Richard Wright’s Life —Ann Rayson Richard Wright (September 4, 1908–November 28, 1960) was
born Richard Nathaniel Wright on Rucker's Plantation, between Roxie and
Natchez, Mississippi, the son of Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper,
and Ella Wilson, a schoolteacher. When Wright was five, his father left the
family and his mother was forced to take domestic jobs away from the house.
Wright and his brother spent a period at an orphanage. Around 1920, Ella Wright
became a paralytic, and the family moved from Natchez to Jackson, then to
Elaine, Arkansas, and back to Jackson to live with Wright's maternal
grandparents, who were restrictive Seventh Day Adventists. Wright moved from
school to school, graduating from the ninth grade at the Smith Robertson Junior
High School in Jackson as the class valedictorian in June 1925. Wright had
published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell's Half- Acre,” in three
parts in the Southern Register in 1924, but no copies survive. His staunchly
religious and illiterate grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson, kept books out of
the house and thought fiction was the work of the devil. Wright kept any aspirations he had to be a writer to himself
after his first experience with publication. After grade school, Wright attended Lanier High School but
dropped out after a few weeks to work. He took a series of odd jobs to save
enough money to leave for Memphis, which he did at age seventeen. While in
Memphis he worked as a dishwasher and delivery boy and for an optical company.
He began to read contemporary American literature as well as commentary by H.
L. Mencken, which struck him with particular force. As Wright reveals in his
autobiography, Black Boy, he borrowed the library card of an Irish co-worker
and forged notes to the librarian so he could read: “Dear Madam: Will you
please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?” Determined to
leave the South before he would irretrievably overstep the bounds of Jim Crow
restrictions on blacks, Wright took the train to Chicago in December 1927. In Chicago, Wright worked at the post office, at Michael
Reese Hospital taking care of lab animals, and as an insurance agent, among
other jobs. There, in 1932, he became involved in the John Reed Club, an
intellectual arm of the Communist party, which he joined the next March. By
1935, he found work with the Federal Negro Theater in Chicago under the Federal
Writers' Project. He wrote some short stories and a novel during this time, but
they were not published until after his death. In 1937, Wright moved to New In Native Son, Wright presents his guilt-of-the-nation
thesis. His main character, Bigger Thomas, is a nineteen-year-old, edgy,
small-time criminal from Chicago's South Side ghetto. The novel races with no
stops in between the three parts: Book I, Fear; Book II, Flight; and Book III,
Fate. When Bigger is offered a job as a chauffeur for a wealthy white family,
he imagines himself in various fanciful scenarios, including sexual ones with
the daughter. Lines that referred to Bigger's sexual interest in Mary Dalton
were taken out in 1940 and only restored fifty-three years later in the 1993
Library of America edition edited by Arnold Rampersad and copyrighted by
Wright's second wife, Ellen Wright. Bigger's first driving job requires him to
take Mary to pick up her Communist lover, Jan Erlone, then eat with the couple
in a black diner on the South Side. They drink themselves into oblivion on the
ride home and invite Bigger to join them. Jan leaves, and Bigger must take Mary
home and put her in bed. Terrified to be in Mary's bedroom and afraid to be
caught as he is kissing her, he puts a pillow over her face when her blind
mother walks in. Realizing he has accidentally murdered her, he drags her in a
trunk to the basement and burns her in the furnace. Bigger rationalizes,
correctly for a while, that the whites will never suspect him because they will
think he is not smart enough to plan such a crime. As it begins to snow, Bigger leaves the Dalton house and
returns to his mother's tenement feeling like a new man. Bigger now sees that
everyone he knows is blind; he himself is filled with elation for having killed
a white girl, the ultimate taboo, and gotten away with it. To seal his guilt,
Wright has Bigger murder his girlfriend Bessie in a brutal and premeditated way
in Book II. As the snowfall becomes a blizzard, Bigger is surrounded
by the white world, whose search closes in and captures him. At the trial in
Book III, Bigger is never convicted for Bessie's murder but only for the
assumed rape of Mary, deemed to be a more serious crime than even Mary's
murder. Boris While Wright made blacks proud of his success, he also made
them uncomfortable with the protagonist, Bigger, who is a stereotype of the
“brute Negro” they had been trying to overcome with novels of uplift by the
“talented tenth” since the Gilded Age. Wright's argument is that racist America
created Bigger; therefore, America had better change or more Biggers would be
