March 1, 1940: Richard Wright Publishes "Native Son"

March 1, 1940: Richard Wright publishes Native Son, his debut novel. It is a watershed moment in the history of American literature.

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908 in Roxie, Mississippi. His father abandoned the family when Richard was 6, and the family moved first to Natchez, Mississippi, and then to Memphis, Tennessee. His mother suffered a stroke, and was subsequently raised by an aunt and uncle in Greenwood, Mississippi, and then by grandparents in the Mississippi State capital of Jackson.

He was first published at age 15, with a short story in a local black newspaper, but no copies survive. At 17, he moved to Memphis, got a job, and, using the library card of a sympathetic white co-worker, self-educated himself at the city's main library. In 1926, as part of the Great Migration of black Americans from south to north, he took his mother and younger brother with him to the South Side of Chicago, which became the biggest black neighborhood in the country -- with more black people than even New York's Harlem.

He became a postal clerk. Then came the Great Depression, and he became a Communist. He founded an edited a leftist literary magazine, and published his own stories. In 1937, he moved to Harlem, and became the New York editor of The Daily Worker, the newspaper of the Communist Party of America. In 1940, after failing to get his 1st novel, titled Cesspool, published, his next effort, Native Son, was published by Harper & Brothers, a precursor of Harper Collins.

The book focuses on Bigger Thomas, 20 years old at the start, and living in the Chicago ghetto. He gets a job as a driver for a rich white family, whose daughter, Mary, is around his age, and has been seduced to the Communist cause by her boyfriend, Jan.

Mary gets drunk, and Bigger carries her into the house and up to her room. Her mother comes into the room. She is blind, but he forgets this, and puts a pillow over her face to keep her quiet. By the time the mother leaves, Bigger realizes he has, however unintentionally, smothered Mary to death. To cover this up, he incinerates her in the house's furnace.

When the police investigate, Bigger implicates Jan, thinking it will please Mary's father. But his story falls apart, and he runs, and ends up killing another woman, a black one. The story hits the newspapers, and both white and black people hate him. He is finally caught, tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. He accepts his fate.

In 1941, Wright collaborated with playwright Paul Green, and Native Son was staged on Broadway, starring Canada Lee as Bigger, and directed by none other than Orson Welles. It ran for 114 performances.

It has been filmed 3 times: In 1951, with Wright himself, despite now being 42 years old, playing Bigger, after the play's star, Canada Lee, was offered the role again but had to drop out; in 1986, with Victor Love; and in 2019, with Ashton Sanders.

Without Native Son, it is difficult to imagine the later success of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Go Tell It On the Mountain and other works by James Baldwin, Fences and the other plays of August Wilson, and many other works by black authors. Wright wasn't quite the Jackie Robinson of literature -- through his poetry, that was probably Langston Hughes -- but in prose, he was indispensable. As Baldwin himself put it, "No American Negro exists who does not have his private Bigger Thomas living in his skull." In 1955, Baldwin published a book of essays, titling it Notes of a Native Son.

As Irving Howe wrote in his 1963 essay "Black Boys and Native Sons": "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies... (and) brought out into the open, as no one ever had before, the hatred, fear, and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture."

In 1941, Wright married Ellen Poplar, a white Jewish Communist organizer from Brooklyn. They had 2 daughters, Julia and Rachel. In 1946, the Wrights left America for Paris, France, never to return. He continued to write, including essays attacking the appearance of American imperialism, until his death on November 28, 1960, after a short illness, only 52 years old. Julia has claimed that he was murdered. Like many other literary figures who came to settle in Paris, he was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

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March 1, 1940 was a Friday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. Ironically, the only major team sport in season in North America at that time of the year was hockey, then all-white. And no games were scheduled for that day. So there were no scores, in any sport.