Richard Wright

Richard Wright is hailed as one of the United States' finest writers. He was born in 1908 on a Mississippi plantation, son of a schoolteacher mother and sharecropper father. At a young age, his father left the family and his mother became ill while working to support the family. He then lived with his grandmother who enrolled him in a Seventh Day Adventist school.

Wright's first work was published by a local black newspaper in 1924. He spent the next few years working jobs to support himself while absorbing the works of such writers as H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis.

During the Depression, Wright joined the Communist party and began working as a journalist. In the late 30s, he received a Guggenheim fellowship. It was during that fellowship that he wrote his most famous work, Native Son.

Wright later moved to Paris where he befriended Jean-Paul Sarte and Albert Camus. In 1947, he became a French citizen.

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--B. Redman