Literary Birthday – 4 September – Richard Wright

Richard Wright was born on 4 September 1908 and died on 28 November 1960.

Richard Wright Quotes

1. I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human.
2. The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
3. Whenever my environment had failed to support or nourish me, I had clutched at books…
4. The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.
5. All literature is protest.

Richard Wright was an African-American author of novels, short stories, poems, and nonfiction. His work helped reshape discussions about race and racism in mid-20th-century America.  Wright’s short stories helped him win a Guggenheim Fellowship, which provided the financial support he needed to complete Native Son. The book became a bestseller, and it was staged successfully as a play on Broadway in 1941 directed by Orson Welles. His other important books included Black Boy and Uncle Tom’s Children. Other posthumously released works include a novella, Rite of Passage, and an unfinished crime novel, A Father’s Law. In 1932 Wright became a member of the Communist Party, and in 1937 he went to New York, where he became Harlem editor of the Communist Daily Worker. He left the party in 1944 because of political and personal differences. In 1946, Wright moved to Paris, where he became a permanent American expatriate. He formed friendships with French writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and continued to explore race, identity, and social injustice in his writing.

Source for Image: Carl Van Vechten, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Wright.jpg

by Amanda Patterson
Are you interested in more authors’ birthdays? Please click here: The Complete Author Birthday Calendar