Richard Wright: African-American Writer And Man

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“The impulse to dream was slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.” Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American journalist, writer and poet best known for his works, Native Son (novel) and Black Boy (autobiography). Wright was born on September 4, 1908, in Roxie, Mississippi. His father, Nathan Wright, was an illiterate sharecropper and his mother, Ella Wilson Wright, was a schoolteacher. When Wright was about five-years-old, his father left him, his mother, and his barely one-year-old brother, Leon Alan, forcing their family to move to Jackson, Mississippi. Wright was schooled in Jackson, Mississippi and only managed to get a 9th-grade education, but was a