African American novelist whose Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945) set the terms on which American literature would reckon with Black rage and white terror for a generation. Born on a Mississippi plantation, raised in poverty, educated almost entirely by his own reading, Wright migrated through Memphis to Chicago, where in the 1930s he joined the Communist Party, wrote for the WPA, and produced the stories of Uncle Tom's Children (1938).
Native Son — the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man in Chicago who kills a white woman, first by accident and then a Black woman deliberately, and is destroyed by the machinery that had already condemned him — was the first novel by a Black American to reach a massive white readership, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and a founding text of what James Baldwin would famously attack as the "protest novel." Baldwin's quarrel — that Wright's Bigger is a figure produced by the white imagination of the Negro, not liberated from it — has dominated criticism, but does not quite do justice to the book's formal and emotional force.
Black Boy (1945) is among the great American autobiographies — an account of a Black Southern childhood rendered with the sociological precision Wright had learned from Chicago School urban ethnography. He broke with the Communist Party in 1944 (The God That Failed), moved to Paris in 1946, and spent his last years among Sartre, Beauvoir, and the African and Caribbean writers of Césaire's circle. The Outsider (1953) is his attempt at an existentialist novel.