Richard Nathaniel Wright (Sept 4, 1908 – Nov 28, 1960)

France, 1959

Simone de Beauvoir with Ellen Poplar Wright (left) and Richard Wright. New York, 1947.
Photographer: unknown

“Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“Reading was like a drug, a dope. The novels created moods in which I lived for days.”
― Richard Wright, Native Son

“I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“I did not know if the story was factually true or not, but it was emotionally true […].”
― Richard Wright, Black Boy

“At the age of twelve I had an attitude toward life that was to endure, that was to make me seek those areas of living that would keep it alive, that was to make me skeptical of everything while seeking everything, tolerant of all and yet critical. The spirit I had caught gave me insight into the suffering of others, made me gravitate toward those whose feelings were like my own, made me sit for hours while others told me of their lives, made me strangely tender and cruel, violent and peaceful. ”
― Richard Wright

“I was leaving the South
to fling myself into the unknown . . .
I was taking a part of the South
to transplant in alien soil,
to see if it could grow differently,
if it could drink of new and cool rains,
bend in strange winds,
respond to the warmth of other suns
and, perhaps, to bloom”
― Richard Wright

“Love grows from stable relationships, shared experience, loyalty, devotion, trust.”
― Richard Wright

quotations courtesy of Goodreads

The Man Who Lived Underground—a previously unpublished novel held in the Wright archives,  written in the early 1940s
review in The Atlantic