While he authored many acclaimed works during his 52 years, Richard Wright is perhaps best known for his often heartrending memoir Black Boy, in which he recounts an early life of brutality, fear, neglect, and poverty in the Deep South.
A Brief Review of Black Boy
Black Boy (1945) is Richard Wright’s narrative of his childhood and adolescence. This autobiographical account and his fictional Native Son (1940) are considered Wright’s definitive works. (Columbia, 1999)
George Perkins, editor of The American Tradition in Literature (1989), offers this commentary on Wright’s memoir:
- It is a strong book, perhaps his masterpiece. The prose is straightforward, leaving the events to speak for themselves. There are fewer sociological asides, fewer literary posturings than appear in some of his other works. When he wrote it, he was at the height of his powers, far removed in time both from the black boy whose story he tells and proletarian writer he had become in the 1930’s. (p. 1373)
However, like many authors of that era, following the publication of Black Boy Wright began to view “all writing as propaganda” and to believe that “art must be subordinated to the class struggle” (Perkins, p. 1373). As a result, Wright began to devote the majority of his time and energy to writing for such publications as New Masses and The Daily Worker, although he did not entirely abandon autobiographical and fictional writing. (Perkins, 1989)
A Short Biography of Richard Wright
Born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, Richard Wright experienced an impoverished, migratory childhood. His father was a tenant farmer and sometimes millworker, who shuffled the family from home to home across the Deep South, while his mother, according to conflicting reports, was either a school teacher or a household maid, who placed Wright in an orphanage after her husband deserted the family. (Perkins, 1989; Parini, 1999)
Erratically educated at best, Wright dropped out of school after completing the ninth grade and made his way to Chicago, where, as related in the final chapters of Black Boy, “a chance encounter with the works of Mencken led him to Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser” (Perkins, p. 1373). As Wright says, “All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them” (Perkins, p. 1373). And, thus, a writer was born.
According to Jay Parini, editor of The Norton Book of American Biography (1999), Wright joined the Communist party in 1927, at the age of nineteen, “as a form of social action as well as means of achieving identity” (p.381)). In the 1940’s, however, Wright became disillusioned with the Communist organization, as well as life in the United States, and subsequently moved to France in 1947. It was there he penned his last books, none of which achieved the recognition of Native Son and Black Boy. (Perkins, 1989)
The Published Works of Richard Wright
While most noted for Native Son and Black Boy, Wright produced an important body of work during his lifetime, including but not limited to:
- Uncle Tom’s Children (1938)
- Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the U.S. (1941)
- The Outsider (1953)
- Black Power (1954)
- The Color Curtain (1956)
- White Man, Listen! (1957)
- The Long Dream (1958)
- Eight Men (1961)
In summary, Richard Wright triumphed over a life of neglect and poverty to become a self-educated scholar and prominent writer. During his lifetime, he produced an invaluable collection of writings that today, like all great literature, continue to say something exceedingly profound about the human condition.
Sources:
Concise Columbia Encyclopedia (1999) Richard Wright; New York: Avon Books
Parini, J. ((1999) The Norton Book of American Autobiography; W.W. Norton & Company: New York
Perkins, G, (1989) The American Tradition in Literature; New York: Random House
Carol Rzadkiewicz - Carol Rzadkiewicz has taught college English for over 14 years and is the author of three published novels and numerous short stories.
