Harlem Renaissance-The Harlem Renaissance

Richard Wright as an American author of sometimes controversial novels
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.¹
Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, at Rucker's Plantation, between Roxie and the larger town, Natchez, Mississippi.² His autobiography, Black Boy, covers the interval in his life from 1912 until May 1936. Richard's father left the family when the boy was six years old, and he did not see him for another 25 years. After his single parent mother became incapacitated with a stroke, he was separated from his younger brother and lived briefly with his uncle. At that time, 12 years old, 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 Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived from early 1920 until late 1925.He later threatened to leave home because his Grandmother Wilson refused to permit him to work on Saturdays, the Adventist Sabbath. Early strife with his aunt and grandmother left him with a permanent, uncompromising hostility toward religious solutions to everyday problems.³
In 1923, Wright had excelled in grade school and then junior high school, and was made class valedictorian of Smith Robertson junior high school. He was assigned to write a paper to be delivered at a public auditorium, at graduation. Later, he was called to the principal's office, and the principal gave him a prepared speech to present in place of his assignment. Richard challenged the principal, and said "...the people are coming to hear the students, and I won't make a speech that you've written".⁴ The principal threatened him obliquely by suggesting Richard might not graduate if he persisted, despite having passed all the examinations, and then tried to entice Richard with an opportunity to become a teacher. Determined not to be called an Uncle Tom, Richard refused to deliver the principal's carefully prepared valedictory address that would not offend the white school officials. The principal put pressure on one of Richard's uncles to speak to the boy and get him to change his mind, but when his uncle tried to persuade Richard, he was adamant about delivering his speech, and refused to let his uncle edit it. Despite further pressure from his classmates, Richard delivered his speech as he had planned.
In September that year, Wright registered for mathematics, English, and history courses at the new Lanier High School in Jackson, but had to stop attending classes after a few weeks of irregular attendance because he needed to earn money for family expenses. The next year, in his plan to become independent and call for his mother to live with him when he could support her, Wright moved on his own to Memphis, TN in November 1925. The following year, his mother and brother came to live with him, and the family was reunited. Shortly thereafter, Richard resolved to leave the Jim Crow life and go to Chicago.
His childhood in Mississippi as well as in Memphis, TN, and Elaine, AR shaped his lasting impressions of American racism. At the age of 15, while in eighth grade, Wright published his first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre", in the local Black newspaper Southern Register, but no extant copies survive.⁵ He gave a brief description of the story about a villain who sought a widow's home in Chapter 7 of Black Boy ".
In 1937, Richard Wright moved to New York, where he forged new ties with Communist Party members. He worked on the WPA Writers' Project guidebook to the city, New York Panorama (1938), and wrote the book's essay on Harlem. Wright became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker. In the summer and fall he wrote over two hundred articles for the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine New Challenge. The year was also a landmark for Wright because he met and developed a friendship with Ralph Ellison that would last for years, and he learned that he would receive the Story magazine first prize of five hundred dollars for his short story "Fire and Cloud".⁶
After Wright received the Story magazine prize in early 1938, he shelved his manuscript of Lawd Today and dismissed his literary agent, John Troustine. He hired Paul Reynolds, the well-known agent of Paul Laurence Dunbar, to represent him. Meanwhile, the Story Press offered Harper all of Wright's prize-entry stories for a book, and Harper agreed to publish them.
Wright gained national attention for the collection of four short stories entitled Uncle Tom's Children (1938). He based some stories on lynching in the Deep South. The publication and favorable reception of Uncle Tom's Children improved Wright's status with the Communist party and enabled him to establish a reasonable degree of financial stability. He was appointed to the editorial board of New Masses, and Granville Hicks, prominent literary critic and Communist sympathizer, introduced him at leftist teas in Boston. By May 6, 1938, excellent sales had provided Wright with enough money to move to Harlem, where he began writing the novel Native Son (1940).
The collection also earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to complete Native Son. It was selected by the Book of the Month Club as its first book by an African-American author. The lead character, Bigger Thomas, represented the limitations that society placed on African Americans as he could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge by committing heinous acts.
