Richard Wright (author)

\nRichard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 - November 28,1960) was an African-American author of novels and short stories. Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi, a tiny town located about 22 miles east of Natchez, in Franklin County, though his family moved soon to Memphis, where his father , a former sharecropper, abandoned them. Wright, his brother, and mother soon moved to Jackson, Mississippi, to live with relatives. In Jackson Wright grew up and attended high school and formed some of his most lasting early impressions of American racism before eventually moving about 1927 back to Memphis, 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 then New York City. In May 1946 he travelled to France as a guest of the French government, where he was well-received by French intellectuals. It was then that he settled in Paris to become a permanent American expatriate. The grandson of slaves, Wright became a respected author, best known for his novel Native Son (1940), which in 1951 was made into a film in Argentina, in which Wright played the title character, Bigger Thomas. He is also renowned for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which describes his early life from Roxie through his move to Chicago and involvement with the Communist Party, which he left in 1944. Its sequel, American Hunger, was published posthumously in 1977. Other works include 1953's The Outsider 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. Richard Wright died in Paris of a heart attack at the age of 52. He is interred there in Le Père Lachaise Cemetery. Wright, Richard\nWright, Richard