Richard Wright (writer)

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Richard Wright, photographed by Carl van Vechten , 1939

Richard Nathaniel Wright (born September 4, 1908 in Roxie , Mississippi , † November 28, 1960 in Paris ) was an American novelist and storyteller.

Life

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1908-1936

Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez , where his father Nathaniel was a smallholder and his mother Ella was a teacher. In 1914 the family moved to Memphis . After the father left the woman and his two boys, the mother had to work as a cook. When his mother fell ill, Richard Wright lived in an orphanage for some time until he finally moved with his mother and brother to live with his grandmother in Jackson, Mississippi . In Jackson, he attended a Seventh-day Adventist School and then a state school. In 1924 his first story, The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre, appeared in an African American newspaper.

In 1927 Wright moved to Chicago, where he worked for the Post Office. He read a lot during this time and was particularly influenced by the works of the literary critic Henry Louis Mencken and the naturalistic novelist Theodore Dreiser . Due to the global economic crisis , he lost his job and subsequently had to make ends meet with jobs. During this time, the John Reed Club, a cultural association close to the Communists, established contacts with the Communist Party , in whose organs Wright repeatedly published. Wright wrote his first novel Lawd Today during these years , but it was published posthumously in 1963.

1937 to 1946

In 1937 Wright moved to New York, where he was editor of the communist newspaper Daily Worker . In 1938 he published his first book Uncle Tom's Children , a collection of short stories about racism in the southern states. In 1939 he married the white dancer Dhimah Rose Meadman; however, the marriage was divorced again in 1940. His novel Native Son was also published that year - albeit in a mutilated version. For example, scenes depicting the sexual fantasies of the black protagonist Bigger Thomas in relation to white women were first printed in a new edition in 1993. Native Son was the first bestseller by an African-American author - over 200,000 copies were sold in three weeks. In 1941, a stage version of Native Son directed by Orson Welles was performed on Broadway . Also in 1941 Wright married Ellen Poplar, a white communist party member; two daughters, Julia and Rachel, were born in 1942 and 1949.

In 1942 Wright resigned from the Communist Party. In 1944 he published the essay I Tried to Be a Communist , in which he explained how the break came about. His autobiography Black Boy was published in 1945 and became a bestseller again. In 1946 Wright was invited to France. The experience of Europe, where he was seen not as an inferior black but primarily as an American, convinced him to finally move to France; afterwards he did not return to the USA.

1947 to 1960

In 1951 Wright ventured into uncharted territory. In the European film adaptation of his main work Native Son , he himself played the role of the main character Bigger Thomas.

In 1953, Wright's existentialist novel The Outsider was published and in 1954, Savage Holiday , his only novel with white protagonists. Both books had little success. In Paris, Wright made the acquaintance of the Afro-American authors Chester Himes and James Baldwin, who had also emigrated to France . While relations with Himes were good, a conflict soon developed between Wright and Baldwin. For the younger Baldwin (who was also homosexual, which led to additional tension), it was a question of liberating himself from the literary "overfather" Wright on the one hand, and on the other hand seeing in his works an outdated form of protest literature that did not meet his aesthetic standards .

In the 1950s Wright traveled extensively, including to Africa and Asia, and published a number of political and sociological texts. In 1954 Black Power appeared - with which Wright coined this slogan of the 1960s. The book is about the independence efforts of the African colonies , in particular Ghana (the former British colony Gold Coast ). 1959 appeared his last novel The Long Dream , the first part of a planned trilogy; a second part, American Hunger , completed in 1944, was published posthumously in 1977.

Towards the end of his life Wright was seriously ill; he died of a heart attack in 1960 and was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris .

Importance of his work

In the literary analysis of his work, Monika Plessner sees Richard Wright's literary work as the beginning of "a new era for Black American literature". With him träten "the problems of the black masses in concentrated form in the world literature." "Wright's protest was directed called the man in black and he refused human integrity of the people of whatever color, that is to humanity. As a result, the people he portrays are people without qualities - similar to Kafka, Brecht, Beckett ”.

