10 facts about richard wright

Richard wright family
Richard wright date of death
Richard wright famous works

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The Enduring Importance of Richard Wright
by Milton Moskowitz

For a century or more, a general boycott prevailed whereby America’s great colleges and universities refused to even consider the appointment of a black person to their faculties.

Richard Wright, who would have been 100 years old this year, was, arguably, the most influential African-American writer of the twentieth century. He stood astride the midsection of that century as a battering ram, paving the way for the black writers who followed him: Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, John Williams. Today, 48 years after his death, his legacy remains strong; his daughter, Julia Wright, is helping to keep it alive. She succeeded in getting HarperCollins to publish the unfinished novel her father was working on in the weeks before his death. It was published in January under the title, A Father’s Law. And she will host a series of seminars this year that will discuss her father’s work.

Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a Mississ

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Richard Wright (author)

American novelist and poet (1908–1960)

Richard Wright
Wright in a 1939 photograph by Carl Van Vechten
Born	Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908-09-04)September 4, 1908 Plantation, Roxie, Mississippi, U.S.
Died	November 28, 1960(1960-11-28) (aged 52) Paris, France
Occupation	Novelist poet essayist short story writer
Period	1938–60
Genre	Drama, fiction, non-fiction, autobiography
Notable works	Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, The Outsider
Spouse	Dhimah Rose Meidman (m. 1939; div. 1940) Ellen Poplar (m. 1941)
Children	2

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries suffering discrimination and violence. His best known works include the novella collection U

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A Richard Wright Chronology

1908: Richard Nathaniel Wright born September 4 on Rucker's Plantation, twenty miles east of Natchez, Mississippi, the first child of Nathaniel Wright, a sharecropper, and Ella Wilson Wright, a schoolteacher who gave up teaching soon after Richard was born for farm work. He grows up in one of the most poverty-stricken and rigidly segregated parts of the South.

1911-1912: Unable to support themselves on a farm, the Wrights go to Natchez to live with her family. Richard accidentally sets fire to house of his grandparents, the Wilsons

1913-1914: Nathaniel and Ella move with their children to Memphis in search of better employment. Nathaniel works as a night porter in a hotel and Ella works as a cook for a white family until Nathaniel leaves his family to live with another woman.

1915-1916: Ella moves with her sons to Elain, Arkansas, to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Maggie and Silas Hopkins. Richard becomes close to Silas.

1917: Uncle Silas, a relatively prosperous builder and saloon-keeper, is murdered by whites who resent h