Richard Wright (author)

Richard Wright
Wright in a 1939 photograph by Carl Van Vechten
Born	Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908-09-04)September 4, 1908 Plantation, Roxie, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	November 28, 1960(1960-11-28) (aged 52) Paris, France
Occupation	Novelist, poet, essayist, short story writer
Nationality	American, French
Genre	Drama, fiction, non-fiction, autobiography
Notable works	Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, The Outsider

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, at Rucker's Plantation, between the train town of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. His autobiography, Black Boy, covers the interval in his life from 1912 until May 1936. He was the son of Nathan Wright (c.1880-c. 1940) and Ella (Wilson) (b.1884 Mississippi- d.Jan 13, 1959 Chicago, Illinois}. His parents were born free after the Civil War; both sets of his grandparents had been born into slavery and freed as a result of the war. Each of his grandfathers had taken part in the US Civil War and gained freedom through service: his paternal grandfather Nathan Wright (1842–1904) had served in the 28th United States Colored Troops; his maternal grandfather Richard Wilson (1847–1921) escaped from slavery in the South to serve in the US Navy as a Landsman in April 1865.

Richard's father left the family when the boy was six years old, and he did not see him for 25 years. In 1916 his mother Ella moved with Richard and his younger brother to live with her sister Maggie (Wilson) and her husband Silas Hoskins (born 1882) in Elaine, Arkansas. This was also in the area of the Mississippi Delta and former cotton plantations. The Wrights were forced to flee after Silas Hoskins "disappeared," reportedly killed by a white man who coveted his successful saloon business. After his single-parent mother became incapacitated by a stroke, Richard was separated from his younger brother and lived briefly with another uncle. At the age of 12, he had not yet had a single complete year of schooling. Soon Richard and his mother moved to the home of his maternal grandmother in the state capital, Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived from early 1920 until late 1925. There he was finally able to attend school regularly. After a year, at the age of 13 he entered the Jim Hill public school, where he was promoted to sixth grade after only two weeks. In his grandparents' pious, Seventh-Day Adventist household, Richard felt stifled by his aunt and grandmother, who tried to force him to pray so that he might find God. He later threatened to leave home because his Grandmother Wilson refused to permit him to work on Saturdays, the Adventist Sabbath. This early strife with his aunt and grandmother left him with a permanent, uncompromising hostility toward religious solutions to everyday problems.