Books by Richard Wright

 Richard Wright: Early Works  / Black Boy  / Native Son  / Uncle Tom's Children / 12 Million Black Voices  / Richard Wright: Later Works

The Outsider  /  Pagan Spain /  Black Power  /  White Man Listen!  / The Color Curtain /  Savage Holiday / The Long Dream

Eight Men: Short Stories  / Haiku / American Hunger /  Lawd Today!

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Richard N. Wright

(1908-1960)

Author of  Uncle Tom's Children  & Native Son

Richard Wright was a brilliant writer whose collection of short stories (novellas), Uncle Tom's Children, won a $500-prize competition in 1938. Native Son, the March 1940 selection of the Book-of-the-Month club, was his first full-length novel.

In 1935, Wright got on the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. By the time he had sold poetry, articles and some stories to little magazines, and was working on his first, Uncle Tom's Children.

He went to New York in 1937, lived from hand to mouth for some months, then got on the Writers' Project. he wrote the essay on Harlem in New York Panorama. he also did some work on the Daily Worker (he says he never got orders from Stalin to cover anything) and became a contributing editor of the New Masses. His book of four long short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, part of which had originally appeared in in the New Caravan, was a success. The stories won high critical praise; what one critic had to say of them is characteristic: "Uncle Tom's Children has its full share of violence and brutality; violent deaths occur in three stories and the mob goes to work in all four. Violence has long been an important element in fiction about Negroes, just as it is in their life. But where Julia Peterkin in her pastorals and Roark Bradford in his levee farces show violence to be the reaction of primitives unadjusted to modern civilization, Richard Wright shows it as the way in which civilization keeps the Negro in his place. And he knows what he is writing about."

In 1939 Wright got a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled him to quit the Project and complete his novel, Native Son. the material for this, he says, was based partly on boys he met in a Chicago rehabilitation school for Negro "Dead End" kids, and partly on the Robert Nixon case. Nixon was a young Negro who died in the electric chair in Chicago in August 1938 for killing a white woman with a brick.

Native Son is a powerful, intensely gripping story of a Negro boy driven to crime by reason of a Chicago tenement environment and the pressure of racial injustice.  The novel was thought to be the most striking novel to appear after The Grapes of Wrath. Critics have acclaimed Native Son as the most honest and important work written about the American Negro, daring because its author, himself a Negro, has presented in frank terms the savage brutality of a black boy "gone bad." Wright has a good reportorial style: simple, direct, at times staccato, on occasion rising to heights of poetic intensity. Though compared to Dostoyevsky due to its study of crime and punishment, the story of Native Son rather parallels, in pattern and theme, Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Dresier's white boy and Wright's black boy are both social misfits; both are victims of the adolescent lure of sex and money; both commit crime not deliberately but accidentally; both are condemned to the electric chair

And the conclusion is the same: that environment was responsible for their crimes--though in the case of Wright's character there is also the frustrating, neurosis-producing effect of racial suppression. Bigger Thomas, who is twenty years old, lives with his mother, sister, and younger brother in one rat-infested room, for which they pay $8, in Chicago's South Side Black belt. he has been in a reform school; he and his gang commit petty neighborhood thieving; he is surly, fearful, and a bully. he and his friend Gus like to imagine what they'd do if they were white.

But Bigger gets a job as chauffeur to a millionaire philanthropist, Dalton, who makes his money in Negro tenement real estate. His daughter, Mary, is a radical; she asks Bigger to drive her that evening to a meeting with her Communist friend, Jan. When they try to treat him as an equal--shake hands with him, make him eat with them--Bigger is puzzled, scared, resentful.. They all have drinks; Mary, very intoxicated, is brought, half-carried, to her room at two in the morning by Bigger. Her mother who is blind comes into the bedroom and calls to the daughter. Crazed by the fear that Mary will answer and betray his presence, Bigger puts a pillow over the girl's face, and without meaning to, smothers her.

Frantic then, he burns her body in the furnace hoping to leave no trace of the crime, and tries to implicate Jan, the Communist: dimly he knows that the Reds are also an object of mob hatred. When the Negro mistress, Bessie, learns of this crime, he kills her to protect himself and throws her body down the air shaft of an old building. it is not long, however, before the death of Mary Dalton is traced to him (to the authorities, the Negro girl's death was negligible, as he knew it would be) and Bigger is caught while trying to escape over the tenement housetops.

The bloodshed, the horror, the tension--the swiftly paced melodramatic sequence of events--are at this point over. the latter part of the book is about Bigger's trial and defense: an exposition of an individual tragedy that symbolizes the tragedy of a race. it is Jan, the Communist, who calls on Bigger in his cell (and this time Bigger knows him for a friend) and arranges to have Max, a radical lawyer, defend him. 

Max's plea for Bigger, which the author bases to some extent on the arguments used by Clarence Darrow in the Loeb-Leopold case, follows the social premise that the hate of the whites toward Bigger is a subconscious feeling of guilt: by keeping him within rigid and sordid limits, they themselves actually were responsible for the murder of Mary Dalton. Bigger killed in order to keep from being killed, i.e., to preserve his integrity as a person, an individual. Max's plea becomes a defense of the twelve million Negroes in America--a nation without social, economic, or property rights.

Naturally, no plea can save Bigger. he is sentenced to die. As he says: "Now I come to think of it, it seems like something that just had to be." And Bigger, searching for some meaning in his act, some self-justification, tells max: "When a man kills, it's for something. . . I didn't know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for 'em."

And for the first time in his life, because he had done something the white world really noticed, he felt a sense of freedom and power. he had always wanted, in his confused groping way, to belong, to feel an equality with other men. in prison he at last comes to know that Max, and Jan, accept him on man-to-man terms. And he can accept them. Bigger's last words, implicit with his self-realization and self-redemption, are: "Tell Mister. . . Tell Jan hello."

Source: Current Biography (1940)

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update 7 October 2007