American Decades
Wright, Richard 1908-1960
Going North.
Richard Wright came from the rural South and became the first African American to write of ghetto life in the North. His formal schooling ended at age fifteen, yet he became the foremost black author in American history up to his death. Wright was the first black novelist/essayist in American history to achieve the status of a major American writer. He was a remarkable man from humble beginnings who began the process of self-education in the mid 1920s as a teenager. He read H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, Crane, and Dreiser. In the late 1920s he went to Chicago and discovered Gertrude Stein, Marcel Proust, and the Chicago school of sociologists (led by Robert Park and Louis Wirth). Wright also discovered the Communist Party and officially joined in 1932. He was active in the party, writing poems, stories, and essays for leftist magazines. He clashed with the rigid party dictates, was branded an intellectual, and...
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1940's The Arts
The 1940's
