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RICHARD WRIGHT, WHO would have been 100 years old this year, was, arguably, the most influential African-American writer of the twentieth century. He stood astride the midsection of that century as a battering ram, paving the way for the black writers who followed him: Ralph Ellison, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, John Williams. Today, 48 years after his death, his legacy remains strong; his daughter, Julia Wright, is helping to keep it alive. She succeeded in getting HarperCollins to publish the unfinished novel her father was working on in the weeks before his death. It was published in January under the tide, A Father's Law. And she will host a series of seminars this year that will discuss her father's work.
Wright was born on September 4, 1908, on a Mississippi plantation 22 miles east of Natchez. All of his four grandparents were slaves. He would find it ironic that today there is a plaque in Natchez marking his birth, for his upbringing in the South was a bitter, fearful experience, not something he looked back on with any fondness. His father deserted his family when Richard was five years old. He was shuttled to different family homes in Mississippi (Jackson and Greenwood) and Arkansas (Elaine and West Helena) before moving to Memphis. There was rarely enough food in the house. At six he became a drunkard, egged on by men who frequented a saloon. His grandmother was a Seventh-day Adventist who didn't let Richard read books that strayed from this gospel. He was beaten severely for various infractions. He started school late because he didn't have presentable clothes to wear. He never graduated from high school. And from a very early age he was abused mentally and physically by racist employers. In his memoir, Black Boy, Wright described those early years as "dark and lonely as death," causing him to reflect as follows about black life in America:
After I had outlived the shocks of childhood, after the habit of reflection had been born in me, I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how...