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American Literature: The Modernist Period: Wright

A research topic guide on the modernist period of American literature.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright (1908 - 1960) was an African American writer known for Native Son, Black Boy, Uncle Tom's Children, and more. His literature dealt with racial themes, including discrimination and violence. 

Research & Reference

Richard Wright: Black Boy

This program presents a biography of Richard Wright, author of Black Boy and Native Son, taking viewers from his impoverished childhood to his involvement in Chicago’s Black Renaissance, the Communist Party, and the witch-hunts of the McCarthy era, to his exile and death in Paris. Underwritten by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the film skillfully intercuts dramatic excerpts from Wright’s work with historical footage and the recollections of friends, associates, and luminaries that include Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker, and Wright’s daughter, Julia. (86 minutes)

Source: Films on Demand

Author's Works & Perspectives

Native Son

With an introduction by Arnold Rampersad "The Library of America has insured that most of Wright's major texts are now available as he wanted them to be read." --Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny: by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection of the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America. "This new edition gives us a Native Son in which the key line in the key scene is restored to the great good fortune of American letters. The scene as we now have it is central both to an ongoing conversation among African-American writers and critics and to the consciousness among all American readers of what it means to live in a multi-racial society in which power splits among racial lines." --Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times

Richard Wright

Upon meeting thirty-three-year-old Richard Wright in 1941, the renowned sociologist Robert Park famously demanded, "How in hell did you happen?" Having been born into poverty in a sharecropper's cabin in 1908, Wright managed to complete only an eighth-grade education. Yet by the time he met Park he was the best-selling author of Native Son (1940), a searing indictment of racism that is a classic of American literature. Although Wright died prematurely at the age of fifty-two, he published nearly a dozen books and left behind hundreds of unpublished manuscript pages. Jennifer Jensen Wallach's biography--which we will publish on the fiftieth anniversary of his mysterious death--traces Wright from his obscure origins to international fame, from the cotton fields of Mississippi to his expatriate home of Paris. She highlights Wright's various attempts to answer the driving question of his life: "How can I live freely?" Seeking answers, Wright traveled widely and became involved with many of the most important intellectual and political movements of his day, including Marxism, existentialism, and Pan-Africanism. Along the way he struggled to balance his own fierce sense of individualism with a desire to be a spokesperson for oppressed people throughout the globe. His ardent prose infuriated, bewildered, and inspired a generation of African-American writers and activists. It also attracted the attention of American intelligence agencies, which placed Wright under surveillance for most of his adult life. To both his critics and admirers, Wright proved the truth of his claim that words are among the most powerful of weapons.

Richard Wright: Native Son, Author And Activist

NATIVE SON, AUTHOR & ACTIVIST. RICHARD WRIGHT was an African-American author of novels, short stories and non-fiction that dealt with powerful themes and controversial topics. Much of his works concerned racial themes that helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century. Born on a plantation in Mississippi, Wright was a descendent of the first slaves who arrived in Jamestown Massachusetts. This program follows his arduous path from sharecropper to literary giant. Through authors like H.L. Menken, Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, he discovered that literature could be used as a catalyst for social change. In 1937 Wright moved to New York and his work began to garner national attention for it's political and social commentary. Much of Wright's writing focused on the African American community and experience; his novel Native Son won him a Guggenheim Fellowship and was adapted to the Broadway stage with Orson Welles directing in 1941. In 1946, Wright was fed up with America's treatment of its black citizens and became an expatriate in Paris, France where he joined a circle that included famous Existentialists Jean-Paul Sarte and Albert Camus. Though he quit his formal education at only 15 years old, Richard Wright was a major influence on world literature & politics, and brought the black experience to the forefront of social discourse.

Source: Kanopy