"Richard Nathaniel Wright"(September 8,1908-November 28, 1960)

Was an African American author of sometimes controversial

novels,short stories,poems,and non-fiction.Much of his literature concerns,racial themes,especially those involving the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries.His worked change race relations in the mid-20th century.Richard was born on a Plantation,in Roxie Mississippi.He lived with his maternal grandmother in Jackson Mississippi from early 1920 until late 1925.Here he felt stifled by his aunt and grandmother,who tried to force him him to pray that he might find god.Richard later threatened to leave him because his grandmother Wilson refused to permit him to work on Saturdays,the Adventist Sabbath.Early strife with his aunt and grandmother left him with a permanent,uncompromising hostility toward religious solutions to everyday problems.In 1923,Richard excelled in grade school and was made valedictorian of Smith Robertson junior high school.Determined not to be an Uncle Tom,he refused to deliver the Principal's carefully prepared valedictory address that would not offend the school white officials and finally convinced the African American administrators to let him add a compromised version of what he had written.In September that year,he registered for mathematics,English,and history courses at the new Lanier High School in Jackson,Richard had to to stop attending classes after a few weeks of irregular attendance because he needed to earn money for family expenses.His childhood in Memphis & Mississippi shaped his lasting impressions of American racism.at the of 16,Richard published his first story,"The Voodoo of Hell"Half-Acre,"in the Southern Register,a local African American newspaper.Richard moved to Chicago in 1927.After securing employment as a postal clerk,he read other writers and studied their studied their styles during his time off.When his job at the post office was eliminated,he was forced to go on relief in 1931.In 1932,Richard began attending meetings of the John Reed Club.As the club was dominated by the Communist Party,Richard established a relationship with a number of party members.Especially interested in the literary contracts made at the meetings,Richard formally joined the Communist Party in late 1933 and as a revolutionary poet who wrote numerous proletarian poems for The New Masses and other left-wing periodicals.A power struggle within the Chicago chapter of the John Reed Club led to the dissolution of the club's leadership;Richard was told he had the support of the club's party members if he was willing to join the party.By 1935,he had completed his first novel,Cesspool,published as Lawd Today (1963),and in January 1936 his story "Big Boy Leaves Home"was accepted for publication in New Caravan.In February,he began working with the National Negro Congress,and in April he chaired the South Side Writers Group,whose membership included Arna Bontemps & Margaret Walker.Right submitted some of his critical essays and poetry to the group for criticism and read aloud some of his short stories.Through the club,he edited Left Front,a magazine that the Communist Party shut down in 1937,despite Richard's repeated protests.Throughout this period,Richard also contributed to The New Masses magazine.While he was at first pleased by positive relations with white Communist in Chicago,he was later humiliated in New York City by some who rescinded an offer to find housing for Richard because of his race.Some African American Communist denounced him as bourgeois intellectual.He was largely autodidatic,having been forced to end his public education after the completion of grammar school.Richard insistence that young communist writers be given space to cultivate their talents and his working relationship with an African American nationalists communists led to a public falling out with the party and the leading African American communist Buddy Nealson.Richard was threatened at knife point by fellow traveler coworkers,denounced as a Trotskyite in the street by strikers and physically assaulted by former comrades when he tried to join them during the 1936 May Day March.In 1937,Richard moved to New York,where he forged new ties with Communist Party Members.He worked on the WPA Writer's Project guidebook to the city,New York Panorama (1938),and wrote the book's essay on Harlem.He became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker.In the summer & fall he wrote  over two hundered artiles for the Daily  Worker and helped edit a short lived literary magazine New Challenge.The year was also a landmark for Richard because he met Ralph Ellison that would last for years,and he learned that would receive the Story magazine first prize of five hundred dollars for his short story "Fire & Cloud."After Richard received the Story magazine  prize in early 1938,he shelved his manuscript of Lawd Today and dismissed his literary agent,John Troustine.He hired Paul Reyonds,the well-known agent of Paul Lawrence Dunbar,to represent him.Meanwhile,the Story Press offered Harper of Richard's prize-entry stories for a book,and Harper agreed to publish them.Richard gained national attention for the collection of four stories entitled Uncle Tom's Children (1938).He based some stories on lynching in the Deep South.The publication and favorabl e reception of Uncle Tom's children improved his status with with the Communist party and enable him to establish a reasonable degree of financial stability.He was appointed to the editorial board of New Masses, and Granville Hicks,prominent literary critic and Communist party sympathizer,introduced him at leftist teas in Boston.By May 6,1938,excellent sales had provided Richard with enough money to move to Harlem,where he began writing the novel Native Son (1940).The collection also earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship,which