The autobiographical account of Richard Wright’s life ends in “American Hunger,” the sequel novel to “Black Boy,” as Richard finally realizes the incredible power his words will eventually have. He decides that he will use his words as weapons, appealing to the humanistic and emotional qualities of man and society. As a young man living in Memphis, Tennessee, Wright began an intense period of reading in which he became acquainted with a wide range of authors, many of them contemporary American authors. Of that period of his life he wrote: Reading was like a drug, a drug. The novels created moods that I lived in for days.
Despite the violent and depressing imagery presented in “Black Boy,” Wright himself seems to have shed his cynicism and ends on a hopeful note. The song he quotes “Arise, wretched of the earth, a better world is born” expresses his deep new belief that eventually society will rise above its evils and prejudices. Wright even shows his optimism by shedding images of childhood and the brutal South: “The days of my youth were receding from me like a tide, leaving me alone on high, dry ground, leaving me with a deeper, calmer conscience. .”
Wright’s ranking first on the Chicago postal service exam in 1937 brought him a permanent job offer of $2,000 a year. But he turns down the offer to move to New York City to pursue a writing career. He attends the Second Congress of American Writers as a delegate and even serves as session chair. It was here that he emphasized that writers must think of themselves as writers first and not as workers. He becomes the Harlem editor of the communist Daily Worker newspaper for which he writes 200 articles a year. He also helps launch the New Challenge magazine designed to present black life “in relation to the fight against war and fascism.”
Now he tries to sharpen his conception of literary form and seeks to resolve the relationship between the techniques of fiction and the principles of Marxism. To accomplish this, he publishes his influential essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in the November issue of New Challenge as his own attempt to outline a literary theory for black American writers. Blueprint was like a manifesto and declaration of independence from what he considered to be bourgeois literary forms and agendas that had long dominated in black letters. In distancing himself from the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, Wright urges black writers to adopt a Marxist conception of reality and society that offers, in his view, the “maximum degree of freedom of thought and feeling … for the writer black” that would even transcend nationalism.
Wright executed his own model in his short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of four stories set in the Jim Crow South with which he launched his literary career. The stories, though often tainted by Marxist propaganda, melodrama, heavy didacticism, and improbable plots, show some of the major influences on his fiction, including: naturalism, Marxism, Freudianism, and black popular tradition with the one who had a love-hate relationship that lasted throughout her life. career. Wright gained national attention for this collection that fictionalized lynching incidents in the Deep South. One of the stories there, “Fire and Cloud,” won the O’Henry Memorial Award in 1938. The entire collection won first prize in the Federal Writer’s Project’s Story magazine contest open to authors for best manuscript in length from the book. Harper’s published the collection with “Fire and Cloud”, “Long Black Song”, “Down by the Riverside”, and “Big Boy Leaves Home”; in 1940 the story “Bright and Morning Star” was added and the book reissued. The collection earned her a Guggenheim fellowship, which enabled her to complete his first novel, Native Son (1940).
