Richard Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908–1960) was a groundbreaking American novelist, short story writer, and essayist who exposed the brutal psychological and social realities of American racism. Born on a plantation in Roxie, Mississippi, and raised in poverty by a sharecropping family, Wright fled the Jim Crow South for Chicago, joining the Federal Writers' Project and the Communist Party before establishing his independent voice.

His 1940 novel Native Son—telling the story of Bigger Thomas, a young Black man driven to accidental murder in Chicago—became the first book by an African American author chosen as a main Book-of-the-Month Club selection, shaking American society to its core. In 1945, his autobiographical memoir Black Boy described his Southern youth with searing honesty. In 1946, Wright emigrated permanently to Paris, becoming an influential voice among French existentialists including Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.