Richard Wright

Born Richard Nathaniel Wright on September 4, 1908, on a plantation between the towns of Roxie and Natchez, Mississippi, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and a schoolteacher, Wright grew up in crushing poverty across the Jim Crow South. His father abandoned the family when Richard was five; his mother suffered a series of strokes that left her partially paralyzed. He was shuffled among relatives in Memphis, Jackson, and Elaine, Arkansas, where he witnessed racial violence firsthand. He attended school only intermittently but read voraciously, later recalling that H. L. Mencken's prose struck him "like an unexpected blow." In 1927 he moved to Chicago, where he worked at the post office, joined the Communist Party, and began to write. Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of novellas about racial terror in the South, won a prize from Story magazine. Native Son (1940), the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in Chicago who accidentally kills a white woman, became the first bestselling novel by an African American author, selling 250,000 copies in its first three weeks. The autobiographical Black Boy (1945) was equally searing. But Wright felt suffocated by American racism: in 1946, at the invitation of the French government, he moved to Paris and never returned. His friendship with the existentialists Sartre and de Beauvoir deepened his philosophical interests, though his later novels, The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), never matched the power of his early work. He died of a heart attack on November 28, 1960, in Paris, at fifty-two, an exile to the end.

In 1945 Wright and Gertrude Stein began a correspondence that ran for over a year, each admiring the other's most recent book. Stein helped press for an official invitation from the French government, and in May 1946 he sailed for Paris with his wife and infant daughter, never to make America home again.