Wright, Richard (1908-1960)

Once at the center of African-American culture—chosen by the Schomburg Collection poll as one of the "twelve distinguished Negroes" of 1939, recipient of the Spingarn Medal in 1941 (then the highest award given by the NAACP), and mentor to young black writers such as James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Ralph Ellison—Richard Wright became an unpalatable novelist to readers and critics of his own race in the 1980s and 1990s.

Born on a plantation in Roxie, near Natchez, Mississippi, Wright spent his childhood traveling intermittently from one relative to the next because of his father's desertion and his mother's bad health. In 1927, Wright moved to the South Side of Chicago where he worked as a postal clerk and insurance policy vendor. In Chicago, Wright joined first the John Reed Club and then the Communist Party and started to publish essays and poetry in leftist reviews such as Midland Left, New Masses, and International Literature. By 1936, Wright had become one of the principal organizers of the Communist Party, but his relationship with the party would always be difficult until his definite break in 1942.

In 1936, Wright's short story "Big Boy Leaves Home" appeared in the anthology The New Caravan and received critical praise in mainstream newspapers and magazines, marking a decisive step for his career as a writer. The following year Wright moved to New York where, with Dorothy West, he launched the magazine New Challenge (which, lacking Communist support, was short-lived). In New Challenge, Wright published the influential essay "Blueprint for Negro Writing" (1937) where he urged black writers to adopt a Marxist approach as a starting point in their analysis of society. In the same essay, with a move which is considered problematic by contemporary black critics, Wright encouraged black writers to consider as their heritage Eliot, Stein, Joyce, Proust, Hemingway, Anderson, Barbusse, Nexo, and Jack London "no less than the folklore of the Negro himself."

Wright's first novel, Native Son, based on a true story, describes the progressive entrapment and final execution of Bigger Thomas, a young African-American chauffeur living in the Chicago slums who involuntarily killed his boss's daughter. Published in 1940 by Harper, the novel sold 215,000 copies in its first three weeks and became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, thus marking, as Paul Gilroy has pointed out, an important change in the political economy of publishing black writers. The following year Orson Welles directed a successful stage version of Native Son. Two movie versions have been realized so far: the first in 1951 by Pierre Chenal starring Wright himself, the second one in 1995 by Jerrold Freedman starring Victor Love, Matt Dillon, and Oprah Winfrey. Native Son has had a great impact on successive generations of African-American writers who have either followed its pattern of "protest novel," as in the case of Anne Petry, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith (sometimes significantly grouped together as "the Wright school"), or reacted to it very critically as James Baldwin did in his famous essay "Everybody's Protest Novel" (1949), stating: "The failure of the protest novel lies in its rejection of life, the human being, the denial of his beauty, dread, power, in its insistence that it is his categorization alone which is real and which cannot be transcended."

After the success of Native Son, Wright published with equal success and critical acclaim the folk history 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and the first part of his autobiography, Black Boy (1945, the second part was published posthumously as American Hunger in 1977), which became another Book-of-the-Month Club selection. In 1945 Wright wrote the introduction to Black Metropolis, St. Claire Drake and Horace Cayton's classic sociological study of the black ghetto in Chicago. Thanks to Native Son and Black Boy, which were translated into several languages, Richard Wright was the first black writer to enjoy a global readership. However, Black Boy has attracted much criticism by contemporary African-American scholars for Wright's depiction of black life in America as, to quote his own words, "bleak" and "barren." Henry Louis Gates, for example, finds that "Wright's humanity is achieved only at the expense of his fellow blacks … who surround and suffocate him" which makes Wright's autobiographical persona "a noble black savage, in the ironic tradition of Oroonoko and film characters played by Sidney Poitier—the exception, not the rule." Paul Gilroy has suggested a less disparaging, and ultimately more useful, perspective, describing Wright's work as fascinating precisely because "the tension of racial particularity on one side and the appeal of those modern universals that appear to transcend race on the other arises in the sharpest possible way."

In 1946, the French cultural attaché in Washington and famous anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss sent Wright an official invitation from the French government to visit Paris, where Wright was welcomed by prominent intellectuals such as Gertrude Stein, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and André Gide. The following year Wright decided to settle down in Paris permanently where he started to work on his existentialist novel The Outsider (1953) and where he had an active role in several organizations such as Sartre's Rassemblement Democratique Révolutionnaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire's Présence Africaine, and the Société Africaine de Culture. Wright's other books of this late period include a report on his travels in Africa (Black Power, 1954); an account, introduced by Gunnar Myrdal, of the conference of non-aligned nations in Bandung, Indonesia (The Color Curtain, 1956); a collection of essays (White Man, Listen!, 1957); and two novels (Savage Holiday, 1954, and The Long Dream, 1958).

Wright's last years were plagued by his progressive alienation from the African-American community in Paris, which suspected Wright of being an agent for the FBI (in fact, evidence shows that the FBI monitored Wright's activities all his life), and by his increasing financial problems. Paradoxically and sadly for a writer who had to fight against white racism all his life and whose books were not allowed during his lifetime on the library shelves of several American towns, Richard Wright is now being held in contempt by influential black critics who are disturbed by his unaffirmative portrayal of the African-American community, by his controversial relationship with black culture, and by what many consider a stereotypical depiction of black women. It is hoped that critics and readers will find new and more inclusive strategies to recenter Richard Wright within the American and African-American literary tradition.

—Luca Prono

Further Reading:

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston, Beacon Press, 1955.

Bloom, Harold, editor. Richard Wright. New York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

Cappetti, Carla. Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography and the Novel. New York, Columbia University Press, 1993.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated from the French by Isabel Barzun. New York, William Morrow & Company, 1973.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism. New York, Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London, Verso, 1993.

Sollors, Werner. "Modernization as Adultery: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston and American Culture of the 1930s and 1940s." Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts. Vol. 18. 1990, 109-155.