RICHARD WRIGHT

1908-1960
 Biography

• Born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, on

September 4, 1908.
• Son of a sharecropper who deserted his family when
Wright was 5.
• His mother became ill, and the family moved to
Jackson, Mississippi with his grandmother.
• Grandmother tried to stop Wright from writing.
• His grandmother attempted to crush his imagination.
 Biography

• Wright and his brother lived in an orphanage for a

short time because of family problems.
• He would recall his childhood as a “time of hunger.”
• For food, but also for affection, understanding, and
education.
• Although a very good student, Wright never
graduated from high school.
 Biography

• Wright’s jobs in the South were marked by

harassment by whites and by his own disdain for
what segregation and racism had done to distort
the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.
• The harsh conditions of the South pushed
Wright to his first exposure with Urban
Naturalism.
• Wright said he “could not read enough of them.”
 Urban Naturalism

• The term naturalism describes a type of literature that

attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity
and detachment to its study of human beings.
• Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique,
naturalism implies a philosophical position:
• For naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile
Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied
through their relationships to their surroundings.
 Urban Naturalism
• Key themes of Urban Naturalism:
• Survival, determinism, violence, and taboo.
• The "brute within" each individual,
• composed of strong and often warring emotions:
• passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure;
• and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe.
• The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or
"man against himself"
• Characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external
pressures that threaten to release the "brute within.“
• Example: Bigger Thomas
• The forces of heredity and environment as they affect, and
afflict, individual lives.
 Biography
• In 1927, Wright fled the South for Chicago.
• In Chicago, Wright seemed headed for a career in the
post office but was also determined to become a
writer.
• Wright found a circle of friends with similar views in
1933 when he joined the John Reed Club.
• It was a nationwide organization founded by the
communist party to attract writers and artists.
• Between 1933 and 1940 (the first major stage of his
literary career), communism was clearly the major
intellectual and political force of Wright’s life.
 Biography

• In 1938 four of his stories were collected as

Uncle Tom’s Children.
• He then received a Guggenheim Fellowship,
which allowed him to complete his first novel,
Native Son (1940).
• In 1939, he married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a
white dancer, but the two separated shortly
thereafter.
• In 1941, he married Ellen Poplar, a white
member of the Communist Party, and they had
two daughters, Julia in 1942 and Rachel in 1949.
 Biography

• After moving to Paris in 1946, Wright became friends with

Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus while going through an
Existentialist phase best depicted by his second novel, The
Outsiders (1953).
• In his last years, he was plagued by illness (aerobic dysentary)
and financial hardship.
• Throughout this period he wrote approximately 4,000 English
Haikus (some of which were recently published for the first
time) and another novel, The Long Dream, in 1958.
• After his death on November 28, 1960, another of his
collections of short stories, Eight Men, was published.
• His most famous work is still his autobiographical work, Black
Boy (1945).
Themes and Goals of Native Son

• Major goal of Wright’s writing:

• The exposure of the starkest realities of American life
where race was concerned.
• Themes:
• The effects of racism on the individual
• Communism
• Naturalism
• Justice
• The comforts of Religion
 Native Son

• This was meant to be America’s guide in confronting

the danger of facing the profound consequences of
more than two centuries of the enslavement and
segregation of blacks in North America.
• Slavery and neo-slavery had led not simply to the
development of a psychology of timidity, passivity,
and even cowardice among African American masses.
• Wright suggests that it also gives rise to characters
like Bigger Thomas.
 Bigger Thomas

• These characters are estranged from both black

and white culture through their hatred of both
cultures, which gives rise to acts of violence.
• These acts of violence were most often aimed at
other African Americans, but Wright warned that
one day it would be aimed at whites.
 Intellectual Forces

• Other than naturalism, two other intellectual

forces came together to shape Native Son;
communism and existentialism.
• Communism:
• the political and economic doctrine that aims to
replace private property and a profit-based economy
with public ownership and communal control of at
least the major means of production and the natural
resources of a society.
 Existentialism

• Existentialism:
• The Existentialist conceptions of freedom and value
arise from their view of the individual. Since we are
all ultimately alone, isolated islands of subjectivity in
an objective world, we have absolute freedom over
our internal nature, and the source of our value can
only be internal.
• Main principle:
• Existence precedes Essence.