Richard Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His father was a black sharecropper; his mother, a school teacher. In 1914, when cotton prices collapsed at the outbreak of the war, Wright's father was one among thousands who traveled North to the industrial centers; he got as far as Memphis, where he found work as a night porter in a drugstore. The pressures of city living led him to desert his family shortly thereafter, and from then on Wright's childhood consisted of moving from one southern town to another, of intermittent schooling and sporadic jobs.
He arrived in Chicago during the Great Depression, worked at odd jobs, and drifted until his association with the American Communist party gave him roots of a kind. Since the age of twelve, Richard Wright had not only dreamed of writing, but had written. He was particularly attracted to the American naturalists Mencken, Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson and his first publications included articles, short stories, and poetry, mostly printed by the Communist party press.
In 1938, his first book, Uncle Tom's Children, was published. These stories depict the black person in revolt against his environment and reveal the depth of Wright's emotional ties to the South. Each of the stories, in its violence and moral passion, is a preparation for his major publication, Native Son, in 1940. With this book Wright gained national attention, especially after it won the $500 prize awarded by Story magazine.
According to Wright himself, he was a member of the Communist party from 1932 to 1944, and the books he wrote during this period reflect his belief in communism as the only existing agency capable of restoring humanitarian values to the earth. Native Son, incorporating this idea, influenced a whole generation of black novelists. The novel's anti-hero, Bigger Thomas, became the murderer he was, not out of choice, but as a result of environmental influences beyond his control; Wright's autobiography, Black Boy (1945), expresses the same Marxist philosophy. A best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Native Son was successfully dramatized by Orson Welles and was made into a movie, Wright himself playing Bigger Thomas. The book is an integral part of American literary tradition in its struggle to reconcile the innocence of the rural past with the corruption of the urban present. Dreiser's An American Tragedy contains many of the same ideas and even a similarity of theme. Both Wright and Dreiser viewed society as the guilty instigator of criminality.