out there. At the end, when Max fails to understand Bigger, who cannot be saved
from the electric chair, Wright is faulting the Communist Party for not
comprehending the black people it relied on for support. (Personally
disillusioned with the party, Wright left it in 1942 and wrote an essay
published in Atlantic Monthly in 1944 called “I Tried to Be a Communist,” which
was later reprinted in The God That Failed (1949), a collection of essays by
disillusioned ex-Communists.) Native Son continues to be regarded as Wright's
greatest novel and most influential book. As a result, he has been called the
father of black American literature, a figure with whom writers such as James
Baldwin had to contend. To divest himself of Wright's influence, Baldwin wrote a
series of three essays criticizing Wright's use of naturalism and protest
fiction. In “Everybody's Protest Novel,” published in Partisan Review in 1949,
Baldwin concludes, “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.” On the other hand, Wright has been credited with presaging the
Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, particularly in his protest poetry, much of
which was published in Chicago in the 1930s. As Irving Howe said in his 1963
essay “Black Boys and Native Sons,” “The day Native Son appeared, American
culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later
need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies . . . [and] brought As Wright was rising to prominence, his personal life was
going through changes as well. In 1939 he had married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a
Russian-Jewish ballet dancer. Wright moved her, her son, her mother, and her
pianist to Mexico for a few months and then realized the marriage was not a
success. He returned to New York and divorced Dhimah in 1940. On the trip back
to New York, Wright stopped to visit his father for the first time in
twenty-five years. In Black Boy, he describes his father during this visit as
“standing alone upon the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper,
clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands . . .
when I tried to talk to him I realized that . . . we were forever strangers, speaking
a different language, living on vastly distant planes of reality.” In 1941 he
married Ellen Poplar, a white woman and Communist party member with whom he had
worked and been in love before he married Dhimah. A year later their first
daughter was born. Their second daughter was born in Paris in 1949. During 1940 to 1941, Wright collaborated with Paul Green to
write a stage adaptation of Native Son. It ran on Broadway in the spring of
1941, produced by John Houseman and staged by Orson Welles. Simultaneously,
Wright published his sociological-psychological treatise Twelve Million Black
Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), with
photographs collected by Edwin Rosskam. The book was well received. His
autobiography, Black Boy, came out in 1945, again a bestseller and Book-of-
the-Month Club selection, although the U.S. Senate denounced Black Boy as
“obscene.” The later section about his life in Chicago and experience with the
Communist Party was not published until 1977, under the title American Hunger.
Wright's publishers in 1945 had only wanted the story of his life in the South
and cut what followed about his life in the North. There have been numerous biographies of Wright, but all must
begin with Black Boy, Wright's personal and emotional account of his childhood
and adolescence in the Jim Crow South. In a famous passage in the autobiography
that has bothered critics and set Wright apart from the African American sense
of community, he asserts the “cultural barrenness of black life”: “ . . . I
used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable
was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great
hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how
lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how
shallow was even our despair.” He In 1946, Wright was invited to France. After he returned to
the United States, he decided he could no longer tolerate the racism he
experienced even in New York City. Married to a white woman and living in the
North, he still was not able to buy an apartment as a black man; furthermore,
he hated the stares he and his family received on the streets. And he was still
called “boy” by some shopkeepers. So in 1947, he moved permanently to France
and settled in Paris. Wright never again saw the United States. He worked
during 1949 to 1951 on a film version of Native Son, in which he himself played
Bigger. Wright, forty years old and overweight, had to train and stretch
verisimilitude to play the nineteen-year-old Bigger. During filming in Buenos
Aires and Chicago, the production was fraught with problems. The film was
released briefly but was unsuccessful. European audiences acclaimed it, but the
abridged version failed in the United States and the film disappeared. Wright did not publish a book after Black Boy until 1953
when his “existential” novel, The Outsider, was published to mixed reviews.
