Richard Nathaniel Wright

Forthcoming in Encyclopedia of the World’s Minorities,

ed. Carl Skutsch, Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers

Essay

Richard Wright’s contribution to African-American letters is so vast and long-lasting that calling it a contribution is an error. Without him, there would be no contemporary African-American literature as we recognize it today. His work has had enormous influence on the writers who followed him and on American thinking about the African-American experience. W’s most important work, Native Son, and the later critical arguments that ensued, laid the groundwork for much that has since been thought, said, and written about race in America.

Born and raised in the Deep South in the early years of the 20th century and living later in Chicago and New York City, W’s life shared the pattern of many African-Americans of the time. As a child he lived through the worst Jim Crow had to offer, enduring economic hardship and white supremacist society. As a young adult he took part in the great migration from South to North made by so many African-Americans during and after World War I who were looking to leave this situation behind and to find work in the North. While in Chicago he became involved in the causes of the worker and the African-American, joining the Communist Party. Moving to New York, he took part in the political and cultural life of the Harlem whose earlier cultural ferment, the Harlem Renaissance, had been so important to African-American life. W’s life and times—his experiences and the experiences of those around him—greatly informed his work. The things he saw and the people he knew were reflected in the things he said about the world. In turn, the things he said about the world were so powerful that the world came to reflect them as well.

W’s first published work—essays, stories, and poems—came out of his time in Chicago and involvement with the John Reed Society and then the Party, and reflected the social concerns of those groups. In particular, W.’s commitment to use literature to effect social change can be traced to these beginnings. His first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, consists of four long stories that combine class-consciousness and race consciousness to tell stories of white racism. Published in 1938, it was well received, winning the Story magazine prize for work submitted by an author associated with the Federal Writers’ Project. The success of Uncle Tom’s Children allowed him the time to concentrate on his next book. In its writing, W. was determined not to repeat what he saw as his first book’s sympathetic picture of suffering, and to write a book too “hard and deep” for tears. That book, Native Son, appeared in 1940, and with it appeared a new kind of African-American literature.

Native Son was an enormous literary and commercial success, selling over 200,000 copies in its first three weeks of publication. It confronted the reality of race in America in a way no book before it had, with an anger no African-American writer had dared to express. The novel tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man painted into a corner by difficult circumstances and bad luck. Native Son saw Bigger’s story through literary naturalism’s determinist eye, adapting naturalism’s sense of the inevitable results of environmental pressure on individuals to a subject on which it had not previously been trained, the lives of African-Americans. This story of life in Chicago’s’ slums was thus hailed as a masterpiece of the social protest novel (and was in fact based in part on actual events), and earned W. comparisons to masters of the genre such as Theodore Dreiser, John Steinbeck, and even Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and praise from writers such as Ralph Ellison and critics such as Malcolm Cowley.

Bigger’s story is told in three parts, “Fear,” “Flight” and “Fate.” The movement of the three sections emphasizes the sense of the inevitability of Bigger’s fate. Hired away from a street gang to be the driver of a rich white family, Bigger succumbs to the pressures of the situation, accidentally smothering the family’s drunk daughter in fear that he will be discovered in her bedroom after helping her to bed, and in a panic cuts off her head and burns her body in the furnace. His fake blackmail note fails to keep him out of suspicion, as the daughter’s remains are found in the furnace, and Bigger takes flight with his girlfriend. Thinking that her presence might slow him down and lead to his capture, Bigger kills her as well, but is nonetheless captured. The last third of the book details the different reactions to Bigger’s crimes, including his lawyer’s explanation of the effects of racism on Bigger’s psyche, and Bigger’s ultimate measure of existential self-knowledge before he goes to the chair. From the book’s opening with the black rat Bigger confronts in his apartment, which turns on his family when it is cornered, to the rat skittering across the abandoned apartment in which he hides before he is caught, the novel never abandon its naturalist imperative: to show how an individual is subject to the pressure of its environment. W.’s achievement in the novel is to extend the pressures the social novel considers beyond class to race, to show the ultimately psychological effects of racism on African-Americans.

W. adapted Native Son for the stage in 1941, and also in that year published Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, a study in words and photographs of African-American life from the slave ships of the Middle Passage to the plantations of the South to the cities of the North. In 1945 W. published Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth, an autobiography that described not just white racism but also its divisive effects on African-American communities, and was, like Native Son, a critical and commercial success.

W. wrote many more novels and nonfiction works, while still in America and while living as an expatriate in Paris after World War II. In these years, his work was informed by his evolving thinking on race, his repudiation of Communism, his increasing fascination with existentialist philosophy, and his contact with the ideas of negritude and other new ideas emerging from Africa. However, none of the writing that he produced had anything approaching the impact of his earlier work.

W.’s reputation endures, resting largely on Native Son. It suffered some at the hands of James Baldwin, who, in a1948 essay entitled “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” criticized the novel for being, in his eyes, not great art but reductive protest fiction along the lines, ironically enough, of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 antislavery novel. W. also lost his position as the preeminent African-American writer to Ralph Ellison, when his more experimental and artistically complex Invisible Man appeared in 1952. However, while his aesthetic reputation may have dimmed somewhat, W is still recognized for the impact of his work and the power of his greatest novel.

Biography

Born in Roxie, Mississippi, 4 September 1908. Studied at Howe Institute, Memphis, Tennessee; Seventh-day Adventist school, public Jim Hill and Smith-Robertson Junior High schools, Jackson, Mississippi. United States Postal Service worker, Chicago, Illinois, 1928-30; Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, 1937; cofounder, New Challenge, 1937; member of editorial board, New Masses, 1938-1944; researcher, Federal Writers’ Project, 1935-39. O’Henry award for “Fire and Cloud," 1938; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1939. Died in Paris, France, 28 November 1960.