![]() ![]() The lack of sufficient food and the absence of his father became interchangeable in the boy’s mind.Īs a man of thirty-seven, Wright reflected on his childhood and youth in Mississippi and other parts of the South in his autobiography Black Boy (1945). His father’s desertion of the family when Wright was only seven years old forced his mother to take low-paying jobs to support her sons, Richard and Leon Alan. During his boyhood, Wright’s hunger was often physical. The power of Wright’s work comes, in part, from his ability to articulate the idea of hunger. The quest for liberationįrom his birth in Mississippi to his death in Paris on November 28, 1960, Wright was condemned to make a long and unfinished quest for liberation from prejudice. Wright combined the best of both parents. His parentage shaped his thinking and writing: His father was the laborer, the hands that worked in the soil, the person who deals with the concrete materials of life his mother was the thinker, the mind that journeys in realms of abstract ideas and imagination. Wright, the son of a sharecropper father and a high-school-teacher mother, was born September 4, 1908, on a Mississippi plantation some twenty miles from Natchez. Mississippi has produced more world-class writers than other states in the South and among them is Richard Nathaniel Wright, an internationally acclaimed African American novelist and social critic. ![]()
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