Wright, Richard

WRIGHT, RICHARD (1908-1960). Richard Wright, the author of the searingly unforgettable anti-racist novel Native Son (1940), was a pioneer of what is now called “Black Marxism.” The most celebrated African American radical writer in the mid-twentieth century, he is conceivably the least understood. He is frequently pigeonholed as a literary naturalist when his literary inspirers were equally modernist; a Black nationalist when his compass was the Western Enlightenment; and an ex-Communist of the Cold War variety when his politics remained anti-capitalist and anti-colonialist to the end of his life.
Until the 1990s, Wright’s earlier works, written in the United States, were considered classics, while his later ones, authored in Parisian exile after 1946, were disdained as inferior. Since the appearance of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1992), a dramatic rethinking has been in progress emphasizing continuities as well as advancements throughout Wright’s entire oeuvre. These new perspectives have also spurred the posthumous publication and republication of previously unknown, censored, and underestimated works.

Born the son of a sharecropper in Mississippi, Wright was raised mainly by his schoolteacher mother and various maternal relatives, several of whom were fanatically religious. With only a junior high school education, he fled the Jim Crow South and arrived in Chicago in 1927. There he primarily worked in the post office to support his mother and brother, which is where he encountered aspiring writers in the Communist-led John Reed Club (JRC). Wright joined the JRC in 1932 followed by the Communist Party (CP-USA) in 1933. Early literary activities centered on writing poetry and publishing in the Chicago JRC’s journal Left and the CP-USA-sponsored publication New Masses. In 1936 he established the South Side Writers Group to promote craft-consciousness among radical Black writers.

By mid-1937 Wright was engaged in fiction-writing based on interviews with Black Communists who had likewise taken flight from the South, but he also found himself in conflict with local CP-USA leaders who wanted him to engage in more direct political work and stigmatized him as an “intellectual.” At this point he moved to New York City where he was welcomed as a Communist journalist and began writing prolifically for the Daily Worker, subsequently joining the Federal Writers Project. With the 1938 publication of the story collection Uncle Tom’s Children he achieved national attention and was promoted as a spokesman for the Communist cause. He also won a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed him to focus on completing Native Son, which depicted an African American youth whose impoverished economic circumstances and survival instincts in a racist society result in his committing two murders. This became a Book-of-the-Month-Club selection, the first ever by a Black writer; a year later it was turned into a successful Broadway play directed by Orson Welles. Concurrently, Wright and photographer Edward Rosskam issued a widely praised documentary called 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941).

During the 1939-1941 era of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Wright exhibited no disquiet with the politics of the pro-Soviet CP-USA, similar to his complacency during the Moscow Purge Trials shortly before. The situation changed when the USSR was invaded by Nazi Germany in the middle of 1941. The CP-USA became adamantly pro-war, opposing A. Philip Randolph’s planned March on Washington to desegregate the military and even claiming that the racial tensions of 1942-43, erupting in mass uprisings in urban centers, were instigated by Hitler to disrupt the war effort. Wright, along with his literary friends Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes, felt they had been betrayed by reformism and all separated from the CP-USA after 1942. In 1944, Wright held a press conference assuaging any doubts about his views. At the same time he published in the Atlantic Monthly a section cut from his forthcoming Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945), sensationally depicting his conflicts with the CP-USA in Chicago.

At that point, Wright’s politics remained radical but increasingly eclectic as he privately continued to call himself a Communist but closely associated with the heterodox Trotskyist C. L. R. James. In his personal life he passed through a brief first marriage to a Jewish Communist dancer and artist, Dhimah Rose Meidman in 1939, and then began a second one in 1941 with Jewish Communist organizer Ellen Poplar, with whom he would have two daughters. In 1946 he became a permanent expatriate in Paris, supremely active in a variety of political projects, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire with Jean-Paul Sartre, and mentor to younger Black writers. Careful not to endanger his status in France, he refused pleas to criticize the treatment of Algerians and he provided some information about Communists to US officials.

In 1950, Wright, age 42, starred as the teenager Bigger Thomas in an Argentinian film version of Native Son. In mid-1953, Wright traveled to the Gold Coast where Kwame Nkrumah was leading the country to independence from British rule, the subject of Black Power (1954). In 1955, Wright visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference, recording his observations in The Color Curtain (1955). Books of fiction include The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958), and Eight Men (1961). During the period leading up to his death by heart attack at age 52, Wright produced more than 4000 short poems in the Haiku form.

Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

Robinson, Cedric. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, N.C.: 2000.

Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Macmillan, 2002.

Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.