Richard Wright marked the beginning of a new era in black fiction. He was one of
the first American writers of his time to confront his readers with the effects
of racism. Wright had a way of telling his reader about his own life through his
writing. He is best known for his novel, Native Son, which is deeply rooted in
his personal life and the times in which he lived. This paper will discuss this
outstanding American writer, his highly acclaimed novel, Native Son, and how his
life influenced his writing. Richard Nathaniel Wright, was born on September 4,
1908 in Roxie, Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper and his mother a
schoolteacher. In search for better employment his father moved the family to
Memphis, Tennessee. While in Memphis, his father worked as a night porter in a
hotel and his mother worked as a cook for a Caucasian family. Shortly after
their move to Memphis, Wright’s father deserted his family. His mother then
tried to find any work she could find to support her family. Then, at the age of
seven his mother became ill and was unable to financially support her family. As
a result, the family had to move to Jackson, Mississippi to live with relatives.
Wright remained in Jackson until 1925 (Walker, 13). In 1925, Wright left Jackson
and headed as far as his money could take him, and that was Memphis, Tennessee.
Memphis was the exact same city in which his father had taken his family to find
a better life and where he abandoned them. Wright’s first trip to Memphis
ended in disappointment, desertion, and deprivation. While there Wright found
work as a messenger for an optical company. He lived in Memphis for
approximately two years. During that time, he witnessed the deep and violent
South which eventually would permanently scar him for life. Margaret Walker
wrote: I am convinced that the best of Richard Wright’s fiction grew out of
the first nineteen years of his life. All he ever wrote of great strength and
terrifying beauty must be understood in this light. His subjects and themes, his
folk references and history, his characters and places come from the South of
his childhood and adolescence. His morbid interest in violence-lynching, rape,
and murder-goes back to the murky twilight of a southern past. Out of this
racial nightmare marked with racial suffering, poverty, religious fanaticism and
sexual confusion emerge the five long stories in Uncle Tom’s Children. (Walker
43) The violent impression of Southern racism marked Wright’s personality and
literature. As a result, he would spend his entire life struggling to express
the importance for men to reject the stereotypic notions of race, class, creed,
or any other prejudice and to accept human value that honor the human spirit and
release intelligence. It was Wright’s first nineteen years in the South that
opened up his most powerful and passionate writing (Walker 43). In 1927, at the
age of nineteen Wright migrated to Chicago, Illinois. In Chicago, Wright found a
job a as Post Office Clerk and at the same time he continued to self-educate
himself by reading books, magazines, and newspapers. While in Chicago he became
interested in Communism Issues. The interest came as a result of his concern
with the social roots of racial oppression. In 1932, Wright joined the Communist
party. He was a party activist in Chicago and New York. Wright’s involvement
with the Communist party became the subject of most of his fiction writings.
After he broke away from the party his writings were centered around it.
Wright’s years in Chicago are often considered his maturation years, which
were years of growing maturity and preparing for an illustrious future (Metzger
608). Wright’s career as a writer basically began in the 1930’s. In 1930, he
wrote his first novel, Lawd Today. His novel, Lawd Today, however was not
published until after his death. His first published work was, Uncle Tom’s
Children: Five Long Stories, which consists of stories that attack the racial
discrimination and bigotry that Wright encountered as a youth. Throughout
Wright’s career he published many outstanding works. Among his works included:
five novels, two autobiographies, two books of short stories, four nonfiction
books and one collection of essays. Wright’s major influence began when he
published, Native Son , in 1940. Richard Wright’s most notable and highly
acclaimed novel is Native Son. Richard Wright contemplated for a while before he
decided to write a novel in which a Negro, Bigger Thomas, would become a
symbolic figure of American life. The novel is divided into sections entitled:
fear, flight, and fate. Each section is used as a way to chart the changes in
the main character’s, Bigger Thomas, mind. Native Son, is the story of, Bigger
Thomas, a poor young black man who had misinterpreted myths and stereotypes
about the racist society in which he lived and accidentally murders a wealthy
white women. At the novel’s end, Bigger must face the consequences of his
actions, and is imprisoned and sentenced to death. Native Son is “considered
both a psychological melodrama and protest novel, that candidly exposes the
pent-up hatred and bitterness of the oppressed black American.” (Stine 415).
