He was part of a large-scale movement of people who sought higher wages, relief from racial oppression, and a chance to make a fresh start. Like many of his peers, Wright migrated to Chicago in the late 1920s. Such hunger to be, to know, and to understand was pervasive, formative, and motivating throughout his lifetime. His hunger to develop as a whole human being was at once physical, psychological, social, and spiritual. Society and culture created a vast need for fulfillment in Wright’s young life.

Racial customs in the state promoted what Wright called “the ethics of living Jim Crow.” Jim Crow ensured that the ceiling of possibilities for a sensitive, brilliant Black boy was quite low. The laws of Mississippi supported segregation. He had painful memories of the South in the early 20th century. Wright’s bitterness, however, is directed not only against his father but also against a whole society that allowed and caused hunger among poor sharecroppers. He exposed the pain of memory in words that are haunting: “As the days slid past, the image of my father became associated with my pangs of hunger, and when I felt hunger I thought of him with a deep biological bitterness.” The pain of memories 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.

Richard wright native