Cross Damon, the main character, is overwhelmed by the demands of his wife, his
mother, and his mistress. Seizing a chance opportunity during a train crash, he
leaves his identity papers with a dead man and disappears. He ends up
committing three murders to save himself, then is himself murdered by the
Communist Party in the United States for his independence. Savage Holiday
followed in 1954, a “white” novel whose main character, Erskine Fowler,
exemplifies the dangers of repressed emotion. Fowler has been obsessed with
desire for his mother. He marries a prostitute, then murders her; the graphic
murder scene disturbed some readers. The novel is an exception to Wright's work
in that it has no black characters. Savage Holiday was not even a mild critical
success. During the mid-1950s Wright traveled extensively—to Africa,
Asia, and Spain—and wrote several nonfiction works on political and
sociological topics. He had helped found Présence Africaine with Aimé Césaire,
Leopold Senghor, and Alioune Diop during 1946 to 1948. He spent some time in
Ghana and in 1954 published Black Power (a term coined by Wright) to Throughout his international political activities, Wright
knew correctly that he was being shadowed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
His paranoia was later justified when evidence about his surveillance was made
available under the Freedom of Information Act. After Wright made two trips to
Franco's Spain, he published a book of his observations, Pagan Spain (1956).
Here Wright, with his “peasant” understanding, exposes the dark side of
violence and moral hypocrisy beneath the national adherence to Catholicism. In
1957, he put together a collection of his lectures given between 1950 and 1956
in Europe, White Man, Listen!, which includes “The Literature of the Negro in
the United States,” an important overview. Wright's books published during the
1950s disappointed some critics, who said that his move to Europe alienated him
from American blacks and thus separated him from his emotional and
psychological roots. During the 1950s, Wright grew more internationalist in
outlook. While he accomplished much as an important public literary and
political figure with a worldwide reputation, his creative work did decline. The last work Wright submitted for publication during his
lifetime, The Long Dream, a novel, was released in 1958. Here he portrays his
strongest black father, Tyree Tucker, and treats the black middle class in the
setting of Clintonville, Mississippi. This was the first novel in a planned
trilogy about Tyree Tucker and his son Fishbelly. Wright did finish the second
novel, Island of Hallucinations, about Fishbelly's escape to Paris, but it was
not published. The Long Dream, taking place in the long-gone South of the
1940s, seemed out of date to readers. Critics faulted Wright for being away
from the source of his material for too long, and Time magazine criticized him
for “living amid the alien corn.” Subsequent critics, however, have regarded
his late fiction more seriously. In 1959, Wright's Daddy Goodness was staged in
Paris in collaboration with Louis Sapin, and a 1960 Broadway stage version of
The Long Dream, produced by Ketti Frings, was unsuccessful. During his last year and a half, Wright suffered from
amoebic dysentery acquired during his travels to Africa or Asia, and he died
suddenly of an apparent heart attack while recuperating at the Clinique Eugène
Gibez in Paris. There have been recurrent rumors that Wright was murdered, but
this has not been substantiated. After his death, his wife Ellen submitted for
publication his second collection of short stories, Eight Men (1961), which
Wright had completed eight years earlier. She then published his novel Lawd
Today in 1963, generally considered to be the least powerful of Wright's works,
although William Burrison has argued for its sophistication and artistic merit
(“Another Look at Lawd Today,” CLA Journal 29 [June 1986]: 424–41). Lawd Today,
clearly influenced by James Joyce's Ulysses, presents one day in the life of
Jake Jackson in Chicago. Wright had finished this manuscript in 1934, titled it
Cesspool, and had it repeatedly rejected by publishers before Native Son was
released. The unexpurgated 1993 edition of Native Son saddles readers
with an even less sympathetic Bigger Thomas, ensuring this novel's role in
confronting future generations of complaisant Americans about the scourge of
race and fulfilling W.E.B. Du Bois' prophecy in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” |