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| November 28, 1960 |
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| Richard Wright (1908 - 1960) |
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Richard Wright as Sledgehammer
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| by Steve King |
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On this day in 1960 the expatriate American writer Richard Wright died in Paris at the age of fifty-two. Wright's last fifteen years in France were a final stop in a life of migrations. As the son of an illiterate Mississippi sharecropper his early years were spent in poverty on the farm and then moving city to city in the South. He lived with both parents, then only his mother; with one uncle and then another and then a grandmother. He moved to Chicago, expecting the North would be better; he moved to New York to edit the Daily Worker, thinking the Communist Party was the answer. He rejected Communism, and then America; when he left for Europe he continued to travel throughout northern Africa and Asia, now taking the international reputation earned from his political writing and his two best-sellers -- the novel Native Son (1940), the autobiography Black Boy (1945) -- with him: "He came like a sledgehammer," wrote historian John Henrik Clarke, "like a giant out of the mountain with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer ... FULL STORY »
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— SK |
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The TinL masthead features photography by
Natasha D'Schommer
, and the book art featured is by Jim Rosenau.
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