allowed him to complete Native Son.It was selected by the Book of Month Club as its first book by an African American author.The lead character Bigger Thomas,represented the limitations that society placed on African Americans as he could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge by committing heinous acts.He was criticized for his works' concentration on violence.In the case of Native Son.It was people complained that he portrayed an African American in ways that seemed  to confirm whites' fears.The period following Native Son was a busy time for Richard.In July 1940 went to to do research for a folk history of African Americans to accompany photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam.While in Chicago he visited The American Negro Exhibition with Langston Hughes,Arna Bontemps and Claude Mckay.He went to Chapel Hill,North Carolina,where he and Paul Green collaborated on a dramatic version of Native Son.In January 1941 Richard received the prestigious Spigam Medal for noteworthy achievement by an African American.Native Son opened on Broadway,With Orson Wells as director,to generally favorable reviews in 1941.A volume photos almost completely drawn frown the files of the Farm Security Administration,with text from by Richard,Twelve Million Black Voices:A Folk History of the Negro in the United States,was published in October 1941 to wide critical acclaim.Richard's semi-autobiographical Black Boy(1945) described his early life in from Roxie through his move to Chicago,his classes with his Seventh-Day Advent family,his trouble with white employers and social isolation.American Hunger,published posthumously in 1977,was originally intended as the second volume of Black Boy.The Library of America edition restored it to that form.This book detailed Richard's involvement with the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party,which he left in 1942.The book implied he left earlier,his withdrawn was not made public until 1944.In the volumes' restored form, the diptych structure compares the certainties and intolerance of organized communism,"the bourgeois"books and condemned members,with similar qualities to fundamentalist organized religion.Richard disapproved of the purges in the Soviet Union.He continued to believed in far-left democratic solutions to political problems.Richard moved Paris in 1946, and became permanent America expatriate.In Paris Jean Paul Santre and Albert Camus.His Exististentialist phase was depicted in his second novel,The Outsider(1953),which described an African American character's involvement with the Communist Party in New York.He also was friends with fellow expatriate writers Chester Himes and James Baldwin,the relationship with the latter ended in acrimony after James published his essay "Everybody's Protest Novel"(collected in Notes of a Native Son),in which he criticized Richard's stereotypical portrayal of Bigger Thomas.In 1954 he published a minor novel,Savage Holiday.After becoming a French citizen in 1947,Richard continued to travel through Europe,Asia, & Africa.These experiences were the basis of numerous nonfiction works.In 1949 Richard contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed;his essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier and was derived from the unpublished portion of Black Boy.He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom,which he rejected,correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA.The CIA and FBI had him under surveillance starting in 1943.Richard was blacklisted by Hollywood movie executives in the 1950ss,but in 1950 in 1950,started as the teenager Bigger Thomas (he was 42) in an Argentinian film version of Native Son.In mid-1953 Richard traveled to to the Gold Coast where Kwane Nkrumah was leading to independence from British rule.Before Richard returned,to Paris,he gave confidential report to the United States consulate in Accra on some of the things he had learned about Kwane and his political party.After Richard returned to Paris he met twice with an officer from the U.S. Department of State.The officer's report includes what Richard learned about Kwane adviser George Padmore about Kwane's plans for the Gold Coast after its independence (as Ghana).George,a Trinidadian living London;believed Richard to be a good friend,as many letters in the Richard papers at Yale's Beinecke Library attest,and their correspondence continued.Richard's book on his journey,Black Power,was published in 1954;its London publisher was George's,Dennis Dodson.In addition to whatever political motivations Richard had for reporting to America officials,he was in the uncomfortable position of an American who did not want to go back to the U.S. and needed to have his passport renewed.According to Richard's biographer Addison Gayle,just a few months later Richard answered questions at the American embassy in Paris about people he had met in the Communist Party who were were at this point being prosecuted under the Smith Act.Exploring the reasons Richard appeared to have little to say about the civil rights movement unfolding in the U.S. IN THE 1950S,historian Carol Polsgrove has gathered evidence of what his fellow writer Chester Himes the "extraordinary pressure"Richard was under not write about the America scene.Even Ebony magazine delayed "I Choose Exile"until he suggested it would be better to publish it in a white periodical,"since a white periodical would be less vulnerable to accusations of disloyalty."He through the Atlantic Monthly was interested,in the end,the piece went published.In August 1939,with Ralph Ellison as best man,Richard married Dhimah Rose Meidman,a modern-dance teacher of Russian Jewish ancestry,the marriage ended a year later.On March 12 1941,he married Ellen Poplar Poplowitz,a Communist organizer from Brooklyn.They had two daughters:Julia born in 1942 & Rachel in 1949.