RICHARD WRIGHT
1908-1960
Novelist
Richard Wright’s work is still used as a reference for the major writers of today. It is Richard who in the 1940’s set the standard for a whole generation of prose writers including Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin.
Richard was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi on September 9, 1908. He drew on his personal experience to dramatize to a nationwide audience the issue of racial injustice and its auspices of the WPA Illinois writer’s project. He published UNCLE TOMS CHILDREN a collection of four novels based on his Mississippi childhood memories. The book won an award for the best work of fiction by a WPA writer and Wright received a Guggenheim Fellowship. Two years later, Native Son, a novel of Chicago’s Negro ghetto further enhanced his reputation. A book of the month club choice, it was later a successful Broadway production under Orson Welles’s direction and was filmed in South America with Richard Wright himself in the role of Bigger Thomas.
In 1945 He largely autobiographical Black Boy was again selected by the Book of the Month club and went on to become a second best seller. Richard later moved to Paris where he continued to write both fiction and non Fiction, including The Outsider 1953, Black Power 1954, The Color Curtain 1956, The Long Dream 1958, and Lawd Today 1963. The last of these was published posthumously; Richard Wright died o November 28, 1960.