Essay, Biography or Paragraph on “Richard (Nathaniel) Wright ” great author complete biography for Class 10, Class 12 and Graduation and other classes.

Richard (Nathaniel) Wright 

(1908 – 1960)

Wright was an American short story writer and novelist, whose best-known work, Native Son, was published in 1940. The book immediately established Wright as an important author and a spokesman on conditions facing African-Americans. It gained a large multiracial readership and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. He grew up in poverty His grandparents had been slaves and his father, who was an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, left home when Richard was five. His mother was a schoolteacher. The family moved to Memphis, where she found employment as a cook. He attended school sporadically, living with his relatives in Arkansas and Mississippi. However, he continued to teach himself, secretly borrowing books from the whites-only library in Memphis. Wright had various jobs, among them a newspaper delivery boy and as an assistant to an insurance agent. His spare-time employment enabled Wright to buy schoolbooks, pulp magazines, and dime novels, all of which he read avidly. Wright attended junior high school in Jackson, Mississippi, and graduated in 1925.

In 1932 Wright joined the Communist Party and was an executive secretary of the local John Reed Club of writers and authors of Chicago. He wrote poetry for such journals as Left  Front, Mid-land Left, Anvil, International Literature, Partisan Review, and New Masses. In 1937 he moved to New York City becoming editor of Daily Worker and later the vice-president of the League for American Writers. In 1938 Wright published Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of stories of Southern racism, which was reissued in expanded form two years later. The story Fire and Cloud was given the O. Henry Memorial award in 1938. Uncle Tom’s Children helped Wright win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to devote the rest of his life to writing. In the late 1930s Wright appointed to the literature editorial board of New Masses, and was denounced by the House Special Committee on Un-American Activities investigating the Federal Writers’ Project. In 1940 Wright’s Native Son became an instant best seller. In some book-stores stock was sold out within hours; the novel sold 215,000 copies in the first three weeks.

During his years in France Wright spent much of his time sup-porting nationalist movements in Africa. In 1953 he travelled in Africa, gathering material for Black Power (1954). Among his works in the 1950s was Savage Holiday (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), about Asia Pagan Spain (1957), a travel book, White Man, Listen! (1958), a collection of lectures on racial injustice, and The Long Dream (1958), a novel set in Mississippi. American Hunger, a sequel to Black Boy, appeared in 1977.