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richard Wright (september 4, 1908–november 28, 1960) robert Butler When the eminent sociologist Robert Park met Richard Wright in Chicago in 1941 he exclaimed, “How in hell did you happen?”1 For a relatively conservative thinker like Park who believed character was a function of environment and environment was slow to change, Wright was indeed a puzzle. For Wright, who had a year earlier achieved national prominence as writer with the publication of Native Son, had grown up in the worst possible environment, the brutally segregated world of the Deep South, but had somehow risen well above the society that had tried to put severe limitations on his development. By the time Wright died in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, he had achieved extraordinary success as a writer, political thinker, and cultural critic, becoming one who changed the course of American and African American literatures. He published seven novels, including Native Son, a book that transformed the ways Americans envision race by revealing truths that previous writers were either blind to or lacked the courage to confront. His two collections of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men, are noteworthy for their formal artistry and honest treatments of social problems that continue to startle and disturb their readers. Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy/American Hunger, has established itself as one of the seminal texts in American autobiographical writing . Moreover, he published more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays. His groundbreaking critical articles such as, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” and “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” set high aesthetic standards for black literature and established a solid theoretical framework that exerted strong influence over several generations of African American writers. Wright was also one of the first novelists to put American racial dilemmas into a global perspective, publishing three penetrating studies late in his career: Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain. He also achieved success as a poet, writing a powerful series of political poems at the outset of his career and creating a large body of haiku verse at the very end of his life. Very few other major American writers have achieved more success in such a wide variety of literary forms and intellectual inquiry. 342 • roBert BUtler Born to Ella and Nathan Wright on September 4, 1908, on Rucker’s Plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, Wright was raised in a world of stark poverty and systematic discrimination, a rigidly segregated society that was designed by those in power to make sure that he and other black people would stay forever in their “place.” And as Wright would later reveal in all of his writings about the South, this “place” was calculated not only to deprive him of the education he needed to rise in American life but was also intended to reduce him to a subhuman level and relegate him and his people to the extreme margins of American life. As Wright stressed in Black Boy, the social environment he experienced growing up in the Deep South put the most extreme limits on him, becoming a world “ringed by walls,”2 which would make him feel “forever condemned.” The South, therefore, was to Wright not only a naturalistic trap depriving him of economic opportunities and social development but also a Dantean hell that threatened his very soul. But Wright’s life, which has been so ably captured by biographers such as Michel Fabre, Margaret Walker, and Hazel Rowley, can also be regarded as the extraordinary American success story that astonished Robert Park. Facing long odds that very few, if any, major American writers had to face, Wright eventually used his extraordinary talent and will to overcome the repressive environment, which would have crushed many lesser writers. In the process, he became a seminal writer who changed the course of American and African American literatures. As Keneth Kinnamon has observed, Wright became “one of the most important figures of twentieth-century American fiction .”3 He revolutionized American and African American literatures because he was courageous enough to attack old taboos that previous writers dared not approach and created startling new images of black experience that continue to inspire writers and disturb readers. His early life was spent shifting back and forth between a bewildering number of locations in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee as his family sought suitable work that would provide them with some degree of security and stability. His father, an illiterate...

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