Richard Wright

Wright's father abandoned the family when he was six, leaving his mother to raise him amid recurring hunger and a succession of relatives' households across Mississippi and Memphis; a white coworker's library card, borrowed under pretense, gave him his first real access to books. He joined the Great Migration north to Chicago, worked post office and relief jobs through the Depression, and joined the Communist Party, which published his early stories before he broke with it publicly.

Native Son, a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1940, was the first bestseller by a Black American author, followed by Black Boy, his scalding memoir of Jim Crow Mississippi. In 1947 he moved permanently to Paris, entering the circle of Sartre and Camus and later mentoring, then feuding bitterly with, the young James Baldwin over the direction Black American writing should take.

He died in Paris in 1960 of a heart attack, a death still shadowed by unresolved suspicions among some biographers.