Richard Wright

1
Richard Wright

• 1908-1960

2
Biography

• Born on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi,
  on September 4, 1908.
• Son of a sharecropper who deserted his family
  when Wright was 5.
• His mother became ill, and the family moved to
  Jackson, Mississippi with his grandmother.
• Grandmother tried to stop Wright from writing.
• His grandmother attempted to crush his
  imagination.

3
Biography

• Wright and his brother lived in an orphanage for
  a short time because of family problems.
• He would recall his childhood as a time of
  hunger.
• For food, but also for affection, understanding,
  and education.
• Although a very good student, Wright never
  graduated from high school.

4
Biography

• Wrights jobs in the South were marked by
  harassment by whites and by his own disdain for
  what segregation and racism had done to distort
  the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.
• The harsh conditions of the South pushed Wright
  to his first exposure with Urban Naturalism.
• Wright said he could not read enough of them.

5
Urban Naturalism

• The term naturalism describes a type of
  literature that attempts to apply scientific
  principles of objectivity and detachment to its
  study of human beings.
• Unlike realism, which focuses on literary
  technique, naturalism implies a philosophical
  position
• For naturalistic writers, since human beings are,
  in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts,"
  characters can be studied through their
  relationships to their surroundings.

6
Urban Naturalism

• Key themes of Urban Naturalism
• Survival, determinism, violence, and taboo.
• The "brute within" each individual,
• composed of strong and often warring emotions
• passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for
  dominance or pleasure
• and the fight for survival in an amoral,
  indifferent universe.
• The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man
  against nature" or "man against himself"
• Characters struggle to retain a "veneer of
  civilization" despite external pressures that
  threaten to release the "brute within.
• Example Bigger Thomas
• The forces of heredity and environment as they
  affect, and afflict, individual lives.

7
Biography

• In 1927, Wright fled the South for Chicago.
• In Chicago, Wright seemed headed for a career in
  the post office but was also determined to become
  a writer.
• Wright found a circle of friends with similar
  views in 1933 when he joined the John Reed Club.
• It was a nationwide organization founded by the
  communist party to attract writers and artists.
• Between 1933 and 1940 (the first major stage of
  his literary career), communism was clearly the
  major intellectual and political force of
  Wrights life.

8
Biography

• In 1938 four of his stories were collected as
  Uncle Toms Children.
• He then received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which
  allowed him to complete his first novel, Native
  Son (1940).
• In 1939, he married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white
  dancer, but the two separated shortly thereafter.
  
• In 1941, he married Ellen Poplar, a white member
  of the Communist Party, and they had two
  daughters, Julia in 1942 and Rachel in 1949.

9
Biography

• After moving to Paris in 1946, Wright became
  friends with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus
  while going through an Existentialist phase best
  depicted by his second novel, The Outsiders
  (1953).
• In his last years, he was plagued by illness
  (aerobic dysentary) and financial hardship.
• Throughout this period he wrote approximately
  4,000 English Haikus (some of which were recently
  published for the first time) and another novel,
  The Long Dream, in 1958.
• After his death on November 28, 1960, another of
  his collections of short stories, Eight Men, was
  published.
• His most famous work is still his
  autobiographical work, Black Boy (1945).

10
Themes and Goals of Native Son

• Major goal of Wrights writing
• The exposure of the starkest realities of
  American life where race was concerned.
• Themes
• The effects of racism on the individual
• Communism
• Naturalism
• Justice
• The comforts of Religion

11
Native Son

• This was meant to be Americas guide in
  confronting the danger of facing the profound
  consequences of more than two centuries of the
  enslavement and segregation of blacks in North
  America.
• Slavery and neo-slavery had led not simply to the
  development of a psychology of timidity,
  passivity, and even cowardice among African
  American masses.
• Wright suggests that it also gives rise to
  characters like Bigger Thomas.

12
Bigger Thomas

• These characters are estranged from both black
  and white culture through their hatred of both
  cultures, which gives rise to acts of violence.
• These acts of violence were most often aimed at
  other African Americans, but Wright warned that
  one day it would be aimed at whites.

13
Intellectual Forces

• Other than naturalism, two other intellectual
  forces came together to shape Native Son
  communism and existentialism.
• Communism
• the political and economic doctrine that aims to
  replace private property and a profit-based
  economy with public ownership and communal
  control of at least the major means of production
  and the natural resources of a society.

14
Existentialism

• Existentialism
• The Existentialist conceptions of freedom and
  value arise from their view of the individual.
  Since we are all ultimately alone, isolated
  islands of subjectivity in an objective world, we
  have absolute freedom over our internal nature,
  and the source of our value can only be internal.
  
• Main principle
• Existence precedes Essence.

15
Existentialism

• To review the essential beliefs of French
  existentialists, consider the following ideas
• Existentialists believe in free will.
• Existentialists do not recognize any human or
  immortal authority.
• Denied Gods existence in a cruel world, full of
  suffering.
• No Faith because no hope.
• Existentialists believe that they are responsible
  for all the consequences of their actions.
• Existentialists do not believe in an afterlife.
• Sartre stated that we "are condemned to be free."
  
• Camus stated that "life is absurd."