“Native Son” was that book, and it is not a novel for sentimentalists. “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about,” he complained, and he vowed that his next book would be too hard for tears. The reviews were admiring, but they did not please Wright. He had better luck with a collection of short stories, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” which appeared in 1938. In 1935, he finished a short novel called “Cesspool,” about a day in the life of a black postal worker. He became active in literary circles, and in 1933 he was elected executive secretary of the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, a writers’ organization associated with the Communist Party. In 1927, he fled to Chicago, and eventually he found a job in the Post Office there, which enabled him (as he later said) to go to bed on a full stomach every night for the first time in his life. He was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Mississippi and grew up in extreme poverty: his father abandoned the family when Wright was five, and his mother was incapacitated by a stroke before he was ten. Richard Wright was thirty-one when “Native Son” was published, in 1940. Photograph by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche / Getty
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