(1908-1960)

American writer, whose novels and short stories helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Wright publicly opposed racial prejudice and was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson in the United States for his generation of blacks. His most acclaimed works are the novel Native Son (1940) and the autobiographical memoir Black Boy (1945).

Wright was born outside of Natchez, Mississippi. His father left the family when Wright was still young and his mother, a schoolteacher, was stricken with a paralyzing illness when he was a child. Raised mostly by relatives, Wright was an unruly student and quit school at the age of 15. He subsequently moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where he worked at odd jobs and began a remarkable process of self-education, which included having a white friend borrow books for him from the segregated public library.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, Wright worked on various writing and editing projects for the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago. Wright's first book, Uncle Tom's Children (1938; revised 1940), consisted of four novellas that dramatize racial prejudice. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City. He worked there on a Writers' Project guidebook to the city entitled New York Panorama (1938) and wrote the book's essay on the Harlem neighborhood. Wright had joined the Communist Party while in Chicago, and once in New York he published reviews and political essays in Communist Party publications such as New Masses. Wright remained an active member of the party into the 1940s before leaving over ideological issues.

After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1939, Wright completed his novel Native Son. The book explores the violent psychological pressures that drive Bigger Thomas, a young black man, to murder. Native Son was an immediate sensation with white and black readers, and this wide appeal helped make Wright the first black American writer to have a best-seller. With dramatist Paul Green, Wright adapted the story for the stage in 1941. In 1950 he produced a film version.

Wright moved to France in the late 1940s. He published several more novels during his lifetime, including The Outsider (1953), and The Long Dream (1958). The short-story collection Eight Men (1961) and the novel Lawd Today (1963) were published after Wright's death.

Wright also produced a considerable body of nonfiction. His first autobiographical work, Black Boy, reveals in bitter personal terms the devastating impact of racial prejudice on young black males in the United States. Wright's other nonfiction works include Black Power (1954); The Color Curtain (1956); Pagan Spain (1957), and American Hunger (1977), a second autobiographical work. In 1941 Wright collaborated with photographer Edwin Rosskam on 12 Million Black Voices, a folk history of blacks in America.