Who is Richard Wright?

Answer 1

he wrote a lot of great and controversial books

his most famousbooks are native son and black boy which talk about race relations and racism in teh first half of the 20th century

you should really read native son its amazing

here's a bio

http://www.olemiss.edu/depts/english/ms-writers/dir/wright_richard/

Answer 2

Wright, the grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, a tiny town located about 22 miles east of Natchez, in Franklin County. Wright's family soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee. While in Memphis, his father Nathaniel, a former sharecropper, abandoned them. Wright, his brother, and mother Ella, a schoolteacher, soon moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with relatives. In Jackson, Wright grew up and attended public high school. Here, he formed some of his most lasting early impressions of American racism before eventually moving back to Memphis in 1927, where he became acquainted with the works of such literary figures as H. L. Mencken.

Eventually, he moved to Chicago, where he began to write and became active in the John Reed Clubs, eventually joining the Communist Party. He moved to New York City to become the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper, also contributing to the New Masses magazine. Wright gained positive contact with whites during his communist activity—which he had only experienced on one occasion in the south—but became frustrated by the party's theoretical rigidity and disapproved of purges in the Soviet Union.

Wright first gained attention for his collection of (originally) four short stories, Uncle Tom's Children (1937). In this work he fictionalised the incidents of lynching in the Deep South. He followed with a novel Native Son (1940), which was the first Book of the Month Club recommendation by an African American author. Here the lead character, Bigger Thomas, was intended by Wright to be a representation of the limitations that society placed on African Americans, that Thomas could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge through the heinous acts that he commits. Wright was much criticized for both works' concentration on violence, and, in the case of Native Son, for a portrayal of a black person which might be seen as confirming whites' worst fears.

Wright is also renowned for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his difficulties with white employers and social isolation. American Hunger, (published posthumously in 1977) was originally intended as the second book of Black Boy and is restored to this form in the Library of America edition. This details his involvement with the John Reed Clubs and then (ambivalently) the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, though the book implies that it was earlier, and the fact was not made public until 1944. In its restored form, its diptych structure mirrors the certainties and intolerance of organised communism, (the "bourgeois" books and condemned members) with similar qualities in fundamentalist organized religion. During McCarthyism, his membership in the Communist Party resulted in him and his works being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.

In May 1946 he travelled to France as a guest of the French government, where he was well-received by French intellectuals. It was after this visit that he settled in Paris to become a permanent American expatriate. Wright had a mixed marriage and he had become frustrated by the attitudes of people they came in contact with as a couple.

In 1949 he contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; the essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier. This led to an invitation to become involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. That organization, with the FBI, had Wright under surveillance from 1943.

In 1955, he travelled to Indonesia for the Bandung Conference and recorded his observations about the event in his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Wright was very enthusiastic about the possibilities posed by this meeting between recently-oppressed nations.

Other works include The Outsider (1953) and White Man, Listen! (1957), as well as a collection of short stories, Eight Men, published after his death in 1961. His works primarily deal with the poverty, anger, and protest of northern and southern urban Blacks.

In the last years of his life, Richard Wright became enamored with the Japanese poetry form haiku and he wrote over 4,000 of them. In 1998 a book was published ("Haiku: This Other World" ISBN 0-385-72024-6) with the 817 haiku that he preferred.

Wright contracted amoebic dysentery on a visit to the British Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, and despite various treatments, his health continued to deteriorate over the next three years. He died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He is interred there in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery.


GO TO:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wright_%28author%29

Answer 3

Wright, the grandson of slaves, was born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, a tiny town located about 22 miles east of Natchez, in Franklin County. Wright's family soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee. While in Memphis, his father Nathaniel, a former sharecropper, abandoned them. Wright, his brother, and mother Ella, a schoolteacher, soon moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with relatives. In Jackson, Wright grew up and attended public high school. Here, he formed some of his most lasting early impressions of American racism before eventually moving back to Memphis in 1927, where he became acquainted with the works of such literary figures as H. L. Mencken.

Eventually, he moved to Chicago, where he began to write and became active in the John Reed Clubs, eventually joining the Communist Party. He moved to New York City to become the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, a communist newspaper, also contributing to the New Masses magazine. Wright gained positive contact with whites during his communist activity—which he had only experienced on one occasion in the south—but became frustrated by the party's theoretical rigidity and disapproved of purges in the Soviet Union.

Wright first gained attention for his collection of (originally) four short stories, Uncle Tom's Children (1937). In this work he fictionalised the incidents of lynching in the Deep South. He followed with a novel Native Son (1940), which was the first Book of the Month Club recommendation by an African American author. Here the lead character, Bigger Thomas, was intended by Wright to be a representation of the limitations that society placed on African Americans, that Thomas could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge through the heinous acts that he commits. Wright was much criticized for both works' concentration on violence, and, in the case of Native Son, for a portrayal of a black person which might be seen as confirming whites' worst fears.

Wright is also renowned for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago, his clashes with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his difficulties with white employers and social isolation. American Hunger, (published posthumously in 1977) was originally intended as the second book of Black Boy and is restored to this form in the Library of America edition. This details his involvement with the John Reed Clubs and then (ambivalently) the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, though the book implies that it was earlier, and the fact was not made public until 1944. In its restored form, its diptych structure mirrors the certainties and intolerance of organised communism, (the "bourgeois" books and condemned members) with similar qualities in fundamentalist organized religion. During McCarthyism, his membership in the Communist Party resulted in him and his works being blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studio bosses in the 1950s.

