Wright published numerous poems in Left Front, the Partisan Review, and New Masses. He moved to New York City in 1937 and became editor of the Daily Worker and coeditor of Left Front. In Chicago, Wright became involved with the Communist Party and worked for the Federal Writers’ Project. He dropped out of high school to work odd jobs before moving to Chicago in 1927. Books were not allowed in the house, and Wright nursed his dreams of becoming a writer in secret. His father left the family when Wright was five, and he spent time in an orphanage before moving with his mother to Jackson, where he was raised in part by his strict Seventh Day Adventist grandparents. Wright was born in Mississippi, the son of an illiterate sharecropper and a schoolteacher. He is most famous for writings depicting the harsh realities of life for Black Americans in the Jim Crow–era South: the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) the novel Native Son (1940), which was a bestseller and a Book-of-the-Month club selection, the first by a Black writer to earn the distinction, and produced by John Houseman and Orson Welles on Broadway and his autobiography, Black Boy (1945). Richard Wright is recognized as one of the preeminent novelists and essayists of the 20th century.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |