Richard Wright

Richard Wright was born in 1908 near Natchez, Mississippi, the grandson of slaves; his father left the family when he was a child. He grew up amid hunger, a short stay in an orphanage and an Adventist grandmother, graduated first in his class in 1925 and left high school a few weeks later. A member of the Communist Party in the early thirties, he broke with it in 1942 and published his break. He settled in Paris in 1947, composed some four thousand haiku there and died in Paris in 1960, aged fifty-two.

In the catalogue 1

• NarrativeBlack BoyRichard Wright · 1945Literature