After Uncle Tom’s Sons, Wright declared in “How Bigger Was Born” that he needed to write a book that bankers’ daughters couldn’t “read and feel good about,” that “would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the comfort of tears”; that novel was Native Son, which followed in 1940. Native Son was uncompromisingly honest and unrelenting in its depiction of the harshness and cruelties of black life. It contained extremes of violence and horror that are likely to inspire nothing more than fear and, significantly, Wright titled the first of the three parts of the book FEAR Many white Americans saw Bigger Thomas, the central character, as a symbol of the entire black community Wright, who is an avid movie buff who wants to give him to the story a sense of immediacy and closeness, he told the story in the present because he “wanted the reader to feel that Bigger’s story was happening now, like a play or a movie…”
This young black man, Bigger Thomas, lives in a one-bedroom apartment on Chicago’s South Side Black Belt with his mother, younger sister, Vera, and younger brother, Buddy. Bigger in time is employed by the Daltons, a wealthy white family, as his driver. The rat-infested building in which Bigger, his mother, his brother, and his sister, is owned by Mr. Dalton, who instead of keeping and renting decent houses prefers to cover up his sins by giving money to welfare. Dalton’s liberal-minded daughter, Mary, befriends Bigger while he is giving her a ride and she takes him to take her under an oath of secrecy to the communist headquarters where they choose her boyfriend, Jan Erlone, and go out to find a gift. . Having had too much to drink, Mary gets so drunk that Bigger has to carry her to her room. He was in the process of laying her down properly on her bed when he heard the footsteps of her blind mother approaching her. He was scared of the dire consequences he might face for being in the room with Mary. So he covered her with clothes and covered her mouth with a pillow in the process, suffocating her to death. In another show of panic, he burns her body, decapitates it, and cremates it in the basement fireplace, where he hopes it will be impossible to find. He further deflects suspicion from himself by attempting to implicate Jan, as being a communist he could easily be accepted as the bad guy capable of such evil and ruthless deeds. He feels so empowered by what he has done that he tries to extort wealth from Dalton. When that fails and Mary’s bones are discovered, he murders his own black girlfriend, Bessie, in another but futile attempt to cover her tracks. He is soon caught and confined in prison awaiting trial. It was there that Bigger first feels a sense of freedom: “It seems like a natural thing, to be here in front of that chair of death. Now that I think about it, it seems like something like that had to be. Then he is sentenced to death and faces his fate. unapologetically stating that ‘for what I killed, I am!’ However, in prison, he accepts the need for a common brotherhood.
On the day this novel, considered Wright’s most monumental fictional achievement, appeared, Irving Howe declared: “American culture was forever changed. It became an instant bestseller, selling out in a matter of hours in some bookstores and selling 215,000 copies worldwide.” its first three weeks of publication.It also established Wright as one of the leading writers of the 20th century.
Native Son made Wright the most respected and wealthiest black writer in America. It was the first best-selling novel by an African-American writer and the first Book of the Month Club selection by an African-American writer. He was awarded the prestigious Spingarn Medal from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1941.
The novel also marked a high point in the history of the crime novel, not only because it is a work of art in its own right, but because it influenced an entire generation of black novelists. His mix of urban realism, sociological theory, and naturalistic determination helped define and influence almost the entire scope of African-American fiction of the post-World War II era.
The main character, Bigger Thomas, served to represent the limitations that society placed on African Americans and illustrated that Thomas could only gain his own agency and self-knowledge by committing heinous acts. Wright was criticized for both works’ concentration on violence and, in the case of Native Son, for portraying a black person in a way that might seem to confirm white people’s worst fears. For many white Americans, Bigger Thomas was a symbol of the entire black race.
Wright is also known for the autobiographical Black Boy (1945), which depicts his early life from Roxie to his move to Chicago, his run-ins with his Seventh-day Adventist family, his problems with white employers, and social isolation. American Hunger (published posthumously in 1977) was originally intended as the second Black Boy book and was restored to this form in the Library of America edition.
This book details his involvement with the John Reed Clubs and the Communist Party, which he left in 1942, although the book implies that it was earlier, and his departure was not made public until 1944. In its restored form, its diptych structure reflects the certainties and intolerance of organized communism (the “bourgeois” books of McCarthyism), Wright was blacklisted by Hollywood movie studio executives in the 1950s.
The last section on his life in Chicago and his experience with the Communist Party was not published until 1977 under the title American Hunger. Wright’s publishers in 1945 wanted only the story of his life in the South and cut what followed about his life in the North. There have been numerous biographies of Wright, but they must all begin with Black Boy, Wright’s personal and emotional account of his childhood and adolescence in the Jim Crow South. In a famous passage from the autobiography that upset critics and turned Wright away from the African-American sense of community, he asserts the “cultural barrenness of black life”: “…I used to ponder the strange absence of true kindness in blacks, how unstable was our tenderness, how devoid of genuine passion, how devoid of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how devoid of those intangible feelings that bind man to man, And how shallow was even our despair.” He found an “unconscious irony” in the idea that “blacks led such a passionate existence”: “I saw that what had been taken for our emotional strength were our negative confusions, our running away, our fears, our frenzy under pressure” . Statements like these contradict others that describe a caring community. For example, when Wright’s mother suffers a paralytic attack, “the neighbors took care of my mother day and night, feeding us and washing our clothes,” and Wright admits to being “ashamed that so often in my life I had to be fed by strangers.”