Happy birthday to one of our best American writers! This tribute appeared in Garrison Keillor’s “The Writers’ Almanac.”
I own a fifth edition of Wright’s Black Boy. What makes it special is that it’s signed in the frontispiece “Sophie Tucker.” It was her personal copy. When I was a child, Sophie Tucker was a popular singer whose theme song was “Some of These Days.” She appeared in Houston at the Shamrock Hotel, which was the go-to destination for stars at that time. During her run, she stayed at a neighbor’s house and I got to meet the great woman.
I never met Richard Wright. I wish I had, but not as a child.
Today is the birthday of American novelist Richard Wright (1908) (books by this author), author of the novel Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), a seminal memoir of African American experience. Wright was born in Roxie, Mississippi, a town he described as “swarming with rats, cats, dogs, fortune tellers, cripples, blind men, whores, salesmen, rent collectors, and children.”
Wright dropped out of school in the ninth grade to help his family. Black people weren’t allowed to take out library books in the 1920s, so he forged a letter from an Irish co-worker asking a librarian to “let the colored boy use my card.” Wright read voraciously, studying the styles of different writers. He told a friend, “I want my life to count for something.”
He was in New York by 1937, working on a guidebook of Harlem for the Federal Writers’ Project when his first collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, was published (1938). The collection won him a Guggenheim Fellowship, which enabled him to keep working on the novel that became Native Son, the story of 20-year-old African-American Bigger Thomas, whose opportunity-deprived life on the South Side of Chicago leads him to commit murder. The first draft was written in four months. The book is a searing examination of the consequences of systemic racism. About the book, Wright said: “I was guided by but one criterion: to tell the truth as I saw it and felt it. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” The novel was an instant sensation, selling more than 250,000 copies in its first three weeks.
Wright said: “All literature is protest. You can’t name a single novel that isn’t protest.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reading Native Son as a part of a course in African-American Studies as a tenth grader in high school made a huge difference in my perception of the world I lived in. One small thing, a novel among many, Native Son was a big thing, offering a paradigm that was new.
You’ve both hit a nerve. A good one. I learned about Native Son from one of my high school English teachers (my Catholic high school would never, ever have considered including this in a class, if I remember correctly, she left after a year because of the intolerance of the faculty and administration) and read it, had it for an English lit in college (Jesuits weren’t scared of broadening our horizons), and have probably read it five times since, the last time right after the 2016 Republican convention. Would have loved to have been able to teach this together with Cry, The Beloved Country, Pudd’nhead Wilson and <A Dry White Season. I highly recommend the Library of America volume with this, Black Boy and Uncle Tom’s Children. Now I’m motivated to put it high on my upcoming reading list. Essential reading for anyone who cares about American literature. You may enjoy this is you have time: https://studsterkel.wfmt.com/programs/reading-richard-wrights-man-who-lived-underground-michel-fabre-part-1
Sixty years later, and that alarm clock is still ringing.
Not the same alarm clock, but a good one nonetheless:
Diane,
I don’t know if I ever told you that the school where I teach is the one where Wright attended briefly before having to leave to go to work. Unfortunately, that scenario is still all too common here and is exacerbated by the pandemic.