Richard Nathaniel Wright

Richard Nathaniel Wright

By : Alfonso M. Velazquez

Contributions to Harlem Renaissance

• His work has had enormous influence on the writers who followed him and on American thinking about the African-American experience.

Biographical information

• Born Sept. 4 1908• On Rucker's Plantation• between Roxie and Natchez, Mississippi• Born and raised in the Deep South in the early

years of the 20th century and living later in Chicago and New York City.

Childhood

• When Wright was five, his father left the family and his mother was forced to take domestic jobs away from the house.

• live with Wright's maternal grandparents• Wright moved from school to school,

graduating from the ninth grade at the Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson as the class valedictorian in June 1925

Family

• son of Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper

• Mother Ella Wilson, a schoolteacher• Grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson ,

staunchly religious and illiterate

his experiences and the experiences of those around him

Major accomplishments• Native son 1940, the first best selling novel be

a black African-American writer. And the first book-of-the-month club selection by an African-American writer.

• Help start New Challenge Magazine

Challenges and hardships

• He face the climate of hate against Negroes was blatantly cruel. The ugliness and pain would come out in the works of Wright.

• His staunchly religious and illiterate grandmother who kept books out of the house a thought fiction was the work of the devil. (Wright kept any aspirations he had to be a writer to himself)

Who stood in his way

• Whites to accept black emancipation America communism in the 1930 and 1940’s

Impact on future generations

• Changed the landscape and made it possible for African –American writers

Who was influenced by Richard

• Allowed later writers to do the same (his refusal to give the reading public what it had up to this time demand of the African American writer.

• (without concern for explaining his obscure meaning.)

Critics views of his work • New and daringly character

Died November 25, 1960

• Died at night in Paris from a heart attack. He was fifty two years old.

• Standing patiently,The horse grants the snowflakesA home on his back

• A spring sky so clearThat you feel you are seeingInto tomorrow

• Burning out its time,And timing its own burning,One lonely candle.

• With a twitching noseA dog reads a telegramOn a wet tree trunk.

• My cigarette glows• Without my lips touching it, - • A steady spring breeze.

• The day is so longThat even noisy sparrowsFall strangely silent