Born: September 4, 1908, Roxie, MS

Education: Jackson, MS, 9th grade valedictorian

Died: November 28, 1960, Paris, France

Born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright came of age facing family poverty and Jim Crow. In 1927 he migrated to Chicago and did odd jobs prior to a post office job, where he began writing. He joined a communist literary group, the Communist Party, and steadily became an acclaimed writer.

Native Son (1940), his protest novel, places Wright among the best modern American writers. Its protagonist, Bigger Thomas, is a young black man from the ghetto and the chauffeur for the Daltons. He is attracted to Mary, their daughter. One night he takes a drunken Mary to her bedroom and kisses her but Mary's blind mother enters the room. To keep Mary quiet, he covers her face with a pillow and accidentally kills her. Frightened, he hides her in the furnace and writes a ransom note to feign kidnapping. But the body is found and he flees. Bigger also kills a girlfriend before his capture and prosecution. His counsel argues that the white-created ghetto caused Bigger's crimes, yet he is judged guilty and sentenced to death. “What I killed for I am,” he confesses. Indeed, he had done something that white society could not ignore. Wright thus powerfully evoked the tragic consequences of racial inequality.