1 Introduction
1.1 A Brief Introduction to Richard Wright
Richard Wright (1908-1960), a prominent African-American fictionist, essayist in the 20th century, was regarded as one of the most prosperous literary figures in Afro-American literature.A large number of his works are about racial themes between the African-Americans and the white in the USA, especially those involving the plight of Afro-Americans from the late 19th to the middle of 20th centuries. Some people believe his works are so influential that they help to improve the racial relationships between African-Americans and the white in the United States in the mid-20th century. Besides, his works have opened up a new chapter in the field of protest novel so that he was considered as a forerunner of the protest novel. Meanwhile, his works had a great impact on such writers as Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and so on. In 1965, a public opinion poll in America showed that half of the 38 Afro-American writers in the United States looked Wright as the most outstanding Afro-American writer, which manifests the inner voice of the black literary circle in the start of the twentieth century (Kinnamon 2007). As a popular African-American author, Richard Wright has made great contribution to the black literature and to the American literature as a whole, thus he is honored as “father of modern Afro-American novel” across the world. Like most poor African-Americans in America, Wright was born in a poverty-stricken family on a plantation in Mississippi on September 4th, 1908. Both of his grandparents were slaves of the white people. His father, Nathan Wright, in a better situation, was a farmer who did not have his own land and farmed a white man’s land, while his mother, Ella Wilson Wright, once was a country teacher, and later gave up her job to help with the farming. Born to be black man, Wright grew up in an environment full of hostility from the white people. What is worse, in 1912, because of the dropping of cotton price, the economic conditions of the farmers in the south of America were affected seriously. As a result, Wright and his families had to move to Memphis, Tennessee. In the desperate conditions, Wright’s father abandoned the family when he was still a child, at the age of six; subsequently, his mother was ill for a long time, both of which made their life much harder. Therefore, Wright had to live with all kinds of relatives who lived in the ghetto areas from time to time, for many times he even had to attend a Seven-day Adventist School in Mississippi. His formal education ended up with the graduation in the junior high school. Although supplied with limited opportunities to education, Wright himself never gave up learning and growing by all means he could find. Especially, he was thirsty for knowledge and crazy about reading. He kept on reading works of Mark Twain, Dreiser and Louis, from which he learned much about writing.
