Richard Wright Case

Richard Wright was one of America’s greatest and most influential novelists. He was one of the first black writers to gain fame and success. Richard Nathan Wright was born September 4, 1908 in Natchez, Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper and his mother was a schoolteacher. Richard Wright came from a generation of American artists whose work and political views were heavily influenced by the experience of the Great Depression and the battle of working classes. Wright's novels and essays directly addressed the problems of racism in society through powerful and strong language. Wrights encounter with Marxism and the Communist movement was not influenced by the lack of cultural misdirection’s but was heavily influenced his brutal experience with racism. Richard Wright was more than a novelist. He was heavily involved in social change. His novels were more than a complaint against the problems of racism. His intentions were to engage and confront a reality of his times. He believed that as a novelist one must recognized his task. That task was to come to terms with social change and to direct that change. In his earliest novels this concern was directly reflected in his 1937 essay, 'Blueprint for Negro Writing'.

In “Blueprint for Negro Writing” Richard Wright expresses his ideas on the role of Black authors and he challenges these authors to move past the traditional Harlem style of writing. In “Blueprint for Negro Writing” Richard Wright outlines what he saw as to be important in black writing. He believed it was necessary to improve the status of blacks in the United States. He argued that writers before him had spent too much time arguing for the black race and not enough time on developing directions improve consciousness of blacks as a whole. “Rarely was the best of this writing addressed to the Negro himself, his needs, his sufferings, his aspirations. Through misdirection, Negro writers have been far better to others than they have been to themselves. And the mere recognition of this places the whole question of Negro writing in a new light and raises a doubt as to the validity of its present direction.” (Wright 1403) Here he discusses the responsibility of the Negro Writer to fairly depict and represent the African American people .He believed Negro writers before had spent too much time trying to validate rather than uplifting the black race. He stated “One would have thought that Negro writers in the last century of striving at expression would have continued and deepened this folk tradition, would have tried to create a more intimate and yet a more profoundly social system of artistic communication between them and their people. But the illusion that they could escape through individual achievement the harsh lot of their race swung Negro writers away from any such path…Today the question is: Shall Negro writing be for the Negro masses, moulding the lives and consciousness of those