In May 1946 he travelled to France as a guest of the French government, where he was well-received by French intellectuals. It was after this visit that he settled in Paris to become a permanent American expatriate. Wright had a mixed marriage and he had become frustrated by the attitudes of people they came in contact with as a couple.

In 1949 he contributed to the anti-communist anthology The God That Failed; the essay had been published in the Atlantic Monthly three years earlier. This led to an invitation to become involved with the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which he rejected, correctly suspecting that it had connections with the CIA. That organization, with the FBI, had Wright under surveillance from 1943.

In 1955, he travelled to Indonesia for the Bandung Conference and recorded his observations about the event in his book The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Wright was very enthusiastic about the possibilities posed by this meeting between recently-oppressed nations.

Other works include The Outsider (1953) and White Man, Listen! (1957), as well as a collection of short stories, Eight Men, published after his death in 1961. His works primarily deal with the poverty, anger, and protest of northern and southern urban Blacks.

In the last years of his life, Richard Wright became enamored with the Japanese poetry form haiku and he wrote over 4,000 of them. In 1998 a book was published ("Haiku: This Other World" ISBN 0-385-72024-6) with the 817 haiku that he preferred.

Wright contracted amoebic dysentery on a visit to the British Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1957, and despite various treatments, his health continued to deteriorate over the next three years. He died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He is interred there in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery.

Answer 4

Richard Wright
One of America’s greatest black writers, Richard Wright was also among the first African American writers to achieve literary fame and fortune, but his reputation has less to do with the color of his skin than with the superb quality of his work. He was born and spent the first years of his life on a plantation, not far from the affluent city of Natchez on the Mississippi River, but his life as the son of an illiterate sharecropper was far from affluent. Though he spent only a few years of his life in Mississippi, those years would play a key role in his two most important works: Native Son, a novel, and his autobiography, Black Boy.

Richard Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, on September 4, 1908. His father, Nathaniel, was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother, Ella Wilson, was a well-educated school teacher. The family’s extreme poverty forced them to move to Memphis when Richard was six years old. Soon after, his father left the family for another woman and his mother was forced to work as a cook in order to support the family. Richard briefly stayed in an orphanage during this period as well. His mother became ill while living in Memphis, so the family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and lived with Ella’s mother.

Richard’s grandmother, a devout Seventh Day Adventist, enrolled him in a Seventh Day Adventist school near Jackson at the age of twelve. He also attended a local public school for a few years. In the spring of 1924 the Southern Register, a local black newspaper, printed his first story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre.” From 1925 to 1927, he worked several menial jobs in Jackson and Memphis. During this time he continued writing and discovered the works of H.L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sinclair Lewis.

In 1927 he moved to Chicago, where he became a Post Office clerk until the Great Depression forced him to take on various temporary positions. During this time he became involved with the Communist Party, writing articles and stories for both the Daily Worker and New Masses. In April 1931 he published his first major story, “Superstition,” in Abbot’s Monthly.

His ties to the Communist Party continued after moving to New York in 1937. He became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker and helped edit a short-lived literary magazine, New Challenge. In 1938 four of his stories were collected as Uncle Tom’s Children. He then received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which allowed him to complete his first novel, Native Son (1940). In 1939, he married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white dancer, but the two separated shortly thereafter. In 1941, he married Ellen Poplar, a white member of the Communist Party, and they had two daughters, Julia in 1942 and Rachel in 1949.

In 1944 he broke with the Communist Party but continued to follow liberal ideologies. After moving to Paris in 1946, Wright became friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus while going through an Existentialist phase best depicted by his second novel, The Outsiders (1953). In 1954 he published a minor novel, Savage Holiday. After becoming a French citizen in 1947, he continued to travel throughout Europe, Asia, and Africa, and these experiences led to a number of nonfiction works.

In his last years, he was plagued by illness (aerobic dysentary) and financial hardship. Throughout this period he wrote approximately 4,000 English Haikus (some of which were recently published for the first time) and another novel, The Long Dream, in 1958. He also prepared another collection of short stories, Eight Men, which was published after his death on November 28, 1960.

Among his other works are two autobiographies. Black Boy, published in 1945, covered his youth in the segregated South, and American Hunger, published posthumously in 1977, treated his membership and disillusionment with the Communist Party.

Many of Wright’s works failed to satisfy the rigid standards of the New Criticism, but his evolution as a writer has interested readers throughout the world. The importance of his works comes not from his technique and style, but from the impact his ideas and attitudes have had on American life. Wright is seen as a seminal figure in the black revolution that followed his earliest novels. Bigger Thomas, the central figure of Native Son, is a murderer, but his situation galvanized the thought of black leaders toward the desire to confront the world and help shape the future of their race.

As his vision of the world extended beyond the U.S., his quest for solutions expanded to include the politics and economics of emerging third world nations. Wright’s development was marked by an ability to respond to the currents of the social and intellectual history of his time. His most significant contribution, however, was his desire to accurately portray blacks to white readers, thereby destroying the white myth of the patient, humorous, subservient black man.

Answer 5

a guy.. or nowadays.. could b a chick?