Richard Wright

About Richard Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born September 4, 1908, near Roxie, Mississippi, the son of a sharecropper and a schoolteacher. His childhood was marked by poverty and instability; his father abandoned the family when Wright was six, and the family moved repeatedly across the rural South before settling in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright received little formal schooling but graduated as valedictorian of his junior high school in 1925. He moved to Chicago in 1927 as part of the Great Migration, working as a postal clerk and, during the Depression, joining the Communist Party and Chicago's South Side Writers Group.

Wright's literary breakthrough came with the story collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938), which won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, followed by Native Son (1940) and the memoir Black Boy (1945). In 1946 he moved permanently to Paris, becoming a French citizen and befriending writers including James Baldwin, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. He died in Paris on November 28, 1960, at age 52.

Native Son and Its Legacy

Native Son follows Bigger Thomas, a young Black man on Chicago's South Side whose constrained circumstances propel him toward a devastating act of violence. Rather than presenting a sympathetic protagonist designed to reassure white readers, Wright deliberately built the novel around a character who is angry and capable of terrible acts, insisting that the social conditions producing him—not his likability—demanded scrutiny. The novel was the first work by a Black author selected by the Book of the Month Club, and its stark treatment of race and poverty influenced generations of American writers, even as figures like James Baldwin later challenged its methods in print.

Book Challenges

Objections to Native Son center on its graphic violence, including a killing rendered in unflinching physical detail, along with sexual content and language that some parents and reviewers have judged too intense for classroom use. Its unsparing portrayal of racial hatred has also drawn criticism from some challengers, even as others defend the novel's bleakness as essential to its argument about how poverty and racism narrow human possibility. In this catalog, Native Son has been challenged or restricted in 5 states and 27 school districts, keeping it among the more frequently contested works of twentieth-century American literature.