Richard Wright

September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960

Inducted in 2010

Fiction

Uncle Tom's Children (1938)

The Man Who Was Almost a Man (1939)

Native Son (1940)

The Outsider (1953)

Savage Holiday (1954)

The Long Dream (1958)

Eight Men (1961)

Lawd Today (1963)

Rite of Passage (1994)

A Father's Law (2008) (unfinished)

Drama

Native Son: The Biography of a Young American with Paul Green (1941)

Non-fiction

How "Bigger" Was Born; Notes of a Native Son (1940)

12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941)

Black Boy (1945)

Black Power (1954)

The Color Curtain (1956)

Pagan Spain (1957)

Letters to Joe C. Brown (1968)

American Hunger (1977)

Black Power: Three Books from Exile (2008)

Essays

The Ethics Of Living Jim Crow: An Autobiographical Sketch (1937)

Introduction to Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945)

I Choose Exile (1951)

White Man, Listen! (1957)

Blueprint for Negro Literature (1937)

The God that Failed (contributor) (1949)

Poetry

Haiku: This Other World (eds. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener, 1998)

Haiku: The Last Poetry of Richard Wright (2012)

*The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination.*

Winner of the Springarn Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Story Magazine Award, Wright’s highly-lauded novel Native Son deals with racial inequality in Chicago’s ghettos, as, to some extent, does his memoir, Black Boy. Bigger Thomas, Native Son’s protagonist, is a victim and a criminal living in utter poverty on the South Side, and through him Wright explores the intricacies of societal conditioning in the violence that characterized impoverished black neighborhoods. The Book of the Month Club chose Native Son as its first book written by an African-American. Wright has had a Chicago school named after him, and been featured on a U.S. Postal stamp.