franco’s Spain . Other works of his are The Outsider ( 1953 ) and White Man, Listen! (White Man Listen!) ( 1957 ), as well as a collection of short stories, Eight Men (Eight Men) , published in 1961after his death. His works deal primarily with poverty, anger, and the demands of urban blacks in the north and south.
In the last years of his life, Richard Wright fell in love with the Japanese poetic form of Haiku, writing about 4,000 in that style. In 1998 a compilation with his 817 favorite haikus was published. Richard Wright died in Paris on 28 November of of 1960 as a result of a heart attack originated, perhaps in a tropical disease contracted in his travels in Africa . He is buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris .
Publications
Novel and story
Uncle Tom’s Children ( New York , Harper, 1938 )
Bright and Morning Star ( New York , International Publishers, 1938 )
Native Son ( New York , Harper, 1940 ). Tr .: Native son , Barcelona, Circle of readers, 2001
The Outsider ( New York , Harper, 1953 )
Savage Holiday ( New York , Avon, 1954 )
The Long Dream (Garden City, New York , Doubleday, 1958 )
Eight Men (Cleveland and New York , World, 1961 )
Lawd Today ( New York , Walker, 1963 )
Drama
Native Son: The Biography of a Young American with Paul Green ( New York , Harper, 1941 )
Test
How ‘Bigger’ Was Born; the Story of Native Son ( New York , Harper, 1940 )
12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States ( New York , Viking, 1941 )
Black Boy ( New York , Harper, 1945 ). Tr .: Black boy, Madrid, Unisón, 2008 . Autobiography
Black Power ( New York , Harper, 1954 )
The Color Curtain (Cleveland and New York , World, 1956 )
Pagan Spain (New York, Harper, 1957 ). Tr .: Pagan Spain , Madrid, Origen, 1988
White Man, Listen! (Garden City, New York , Doubleday, 1957 )
Letters to Joe C. Brown (Kent State University Libraries, 1968 )
American Hunger ( New York , Harper & Row, 1977 ). Tr .: American hunger [sic, for ‘American’], Barcelona, Noguer, 1978
