Wright, Richard [Nathaniel]
Wright, Richard [Nathaniel]( 1908–60),self-educated black author, born near Natchez, Miss., and reared in Memphis. After many menial jobs there and in Chicago, to which he migrated at age 19, he had to go on relief during the Depression. During the 1930s he joined the Communist party but left it in the 1940s, as recorded in the anthology The God That Failed (1950). His Uncle Tom's Children (1938, enlarged 1940), a collection of four long stories, received the Story prize for the best book submitted by anyone associated with the Federal Writers' Project. The stories tell of race prejudice in the South and contain graphic descriptions of lynchings. With the publication in 1940 of Native Son, Wright was considered not only the leading black author of the U.S. but also a major heir of the naturalistic tradition in his story of the tragedy of a black boy reared in the Chicago slums. The novel was successfully dramatized...
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