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When Silas was shot and lynched by a white man who went unpunished, Wright was overwhelmed by the injustice and complexity of human nature.

For the first time, the boys were well fed, and had found a father figure in their uncle, a successful business owner who supplied the black community in Elaine, Arkansas, with building materials. His mother had taken her two sons to live with an aunt and uncle, Maggie and Silas Hopkins. It precipitated Wright’s lifelong quest for identity through the strength of the individual, a major theme in his writings.Īnother tragic milestone in Wright’s life occurred in 1917, at age eight. He lost innocence that day, through violence and through loss of trust in his mother as a sympathetic and nurturing figure. Wright was beaten unconscious by his mother for this unintentional act. He was just a young boy, and after tossing some broom bristles into the fireplace, curtains nearby caught fire and the entire house burned to the ground. One of Wright’s earliest and most influential memories, described in Black Boy, was an accident that occurred at his grandparents’ house. The two boys were briefly remanded to an orphanage, and later housed with their abusive grandparents after their mother was paralyzed by a stroke when Wright was 10 years old. The family faced dire economic hardship in the racially segregated rural south, and when Wright was age six, his father abandoned them.

Their childhood was tumultuous and difficult. Wright’s younger brother, Leon Alan, was born in 1910. His grandparents had been slaves, and he was the elder of two sons born to Nathaniel Wright, an illiterate sharecropper, and Ella Wilson, an educated schoolteacher. Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a cotton plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. Wright was the first black author to have a best-selling novel. He was a prolific writer who used stunning prose to address themes of race, gender, politics, and the struggle for individual freedom.

1908-1960 Richard Nathaniel Wright, one of America’s great literary figures, was also one of the first African American writers to receive international fame and notoriety.