理查德·赖特

理查德·纳撒尼尔·赖特（英语：Richard Nathaniel Wright，1908年9月4日—1960年11月28日），非裔美国人作家，哈莱姆文艺复兴肇始者之一。他的代表作《土生子》对后来的非裔美国人文学产生了很大的影响。

Richard Nathaniel Wright (September 4, 1908 – November 28, 1960) was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries suffering discrimination and violence. His best known works include the novella collection Uncle Tom's Children (1938), the novel Native Son (1940), and the memoir Black Boy (1945). Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.

Early life and education

Childhood in the US South

Richard Nathaniel Wright was born on September 4, 1908, at Rucker's Plantation, between the train town of Roxie and the larger river city of Natchez, Mississippi. He was the son of Nathan Wright, a sharecropper, and Ella (Wilson), a schoolteacher. His parents were born free after the Civil War; both sets of his grandparents had been born into slavery and freed as a result of the war. Each of his grandfathers had taken part in the U.S. Civil War and gained freedom through service: his paternal grandfather, Nathan Wright, had served in the 28th United States Colored Troops; his maternal grandfather, Richard Wilson, escaped from slavery in the South to serve in the U.S. Navy as a Landsman in April 1865.

Richard's father left the family when Richard was six years old, and he did not see Richard for 25 years. In 1911 or 1912, Ella moved to Natchez, Mississippi, to be with her parents. While living in his grandparents' home, he accidentally set the house on fire. Wright's mother was so angry that she beat him until he was unconscious. In 1915, Ella put her sons in Settlement House, a Methodist orphanage, for a short time. He was enrolled at Howe Institute in Memphis, Tennessee, from 1915 to 1916. In 1916, his mother moved with Richard and his younger brother to live with her sister Maggie (Wilson) and Maggie's husband Silas Hoskins (born 1882) in Elaine, Arkansas. This part of Arkansas was in the Mississippi Delta, where former cotton plantations had been. The Wrights were forced to flee after Silas Hoskins "disappeared", reportedly killed by a white man who coveted his successful saloon business. After his mother became incapacitated by a stroke, Richard was separated from his younger brother and lived briefly with his uncle Clark Wilson and aunt Jodie in Greenwood, Mississippi. At the age of 12, Richard had not yet had a single complete year of schooling.

Soon Richard with his younger brother and mother returned to the home of his maternal grandmother, which was now in the state capital, Jackson, Mississippi, where he lived from early 1920 until late 1925. His grandparents, still angry at him for destroying their house, repeatedly beat Wright and his brother. But while he lived there, he was finally able to attend school regularly. He attended the local Seventh-day Adventist school from 1920 to 1921, with his aunt Addie as his teacher. After a year, at the age of 13 he entered the Jim Hill public school in 1921, where he was promoted to sixth grade after only two weeks.

In his grandparents' Seventh-day Adventist home, Richard was miserable, largely because his controlling aunt and grandmother tried to force him to pray so he might build a relationship with God. Wright later threatened to move out of his grandmother's home when she would not allow him to work on the Adventist Sabbath, Saturday. His aunt's and grandparents' overbearing attempts to control him caused him to carry over hostility towards Biblical and Christian teachings to solve life's problems. This theme would weave through his writings throughout his life.

At the age of 15, while in eighth grade, Wright published his first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half-Acre", in the local Black newspaper Southern Register. No copies survive. In Chapter 7 of Black Boy, he described the story as about a villain who sought a widow's home.