Wright was criticized for his works' concentration on violence. In the case of Native Son, people complained that he portrayed a black man in ways that seemed to confirm whites' worst fears. The period following publication of Native Son was a busy time for Wright. In July 1940 he went to Chicago to do research for a folk history of blacks to accompany photographs selected by Edwin Rosskam. While in Chicago he visited the American Negro Exhibition with Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps and Claude McKay.
He then went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he and Paul Green collaborated on a dramatic version of Native Son. In January 1941 Wright received the prestigious Spingarn Medal for noteworthy achievement by a black. Native Son opened on Broadway, with Orson Welles as director, to generally favorable reviews in March 1941. A volume of photographs almost completely drawn from the files of the Farm Security Administration, with text by Wright, Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, was published in October 1941 to wide critical acclaim.
Wright's semi-autobiographical Black Boy (1945) described his early life from Roxie up until his move to Chicago at age 19, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his troubles with white employers and social isolation. American Hunger, published posthumously in 1977, was originally intended as the second volume of Black Boy. The Library of America edition restored it to that form.
This book detailed Wright's involvement with the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942. The book implied he left earlier, but his withdrawal was not made public until 1944. In the volumes' restored form, the diptych structure compares the certainties and intolerance of organized communism, the "bourgeois" books and condemned members, with similar qualities to fundamentalist organized religion. Wright disapproved of the purges in the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, he continued to believe in far-left democratic solutions to political problems.
After becoming a French citizen in 1947, Wright continued to travel through Europe, Asia, and Africa. These experiences were the basis of numerous nonfiction works. In 1949, Wright contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; his essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier and was derived from the unpublished portion of Black Boy. He was invited to join the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. The CIA and FBI had Wright under surveillance starting in 1943. Wright was blacklisted by Hollywood movie studio executives in the 1950s, but, in 1950, starred as the teenager Bigger Thomas (Wright was 42) in an Argentinian film version of Native Son.
Black Boy became an instant best-seller upon its publication in 1945. Wright's stories published during the 1950s disappointed some critics who said that his move to Europe alienated him from African Americans and separated him from his emotional and psychological roots. Many of Wright's works failed to satisfy the rigid standards of New Criticism as the works of younger black writers gained in popularity. During the 1950s Wright grew more internationalist in outlook. While he accomplished much as an important public literary and political figure with a worldwide reputation, his creative work did decline. ⁷
While interest in Black Boy ebbed during the 1950s, it has remained one of his best selling books, and there has been a resurgence of interest in it by critics. Black Boy remains a vital work of historical, sociological, and literary significance whose seminal portrayal of one black man's search for self-actualization in a racist society made possible the works of such successive writers as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. It is generally agreed that Wright's influence in Native Son is not a matter of literary style or technique. His impact, rather, has been on ideas and attitudes, and his work has been a force in the social and intellectual history of the United States in the last half of the 20th century. "Wright was one of the people who made me conscious of the need to struggle", said writer Amiri Baraka.⁸
During the 1970s and 1980s, scholars published critical essays about Wright in prestigious journals. Richard Wright conferences were held on university campuses from Mississippi to New Jersey. A new film version of Native Son, with a screenplay by Richard Wesley, was released in December 1986. Certain Wright novels became required reading in a number of American high schools, universities and colleges.
"Recent critics have called for a reassessment of Wright's later work in view of his philosophical project. Notably, Paul Gilroy has argued that 'the depth of his philosophical interests has been either overlooked or misconceived by the almost exclusively literary enquiries that have dominated analysis of his writing'." "His most significant contribution, however, was his desire to accurately portray blacks to white readers, thereby destroying the white myth of the patient, humorous, subservient black man".⁹
In April 2009, Wright was featured on a U.S. postage stamp. The 61-cent, two-ounce rate stamp is the 25th installment of the literary arts series and features a portrait of Richard Wright in front of snow–swept tenements on the South Side of Chicago, a scene that recalls the setting of Native Son.¹⁰
In 2009, Wright was featured in a 90-minute documentary about the WPA Writers' Project entitled Soul of a People: Writing America's Story. His life and work during the 1930s is also highlighted in the companion book, Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America.