The first section of Native Son, is entitled Fear. In this portion of the book,
we are introduced to the main character, Bigger Thomas, who is a full-blown
juvenile delinquent. Throughout the first section, he is ruled by images he is
unable to control. Bigger is hired by Mr. Dalton to be his live-in chauffeur.
Bigger’s first task is to drive Mr. Dalton’s daughter, Mary to a lecture at
the university. On their way to the lecture, Mary tells Bigger that they are not
going to the lecture and to go pick up Jan. Jan Erlone is Mary’s communist
lover. Throughout the night, Bigger is frightened by Mary’s and Jan’s
insistence to treat him as an equal. Bigger has this reaction because he isn’t
used to being treated equally by someone of the opposite race. At the end of the
night, Mary is drunk, and after driving her home he must carry her up to her
room. When Mary’s mother, who is blind, enters Mary’s room, Bigger
accidentally smothers Mary while trying to keep her from telling her mother that
he is in the room. Bigger tries to cover up Mary’s death by burning her body
in a furnace. Bigger then creates a scheme to extort money from her parents by
pretending to have kidnapped her. Bigger does that by trying to pen the blame on
Jan, because he is a member of the Communist party (Wright). The second section
of Native Son is entitled Flight. In the beginning of this book Mary’s bones
are discovered by Britten, the police detective. At this point, Bigger is on the
run from the authorities. While on the run, Bigger brings his girlfriend,
Bessie, along. Bigger didn’t want to take any chances leaving her, since she
was the only person who knew about the murder of Mary. However, Bigger ends up
killing Bessie, because he thinks she will slow him down. Eventually, he is
captured by the police and has to face the consequences of his actions (Wright).
The third section of Native Son is titled Fate. At the beginning of this
section, we see Bigger awaiting his destiny, which is death. At this point he
has lost all hope and is ready to accept the consequences. While in jail, Bigger
is visited by Rev. Hammond, his mother’s pastor. Rev Hammond tries to get
Bigger to see that the only thing he can do now is trust God. Even though,
Bigger isn’t interested in what Rev. Hammond has to say, he accepts the cross
that he gives him to wear around his neck. Bigger’s mother comes to the jail
to see him, but embarrasses him by the way she begs Mrs. Dalton not to let her
son die. Also, in this section of the book we are introduced to Buckeley, the
state’s prosecuting attorney, and Boris Max, Bigger’s lawyer. Bigger is
highly intimidated by Buckeley, who only sees him as a sub-human being and is
only out to get him. Max, Bigger’s lawyer, has little contact with him during
the trial and fails in his defense for Bigger. At the of the story, Bigger
stands alone and must accept the life he has made for himself. Also, before his
death Bigger says, “What I killed for must’ve been good!” and “I
didn’t want to kill . . .But what I killed for I am!” Native Son is a
landmark novel that created important new directions in literature. Native Son
was the first novel written by a black American writer achieve widespread
critical and popular success. Many critics hailed the novel as a penetrating
indictment of racial persecution. For example, James Baldwin called Native Son,
“the most powerful and celebrated statement we have yet had of what it means
to be a Negro in America. Also, Irving Howe commented: “A blow at the white
man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow at the
black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his
submission.”(Stine 415) However, some critics faulted the book for a lack of
realism, claiming that its vision of American life was overdrawn and unfair. For
example, David Cohn described Native Son as “ a blinding and corrosive study
in hate.” Another critic, Clifton Fadiman wrote: “ Wright is too explicit.
He says many things over and over again. His characterization of upper-class
whites are paper-thin and confess unfamiliarity. I think he overdoes his
melodrama from time to time. He is not a finished writer. But the two absolute
necessities of the first-rate novelist passion and intelligence-are in him.”
(Butler 12) Richard Wright was one of the first writers of his time to confront
readers with the dehumanizing effects of racism. Most of his stories are
centered around withdrawn, impoverished, black men who have been denied freedom
and personal identity. Much of his fiction came from his own impoverished
childhood in the South and his early adulthood in the segregated communities of
Chicago. In Wright’s writing he often embraced communism, black nationalism
and existentialism. At the center of all his work were the insistence on the
purity of the individual imagination, but it is often tempered by his vision of
black people’s collective destiny. Evelyn Gross Avery wrote: The writer most
frequently credited with making the Negro “visible” is Richard Wright. . .
