Richard Wright | ClassicMotivation.com

Before the Work

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper who abandoned the family when Richard was five. His mother, Ella, suffered a series of strokes that left her partially paralyzed, and Wright spent much of his childhood being moved between relatives — some of whom he feared, some of whom he despised, some of whom he loved — across Mississippi and Arkansas. He lived in genuine poverty: sometimes hungry, sometimes without adequate clothing, sometimes without a stable place to sleep.

He was formally educated through ninth grade in Jackson, Mississippi, where he was the valedictorian of his class. He wanted to read. The public library in Memphis was closed to Black people. He forged a note from a white co-worker requesting books on his behalf, borrowed the co-worker's library card, and read H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson. These books, he later wrote, showed him that it was possible to use words as weapons.

He moved to Chicago during the Great Depression, joined the Communist Party in 1933 (and left in 1942), and began publishing short stories. Native Son, published in 1940, was the first book by a Black author to be selected by the Book of the Month Club and became the fastest-selling title in that organization's history up to that point. Black Boy, published in 1945, is the autobiography of his Mississippi childhood. He moved to Paris in 1947, where he lived until his death from a heart attack in 1960 at fifty-two.

The Philosophy

Wright's philosophical contribution is his unflinching documentation of what systematic racism does to human consciousness — not from the outside, as an observer, but from the inside, as someone who had lived it. Bigger Thomas in Native Son is not a villain and not a hero. He is a human being whose humanity has been systematically denied — whose rage, violence, and despair are not aberrations but the predictable products of the conditions that produced him. Wright is not excusing Bigger. He is explaining him, which is a more demanding and more disturbing intellectual act.

Black Boy makes the same argument autobiographically. The chapters describing his Mississippi childhood document with clinical precision how a society that denies a person education, opportunity, dignity, and basic safety also shapes that person's psychology — the chronic fear, the rage kept constantly in check, the hunger for something the environment refuses to supply, the deformations of character that survive even after the person has escaped the environment. These are not character flaws. They are the residue of specific historical conditions applied to a specific human being.

His insistence on this point — that human character is shaped by social conditions, that individual pathology has social causes, that moral judgment of individuals without examination of their circumstances is a form of intellectual dishonesty — connects him to every thinker in this library who has refused to reduce human development to a matter of individual will alone.

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.

Richard Wright — Native Son, 1940

Concepts Shaped

Resilience

Forging a library card to survive intellectually — the lengths a person will go to preserve their mind.

Self-Actualization

Men can starve from a lack of self-realization — his account of what human beings actually need.

Courage

Writing Native Son in 1940 — the most unflinching account of race and consciousness in American literature.

The Works

1945

Black Boy

His autobiography of his Mississippi childhood — one of the great American memoirs and the most honest account of what poverty and racism do to a developing mind.

1940

Native Son

The novel that changed American literature and American self-understanding. Read with the knowledge of when it was written.