The first 20th century African-American writer to command both
critical acclaim and broad popular success, Richard Wright was born
on a plantation outside of Roxie, Mississippi in 1908. In 1937 he
moved to New York to make his way as a professional writer and in
1938 he published Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of
four short novels about the violent persecution of black men in the
South. Harper and Brothers published Native Son two years
later to immediate acclaim and phenomenal sales. Black Boy
was even more successful when it appeared in 1945, selling more
than 500,000 copies in its first year.
Despite his success, Wright continued to feel stifled by racial
prejudice. Convinced that he could find greater freedom abroad,
Wright moved to Paris in 1947 with his wife, an American woman of
Polish-Jewish descent, and their young daughter. He quickly made
contact with leading French
existentialists and began reading deeply in the works of Sartre,
Camus, and Heidegger. In the fiction he composed in France, Wright
tried to view racial issues from an existentialist perspective.
When he died suddenly of a heart attack in Paris in 1960, Wright
was considered a marginal figure - an expatriate novelist whose
works had lost favor with a younger generation of African-American
intellectuals. But the emergence of the black power movement in the
1960s sparked a major reassessment of Wright as both an innovative
prose stylist and militant social critic. Today Richard Wright is
widely recognized as one of the great American writers of the 20th
century.