10 facts about richard wright
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Richard Wright
(1908-1960)
Who Was Richard Wright?
Richard Wright was an African American writer and poet who published his first short story at the age of 16. Later, he found employment with the Federal Writers' Project and received critical acclaim for Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of four stories. He is well-known for his 1940 bestseller Native Son and his 1945 autobiography, Black Boy.
Early Life
Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, in Roxie, Mississippi. The grandson of slaves and the son of a sharecropper, Wright was largely raised by his mother, a caring woman who became a single parent after her husband left the family when Wright was five years old.
Schooled in Jackson, Mississippi, Wright only managed to get a ninth-grade education, but he was a voracious reader and showed early on that he had a way with words. When he was 16, a short story of his was published in a Southern African American newspaper, an encouraging sign for future prospects. After leaving school, Wright worked a series of odd jobs, and in his free time, he delved
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Author Richard Nathaniel Wright, who was named after both his maternal and paternal grandfathers, was born on 4 September 1908 on Rucker’s Plantation in the Cranfield-Roxie area in northeast Adams County, some twenty miles from Natchez. His father, Nathan Wright, was a sharecropper, and his mother, Ella Wilson Wright, was a schoolteacher. It is reasonable to believe that his parentage and his childhood and youth in Mississippi had a strong impact on his personality and on the works he published from the mid-1930s until his death on 28 November 1960 in Paris. His father was a laborer, with hands that worked the earth, dealing stoically with the concrete materials of life; in sharp contrast, his mother was a thinker, a dreamer whose mind explored the realms of abstract ideas and the imagination. Wright, who went on to become one of Mississippi’s most famous native sons, combined the best qualities of both parents.
Wright and his younger brother, Leon Alan Wright, experienced displacement and poverty during their earliest years. As Wright explains in dramatic detail in his autobiog
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Theodore Dreiser
Jump To: Overview :: Biography :: Native Son
Overview
Full Name: Richard Nathaniel WrightDate and Location of Birth
September 4, 1908
Roxie, Mississippi
Date of Location Death
November 28, 1960
Paris, France
Parents
Nathaniel Wright
Ella Wilson
Married
Dhimah Rose Meadman (Divorced)
Ellen Poplar
Biography
Richard Wright was born on Rucker's Plantation (around Roxie, Mississippi), to an illiterate sharecropper named Nathaniel Wright and his schoolteacher wife, Ella Wilson. Around the time that Wright was five or six-years-old, his father left the family for another woman and forced Wright's mother to take a number of small dead-end jobs away from the house in order to keep the family afloat. Eventually Wright and his brother had to spend a bit of time in aCopyright ©soybeck.pages.dev 2025