Richard Nathaniel Wright (born on 4 September 1908, died on 28 November 1960) was an African-American writer. He wrote about racialism in The United States of America, using the novel, the short story and non-fiction. Happy birthday to him. His most famous work may be Native Son.
Wikipedia says, "Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and became a permanent American expatriate. In Paris, he became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. His Existentialist phase was depicted in his second novel, The Outsider (1953), which described an African-American character's involvement with the Communist Party in New York. In the book considered the first American existential novel, Wright warned that the black man had awakened in a disintegrating society not ready to include him. In 1954 he published a minor novel, Savage Holiday.
After becoming a French citizen in 1947, Wright continued to travel through Europe, Asia, and Africa. These experiences were the basis of numerous nonfiction works. One was Black Power (1954), a commentary on the emerging nations of Africa.
In 1949, Wright contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; his essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier and was derived from the unpublished portion of Black Boy. He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. The CIA and FBI had Wright under surveillance from 1943. Due to McCarthyism, Wright was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio executives in the 1950s, but he starred as teenager Bigger Thomas (Wright was 42) in an Argentinian film version of Native Son in 1950.
In 1955, Wright visited Indonesia for the Bandung Conference and recorded his observations in The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Wright was upbeat about the possibilities posed by this meeting between recently oppressed nations.
Other works by Richard Wright included White Man, Listen! (1957); a novel The Long Dream in 1958; as well as a collection of short stories Eight Men, published after his death in 1961. His works primarily dealt with the poverty, anger, and protests of northern and southern urban black Americans.
His agent, Paul Reynolds sent overwhelmingly negative criticism of Wright's four-hundred page "Island of Hallucinations" manuscript in February 1959. Despite that, in March Wright outlined a novel in which Fish was to be liberated from his racial conditioning and become a dominating character.
By May 1959, Wright wanted to leave Paris and live in London. He felt French politics had become increasingly submissive to American pressure. The peaceful Parisian atmosphere he had enjoyed had been shattered by quarrels and attacks instigated by enemies of the expatriate black writers."
| Richard Wright |