With his embodiment of violence as an elementary constant of American life and the absolutization of deprivation and suffering of blacks, Native Son is generally considered to be one of the most uncompromising representations of the racial problem in African American literature. The youthful protagonist Bigger Thomas is shaped by a world of violence to which he can only react with blind violence. As a murderer, he is chased like a wild animal and sentenced to death in a show trial. Although Bigger Thomas is accompanied by two communists who try to make him aware that he himself has only become the victim of social conditions, the novel ends with the protagonist's radical existentialist avowal of what he did to create meaning in his life. At the same time, Wright distances himself from communist doctrine. The autobiographical novel Black Boy , which is considered to be one of the most moving autobiographies in Afro-American literature, is also shaped by an existentialist attitude. Wright's late work, in which he processed his experiences in encounters with Europe, Africa and Asia in novels, short prose, poems and writings, made him a spiritual father figure of Afro-American social realism and founded a school that began with William Attaway, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison , Chester Himes, and numerous other authors were close to nearly an entire generation of writers, at least for a limited time.

Works

  • Uncle Tom's Children: Four Novellas, 1938.
  • Bright and Morning Star, 1938.
  • Uncle Tom's Children: Five Long Stories, 1940.
  • Native Son , 1940 (German: Son of this country. Kein & Aber, Zurich-Berlin, 2019 ISBN 978-3-0369-5795-1 ).
  • Fire and Cloud, 1940.
  • 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States, 1941.
  • Black Boy , 1945.
  • 1950 Ed. Richard Crossman : The God that Failed . Hamilton, London. In German a god who wasn't. Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone , André Gide , Louis Fischer , Richard Wright, Stephen Spender describe their path to communism and their departure. Foreword by Richard Crossmann, afterword by Franz Borkenau . Europa-Verlag, Zurich / Konstanz / Vienna 1950, new edition 2005, ISBN 3-85665514-X . (Introduction by Wolfgang Leonhard and foreword by Richard Crossmann )
  • The Outsider, 1953.
  • Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, 1954.
  • Savage Holiday, 1954.
  • The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference, 1956.
  • Pagan Spain, 1957 (German: Heidnisches Spanien, Hamburg: Claassen, 1958).
  • White Man, Listen !, 1957.
  • The Long Dream, 1959.
  • Eight Men, 1961.
  • Lawd Today, 1963.
  • American Hunger, 1974 (edited from the estate, completed in 1944, German title: Schwarzer Hunger, 1980).

Film adaptations (selection)

  • 1986: Native Son
  • 1996: America's Dream
  • 2019: Native Son

literature

Biographies

  • Michel Fabre: The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright , revised 1993 edition.
  • Addison Gayle: Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son , 1980.
  • Hazel Rowley: Richard Wright: The Life and Times ; Chicago, Ill. [U. a.]: University of Chicago Press, 2008; ISBN 978-0-226-73038-7 .
  • Margaret Walker: Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius , 1988; 1993, ISBN 1-56743-004-X
  • Constance Webb: Richard Wright - A Biography , 1968.
  • John A. Williams: Richard Wright , 1969.

To the work

  • Evelyn G. Avery: Rebels and Victims , 1979.
  • Robert Bone: Richard Wright , 1959.
  • Jean Franco Goundard: The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright , 1992.
  • Joyce Ann Joyce: Richard Wright's Art of Tragedy , 1986.
  • Keneth Kinnamon: The Emergence of Richard Wright , 1972.
  • Monika Plessner : I am the darker brother · The literature of black Americans · From the spirituals to James Baldwin. Fischer Verlag Frankfurt a. M. 1979, ISBN 3-596-26454-5 , pp. 240-255.
  • Carol Polsgrove: Ending british rule in africa: writers in a common cause. Manchester Univ. Press, Manchester [u. a.], 2012, ISBN 978-0-7190-8901-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Plessner: I am the darker brother , p. 241.
  2. ↑ Plessner: I am the darker brother , p. 242.
  3. ↑ Cf. Maria Diedrich: Multiculturality - Afro-American Literature . In: Hubert Zapf u. a .: American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart and Weimar 2004, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , p. 430.
personal data
SURNAME Wright, Richard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wright, Richard Nathaniel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH 4th September 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Roxie, Mississippi (state)
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1960
Place of death Paris