Richard Wright was born September 4, 1908, on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His father, Nathaniel, was a sharecropper who left the family when Richard was a young boy. His mother, Ella Wilson, was an educated woman who worked as a schoolteacher and a cook. Throughout his childhood, Richard moved often, living at various times with his mother, his maternal grandmother, and other relatives in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He attended school sporadically but was an avid reader.

Wright's first short story was published in 1924 in an African American newspaper, the Southern Register. For a few years, Wright worked at odd jobs and continued to write. In 1927, Wright moved to Chicago. There he wrote articles for Communist Party newspapers as well as short stories, and when Wright moved to New York in 1937, he became editor of the Communist Daily Worker.

Four of Wright's short stories were published in...