Black Boy is assigned so frequently in secondary English classes that the details of Wright's early life are common knowledge. He was born on September 4, 1908, near Natchez, Mississippi, to Nathaniel Wright (a sharecropper) and Ella Wilson Wright (a schoolteacher). His parents' respective professions are important because much of Wright's childhood comprised a battle between his status (a black boy in the Jim Crow South) and his ambitions (to become a writer). By 1927 a series of professional setbacks and personal traumas had made it clear to Wright that in the South his status would always outweigh his ambitions, and in December of that year he moved to Chicago. In the 1930s, as American Hunger describes, he began dual careers as a writer (publishing his first story in 1931, his first poems two years later, and the important collection Uncle Tom's Children in 1938) and a public activist (joining the Communist Party in 1933). These careers came to quite distinct heads in the early 1940s: in 1940 Wright published his creative masterpiece, the novel Native Son, and two years later he severed all ties with the Party. As always, Wright publicly reflected on these important events, writing about Native Son in How Bigger Was Born (1940) and on his political experiences in "I Tried to Be a Communist" and "The Man Who Lived Underground" (both 1944). Forced to leave the country because of his political history, he lived the remaining years of his life abroad, dying of an apparent heart attack in Paris on November 28, 1960.
While the continued popularity of Black Boy and Native Son have ensured that Wright's self-constructed life and creative apex have remained in the public consciousness, later African-American writers have complicated his legacy. His friend Ralph Ellison and Ellison's prot�g�, James Baldwin, acknowledged their debt to Wright but sought, in their critical and creative works, to distinguish their erudite styles and complex historical themes from his more blunt style and straightforward political themes. And writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker have explicitly critiqued the brutal violence and occasional misogyny of Native Son, opting instead for the folkloric, female-centered world of Wright's contemporary Zora Neale Hurston (whose Their Eyes Were Watching God Wright reviewed unfavorably).
As the works and philosophies of those writers indicate, Wright's brutal, urban, overtly political novel was perhaps not the quintessential African-American work which he had envisioned. Yet even if Wright was not able to define his own legacy as fully as he did his life and works, he remains, almost fifty years after his death, one of the best known and important twentieth-century American writers; similarly, the suffering, violence, and almost entirely stifled hope of Native Son and Black Boy remain seminal statements about African-American life and identity. There can be no question that Wright's childhood ambitions triumphed over his status as Southern black boy.
Autobiographies, Memoirs, and Diaries
PAL: Perspectives in American Literature: Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Modern American Poetry: Richard Wright
Encyclopedia of American Studies, ed. Simon J. Bronner (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), s.v. "Wright, Richard" (by Ben Railton), http://eas-ref.press.jhu.edu/view?aid=759 (accessed August 23, 2018).
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