Richard Wright

From Philosopedia

Wright, Richard (1908–1960)

Born on a Mississippi plantation in Roxie, the African American novelist Richard Wright came to be as estranged from God as he was by the oppressive religious practices of his Seventh-Day Adventist grandmother, according to Michel Fabre.

“On the whole,” Fabre adds, “he is a humanist whose values are not created by a transcendental entity but by the common workings of mankind. Wright makes no difference between religion and superstition in his short stories, “Superstition” and “Man, God Ain’t Like That.” He was mainly a rationalist, one who in Blueprint for Negro Writing, stated, “I abhor the very notion of mysticism.”

Wright's father deserted his mother when he was five, and a few years later his mother became incapacitated by a series of strokes. Further, according to Seymour-Smith, he was badly treated by his relatives, got no proper schooling, and suffered from his grandmother['s fanatical religion, which "turned him into a fierce if pessimistic humanist."

Black Boy (1945), wrote Seymour-Smith, "shows pure genius: it is never spoiled by didacticism, and its language reflects its story. Already here Wright is existentialist in the sense that he is describing a condition of nausea and a search for an identity.

In 1932 Wright joined the Communist party, leaving it in disillusionment in 1944. His work deals mainly with Southern racial problems, and Native Son (1942), an example of literary naturalism, tells of the victimized Negro fighting against the complicated political and social conditions of Chicago in the 1930s. Fabre states that “American naturalism, both as a philosophy and as a literary technique in the line of Dreiser and James Farrell, provided (Wright) only with a starting point; then either, as we suggested, a larger definition of naturalism must be given—if it is to encompass the many facets of Wright’s writing—or it must be recognized that he often overstepped its boundaries,” for he also included the fanciful, the mysterious, the irrational.

Wright died of a heart attack, was cremated, and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris, France.

{AAH, Michel Fabre; CE; Martin Seymour-Smith, Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature; TYD}