US writer and poet. He was regarded as an inspiration by black American writers
such as James Baldwin. His Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), a collection of four stories,
was highly acclaimed. In 1937 he moved to New York, New York, where he was an
editor on the communist newspaper, Daily Worker, but the publication of Native Son
(1940) brought him overnight fame.
Born near Natchez, Mississippi, the grandson of slaves and son of a sharecropper, he
went to school in Jackson, Mississippi, though only up to the ninth grade, but got a
story published at age 16 while working at various jobs in the South. In 1927 he went
to Chicago, Illinois, and worked briefly in the post office but, forced on relief by the
Depression, he joined the Communist Party in 1932. With two more minor works
published, he found employment with the Federal Writers Project.
Wright was one of the first to depict the condition of black people in 20th-century
US society with his powerful tragic novel Native Son and the autobiography Black
Boy in 1945. A stage version of Native Son was made in 1941 (and Wright himself
later played the title role in a movie version made in Argentina). Black Boy (1945)
advanced his reputation, but after living mainly in Mexico (1940–46), he had become
so disillusioned with both the communists and white America that he went to Paris,
France, where he lived the rest of his life as an expatriate. He continued to write
novels – such as The Outsider (1953) and The Long Dream (1958) – and non-fiction –
such as Black Power (1954) and White Man, Listen! (1957).