Although Bigger, the protagonist of Native Son, finds that Chicago lacks the overt racism of Mississippi (where Bigger claims to have family, and where Wright himself was born), Bigger also notices a good deal of subtler racism in the city: zones where only whites or blacks are expected to live “charities” that serve, mostly, to maintain conditions for African Americans, rather than to help them to make money and live on equal terms with whites.

Wright’s most famous works- Native Son and Black Boy-each deal with the effects of a historical event often called the Great Migration, in which million of African Americans left the oppressive political and social conditions of the South and moved northward, to cities like Chicago and Detroit, in the Midwest, and New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, on the East Coast. Wright was an inspiration for other African-American writers, including Ralph Ellison (author of Invisible Man) and James Baldwin the latter would go on to critique Wright’s work severely, but with the acknowledgment of its influence on his own.

Wright moved to Paris in 1946, and lived there, primarily, until his death in 1960. Wright’s Black Boy, a somewhat fictionalized tale of his young life, was released in 1945 and added to his fame. Wright joined, for a time, the Communist Party in Chicago, and after writing a first novel ( Lawd Today, eventually published in 1963), he moved to New York City in 1937 and wrote, in 19, respectively, the short-story collection Uncle Tom’s Children and the novel Native Son, which launched his career. As a young man, Wright read widely in modern English and American literature, as well as translated literature from continental Europe. One of Wright’s jobs in Chicago was mail sorter at the Post Office.

Having performed well academically until he was forced, in high school, to drop out and begin working, Wright relocated, in 1927, to Chicago-a city that would allow Wright to develop as a writer and thinker, and in which his novel Native Son was based. His father left the family when Wright was a child, and his mother worked a series of menial jobs before suffering strokes between 19, requiring medical care for the rest of her life. Richard Wright was born in rural Mississippi, lived for a time near Memphis, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, and was raised mostly by female relatives in his extended family.

Native son written by richard wright