Richard Wright

When the twenty-year-old James Baldwin knocked on his door in 1944, Richard Wright was the most famous Black writer in America, the author of Native Son and Black Boy. Within a decade both men were living in Paris, and the mentorship had curdled into the most public quarrel in Black American letters. Wright's own story runs from a Mississippi plantation through Chicago and New York to a café table below the French Senate, where for a decade he presided over the capital of Black literary exile.

Mississippi

Wright was born on 4 September 1908 on Rucker's Plantation, some twenty miles from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nathan Wright, a sharecropper, and Ella Wilson Wright, a schoolteacher. His father deserted the family when he was seven, and the childhood that followed — Memphis, Jackson, a scatter of relatives' houses in Arkansas and Mississippi — was poor, hungry, and constantly uprooted. He told it all in Black Boy. The schooling was as uneven as the addresses, yet he graduated from Jackson's Smith Robertson Junior High School in May 1925, published a story in a local Black newspaper as a teenager, and discovered H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, and Sherwood Anderson in Memphis.

In 1927 he joined the Great Migration to Chicago, worked as a postal clerk, and began writing in earnest through the John Reed Club, joining the Communist Party in 1934 and working for the Federal Writers' Project.

Native Son and Black Boy

New York, 1937. A first-prize story in a magazine contest led to Uncle Tom's Children in 1938, and then the two books that made him: Native Son in 1940, the novel of Bigger Thomas that put the rage of the Black urban North in front of a mass white readership, and Black Boy in 1945, the autobiography of his Jim Crow childhood. The NAACP gave him the Spingarn Medal in 1941. He broke publicly with the Communist Party in the 1944 essay I Tried to Be a Communist.

It was in these years, at the top of his fame, that he read an unfinished novel by a twenty-year-old from Harlem and backed him for the Eugene F. Saxton fellowship. The novel eventually became Go Tell It on the Mountain; the young writer was James Baldwin.

The invitation

Leaving America took connections. Wright applied for a passport in January 1946 and was refused. Gertrude Stein, who had been corresponding with him since he reviewed her work admiringly, pressed for a remedy from Paris, and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, then France's cultural attaché in Washington, delivered one: an official invitation from the French government. The passport came through, and Wright stepped off the boat train on 9 May 1946 to find Stein waiting on the platform. She had reserved him a room at the Hôtel Trianon on rue de Vaugirard, a short walk from her apartment.

Stein died that July, in the middle of Wright's first stay. They had known each other in person for about ten weeks.

He went back to New York, decided against staying, and moved the family to Paris in 1947 — first to a year in a comfortable apartment at 166 avenue de Neuilly, then, in 1948, to 14 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, near the Luxembourg Gardens. That remained his address for eleven years. A marble plaque has marked the building since February 1992, when Julia Wright and the biographer Michel Fabre unveiled it: "L'homme de lettres noir américain Richard Wright habita cet immeuble de 1948 à 1959" — the Black American man of letters Richard Wright lived in this building from 1948 to 1959.

Paris, and the quarrel

Wright visited Paris in 1946 and moved his family there for good in 1947, seeking, as the Mississippi Encyclopedia puts it, an atmosphere in which to explore what it meant to be human without carrying quite so much racial baggage. The move cost him standing with American critics and gained him Europe. His table at Le Tournon, the café below the Senate, became the unofficial headquarters of the Black American writers in postwar Paris — Chester Himes, the cartoonist Ollie Harrington, the painter Beauford Delaney.

Baldwin was in that Paris too, and the friendship did not survive it. Baldwin's 1949 essay Everybody's Protest Novel, published in the Paris magazine Zero, took Native Son as its central example of the protest fiction it dismantled. Wright took it as a betrayal by the younger writer he had carried, and confronted him at Brasserie Lipp on the day Zero published it. The friendship never fully recovered. The two argued again four years later, in 1953, at Les Deux Magots with the novelist Chester Himes present, and Wright and Himes each described that evening differently afterwards. Baldwin returned to the break in two later essays and regretted the parting without ever retracting the criticism.

The exile years produced a second shelf of books: the existentialist novel The Outsider (1953), the travel and political writing of Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957), the lectures of White Man, Listen! (1957), the novel The Long Dream (1958) — and, near the end, some four thousand haiku.

The strangest item from those years is a film. Wright co-wrote the screenplay for a screen version of Native Son, directed by Pierre Chenal and shot mainly in Buenos Aires. When the intended lead could not travel, Wright took the role himself: the film was released in 1951 with its forty-two-year-old author playing Bigger Thomas, a character twenty years younger. A restored print returned to circulation in 2021.

The institutions of Black Paris

Wright did more in Paris than hold a café table. When Alioune Diop founded the journal Présence Africaine in 1947 — the quarterly that grew into the publishing house of the Black francophone world — Wright joined its founding patronage committee alongside Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, André Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.

The world is greater than America or Russia.

In December 1948 he spoke to a crowd of five thousand at a rally of Jean-Paul Sartre's short-lived political movement, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, refusing to choose a side in the Cold War from the platform. Around 1950 he organized the Franco-American Fellowship, a pressure group against discrimination by American companies and institutions operating in Paris; its constitution and correspondence survive in the Schomburg Center's Richard Wright papers.

In September 1956 the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists met at the Sorbonne, organized by Présence Africaine. Wright spoke alongside Senghor, Césaire, and Frantz Fanon, and was the only speaker to remark on the absence of women from the platform.

Watched

The expatriate scene did not sit outside the Cold War. The FBI had carried Wright on its Security Index since 1942, the American embassy reported on his press appearances, and the CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom sponsored some of his lecture tours without his knowledge. In the mid-1950s a dispute between two members of his Le Tournon circle, the journalist Richard Gibson and the cartoonist Ollie Harrington, escalated into letters published under Harrington's name that Harrington had not written, and Wright became convinced the community was infiltrated. He turned the poisoned atmosphere into a novel, Island of Hallucination, which has never been published.

The end in Paris

Wright died of heart failure in a Paris clinic on 28 November 1960, at fifty-two. He was cremated, and his ashes were interred at Père Lachaise. The following year Baldwin published Nobody Knows My Name, which closes on three linked essays about Wright — a review, a memoir of their Paris years, and a final accounting of the argument that had separated them since 1949.

He had been ill for more than a year. In August 1959 he was diagnosed with amoebic dysentery, probably contracted on his 1953 reporting trip to the Gold Coast, and the treatments of the era wore him down. Confined to bed for stretches of his last eighteen months, he wrote more than four thousand haiku and selected 817 of them for a collection that was finally published in 1998 as Haiku: This Other World.

The suddenness of the death bred suspicion. His daughter Julia Wright and his close friend Ollie Harrington both came to believe he might have been murdered, and the theory has circulated ever since. The documented record shows surveillance, not poison: his biographer Hazel Rowley examined the theories and concluded that nothing beyond the official cause — a heart attack in a man weakened by illness and stress — can be established.