Offering historical and sociological, as well as psychological insights into the
American character, Wright examines the rebel, his behavior and motivations, his
background. Products of a lower-class black environment, Wright’s rebels are
well acquainted with hunger, disease, poverty. They learn quickly from
frightened mothers and beaten fathers not to expect much from America. Their
dreams of power are undercut by the reality of Jim Crow and more subtle
discrimination. Ambition is discouraged; impotency reinforced. All entrances and
exits are blocked. Trapped, Wright’s black man may choose to suffer his fate
passively; he may reluctantly accept his status as a victim. But not for long.
Wright’s victims are generally minor characters or else they evolve into
sullen rebels(597). Richard Wright, is considered a naturalist writer. By
naturalist we mean his writing is defined through his own experiences.
Naturalistic fiction provided Wright with a means by which he could better see
himself and his work. Wright considers his naturalism as just another version of
American realism. Wright’s attraction to naturalism comes from his instinctive
recognition that his own life as an American black man was so closely reflected
in naturalistic fiction. The use of naturalism was useful to Wright in a number
of ways. First, it gave him a literary style that was a useful tool for honestly
probing into the world around him. Also, he was able to use his naturalistic
style to objectively record his own experience without distorting it to suit
conventional morality and standard literary tastes. Critics debate whether
Wright’s Native Son is fully naturalistic in style and vision. Although,
“Bigger is initially portrayed as a naturalistic victim caught in an
environmental trap, but becomes a new kind of black hero when he develops the
psychological resources necessary to understand his and master his
environment.” (Bloom 65) An example of Wright’s naturalism writing is showed
through Bigger’s thoughts after he kills Bessie. He closed his eyes, longing
for a sleep that would not come. During the last two days and nights he had live
so fast and hard that it was an effort to keep it all real in his mind. So close
had danger and death come that he could not feel that it was he who had
undergone it all. And, yet, out of all, over and above all that had happened,
impalpable but real, there remained to him a queer sense of power. He had done
this. He had brought all this about. In all of his life these two murders were
the most meaningful things that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly
and deeply, no matter what others might think, looking at him with their blind
eyes. Never had he had the chance to live out the consequences of his actions;
never had his will been so free as in this night and day of fear and murder and
flight. He had killed twice, but in a true sense it was not the first time he
had ever killed. He had killed many times before, but only during the last two
days had this impulse assumed the form of actual killing. Blind anger had come
often and he had either gone behind his curtain or wall, or had quarreled and
fought. And yet, whether in running away or in fighting, he had felt the need of
the clean satisfaction of facing this thing in all it fullness, of fighting it
out in the wind and sunlight, in front of those whose hate for him was so
unfathomably deep that, after they had shunted him off into a corner of the city
to rot and die, they could turn to him, as Mary had that night in the car, and
say: “I’d like to know how your people live.” But what was he after? What
did he want? What did he love and what did he hate? He did not know. There was
something he knew and something he felt; something the world gave him and
something he himself had; something spread out in front of him and something
spread out in back; and never in all his life, with this black skin of his, had
two worlds, though and feeling, will and mind, aspiration and satisfaction, been
together; never had he felt a sense of wholeness(277-278). Throughout the years
Richard Wright’s writings has effected and influenced many people all across
the world. Richard Wright will continue to be known as the most highly acclaimed
writer of his time. Through his writings, Wright allows his readers to visualize
what his life was like. Wright told the story of his life through his writing.
His novel, Native Son, will remain on reading lists now and for years to come. I
hope that this paper has broaden your view on Richard Wright and his novel
Native Son.

Bibliography
Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne
Publishers, 1991. Joyce, Anne Joyce. “The Tragic Hero.” Modern Critical
Interpretation. ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Metzger, Linda.
“Richard Wright.” Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary
Authors. New York: Gale Research, 1989. “Richard Wright.” African American
Writers. ed. Valerie Smith. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1991.
“Richard Wright.” Contemporary Literary Criticism. ed. Jean C. Stine.
Michigan: Gale Research Company, 1984. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright:
Daemonic Genuis. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1988. Wright, Richard. Native
Son. New York: Harper Collins Publisher, 1993.