Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
Wright, Richard
6 articles on Wright, Richard
Wright, Richard
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century
Word Count: 3028 Includes: Wright in Chicago. | Wright in New York. | Wright in Paris. | Wright's Controversial Death. | Bibliography(b. 4 September 1908; d. 28 November 1960), writer and activist. Born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, Richard Nathaniel Wright was the son of a former schoolteacher mother and a sharecropper father. His mother moved from Roxie to Natchez with Richard and his brother when his father had to be separated from the family, working odd jobs. A few years later the family reunited and moved to Memphis, Tennessee. Wright's father was an alcoholic who abandoned the family, forcing his mother to work at low-paying jobs in various places in the South. The family eventually moved to Elaine, Arkansas, when Richard was eight or nine years old. There they lived with Richard's aunt and uncle, Maggie and Silas Hoskins, until Silas was shot to death by white men who wanted to take over his19271927 ...
Read full articleWright, Richard
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 1090 Includes: Bibliography1908–1960
African American novelist, among the first to show the destructive effects of white racism on both blacks and whites. Richard Wright was born in rural Roxie, Mississippi, near Natchez, where white hostility was pervasive. His mother was a former schoolteacher. His father, a farmer who drank heavily, abandoned the family in 1914. In the absence of her husband, Wright's mother took a series of low-wage, unskilled jobs to support her two boys. Moving from town to town, they settled in Memphis, Tennessee, then in rural Arkansas, often going hungry. After his mother suffered a debilitating stroke, Wright returned to Mississippi in the care of his stern, religious grandmother, who disapproved of his literary inclinations. The experience left Wright eager to leave the area and disdainful of religion. ...
Read full articleWright, Richard
Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 2451 Includes: Further Reading | Obituary:(4 Sept. 1908–28 Nov. 1960), author, was born Richard Nathaniel Wright in a log cabin in the backwoods of Adams County, Mississippi. He was the eldest of the two sons of Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson, a semiliterate schoolteacher. Since the boll weevil had ravaged the local cotton industry, the family moved to-Memphis, Tennessee, and shortly afterward, Nathaniel Wright abandoned them.Ella Wright eked out a living by working as a servant in white households, but after a severe stroke in 1918, she was never able to work again. She and the boys went to live with her parents, Richard and Margaret Wilson, in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright's autobiographical narrative Black Boy (1945) gives a vivid picture of those difficult years in his grandparents' house. There were constant arguments ...
Read full articleWright, Richard
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 600(1908–1960), writer. Wright was born near Natchez, Mississippi, to Nathan and Ella Wright, he a sharecropper and she a deeply religious schoolteacher. Nathan deserted the family when Richard was five years old. The resulting hardship emerges in Wright's autobiography, Black Boy (1945), with its descriptions of childhood hunger and family disruption. In 1925, Wright moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he read widely among contemporary American writers. In 1927 he migrated to Chicago's South Side where, his reading told him, he could live in freedom and dignity. There he held odd jobs and was aided by the John Reed Club, the Communist party's organization for young writers. He joined the party in 1934, both to further his literary ambitions and because of its acceptance and support. He published widely, both poetry ...
Read full articleWright, Richard
Source: The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature
Word Count: 9276 Includes: The Early Years, the Early Works | Native Son | The 1940s and Black Boy | The Outsider | Richard Wright's Ordeal | Selected Works | Further ReadingIt all began with a fire: the one Richard Wright himself set when he was four years old. He had wondered, he tells us at the start of his autobiography, Black Boy (1945), “just how the long fluffy white curtains would look if I lit a bunch of straws and held it under them.” They looked splendid, terrifying; and it is a wonder no one was killed. As it turned out, the little boy Wright still was at the time came closer to death than anyone, and not from the fire itself, but from the beating his mother gave him in the aftermath. “I was lashed so hard and long that I lost consciousness,” he recalls. For years he was “chastened,” as he dryly puts it, when he remembered that his mother “had come close to killing” him. At about that time his father abandoned the family and Wright, the oldest child, underwent ...
Read full articleWright, Richard
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 2751(1908–1960), novelist, short story writer, and political commentator. Richard Wright changed the landscape of possibility for African American writers. Wright's defiance, his refusal to give the reading public what it had hitherto demanded of the African American writer, his insistence on the expression of an African American voice, allowed later writers to do the same, allowed Toni Morrison, for example, to write as she would—without concern for explaining her sometimes obscure meanings (e.g., her references to news events from long ago or words or phrases from African American vernacular speech) to a mainstream reading public. For other African American writers, positioning themselves against Wright allowed them to write about African American culture in a more positive way, to assume a posture not requiring that the subject of the fiction, the African American, be seen as victim. ...
Read full article