Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to story telling -- in prose and in poetry, in art and in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of September 4th
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It is the 247th day of the year, leaving 118 days remaining in 2022.
He wrote his stories on the Black experience, from a autobiographical perspective and from personal experience. His stories explored extreme poverty in the African-American society, coupled with white prejudice that often erupted into violent.
Wright was born in a small town in Mississippi and raised in different parts of the southern United States, with his family moving around, splitting up, and regrouping. Wright never stayed in any one school long, but became an avid reader.
He wrote his first story, The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre, when he was 15 and in the 7th grade. It was published in a local Black newspaper, but no copies survive.
He later moved to Chicago and New York City trying to establish a writing career. He joined the Federal Writers' Project in 1937, and his group of four novellas, Uncle Tom's Children, was published the next year. White violence in the Jim Crow South is the overriding connection to the stories.
The success of the book -- republished three years later with two additional tales -- helped Wright obtain a $500 Guggenheim Fellowship.
His second book, Native Son, was a huge success, a best-seller, and the first selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club by a Black author. It told the story of Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old African-American man, who was sentenced to die after being convicted of murder. The book's theme was that Thomas's life -- the extreme poverty and lack of education, coupled with the violence of white society -- was destined to end the way it did.
The book was controversial in many ways, even in the Black community. Writer James Baldwin criticized the book, but accepted that "no American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull."
Wright also wrote Black Boy, a memoir of his upbringing.
Because of his views on American society, race, and Communism, Wright moved to Paris after World War II. He lived there the remainder of his life, where he continued to write. Those books included The Outsider, in which he warned that the Black man was born into a society not ready to accept him. It has been called the first American existential novel.
Wright died in 1960.
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