One of the most powerful reading experiences in my life was discovering the work of Richard Wright when I was a teenager in the 1960s. Like many great writers, Richard Wright offered that vision of truth and reality that can change our perspectives forever.
Grandson of slaves, Wright was born this date (September 4) in 1908 on a sharecropper’s farm in Natchez, Mississippi. A life of oppression and poverty led to his career as one of the most influential writers of his day. Moving to Chicago, he wrote for the New Deal-era WPA (Work Projects Administration), including contributing the text to a book of photographs of Depression-era blacks, Twelve-Million Black Americans.
His first novel, Native Son (1940) remains to this day a powerful statement and he turned it into a play produced on Broadway by Orson Welles. Set in 1930s Chicago, it was the violent story of Bigger Thomas and his downward spiral.
Wright followed with his memoir Black Boy (1945), a searing account of coming of age in the Jim Crow South.
Here is a link to browse Native Son at his publisher’s website.
http://browseinside.harpercollins.com/index.aspx?isbn13=9780060837563
(Full Disclosure: HarperCollins is also my publisher.)
Wright’s papers are held at Yale;
http://webtext.library.yale.edu/xml2html/beinecke.WRIGHT.nav.html
An acclaimed PBS documentary on Wright http://www.itvs.org/RichardWright/
It is available at http://www.newsreel.org/nav/title.asp?tc=CN0075&s=Richard%20Wright
