Richard Wright

Richard Wright, born on a Mississippi plantation in 1908, became one of the most prominent African American fiction writers of the twentieth century. His fiction includes the story collections Uncle Tom's Children, published in 1938, and Eight Men, published in 1961, the year after Wright's death, and the blockbuster novel Native Son, published in 1940. His fictional works generally depict black characters frustrated with life in twentieth-century America. Wright also presented his views on America's racial dilemmas in nonfiction works such as Twelve Million Black Voices, published in 1941, and in essays that appeared in New Masses and The Atlantic Monthly. In this excerpt from his autobiography Black Boy, published in 1945, Wright explains that he could not achieve his goal of becoming a writer without leaving the rigidly segregated South and heading North, which he did at age nineteen.

Idreamed of going north and writing...