土生子中別格的自我實(shí)現(xiàn)之路

1、上海交通大學(xué)碩士學(xué)位論文 Chapter One Introduction 第 1 頁 Chapter One Introduction 1.1 Richard Wright and His Native Son 1.1.1 Richard Wright Richard Wright was born on September

2、4, 1908 on a farm outside Natchez, Mississippi. His grandparents were slaves and his maternal grandfather once fought in the Civil War. His father, Nathan Wright, unable to read or write, served as a sharecropper who pos

3、sessed no land of his own but farmed a white man’s land. His mother, Ella Wilson Wright, was once a schoolteacher, but later gave up her profession to help with the farming. In 1912, a drop in cotton price forced Wright

4、’s father off his land, moving the family to Memphis, Tennessee.When he was six, his father deserted the family, making their already impoverished life more miserable. To support the family, his mother became a cook in a

5、 white family, leaving the boys by themselves all day. From then on, the six-year-old Wright had to learn to take on the responsibility of the house while his mother was at work. In 1915 his mother became seriously sick,

6、 and placed her sons in an orphanage for black children that “feeds him with all the grudging contempt of a Dickensian institution” (Warnes, 5). Fed up with the gnawing pangs of hunger, Wright tried to escape, but was ca

7、ught up and punished with a spranking. At last, in the late spring of 1916 or 1917, his mother came to the orphage to take them away and stay with his grandparents in Jackson, Mississippi. The move to Wright’s grandpar

8、ents did not improve their living conditions much. He was forced to subsist on mush and received lots of beatings. His grandmother, a Seventh Day Adventist, regarded literature as the Devil stuff and forbad Wright to rea

9、d any of them. One day Wright saw the lodger, absored in reading and begged her to tell him what it said. Not having the heart to disappoint the boy, she told him the story of Bluebeard and his seven wives, describing ho

10、w Bluebeard murdered six of them and hung them up by the hair, which mesmerized him. Regretfully, it was found out by his grandmother who drove the lodger away. However, she left a permenant legacy, enabling Wright to di

11、scover the 上海交通大學(xué)碩士學(xué)位論文 Chapter One Introduction 第 3 頁 organization sponsored by the communist party, which was an important development in his determination to be a

12、 writer. He joined the Communist Party in the same year, and functioned as the executive secretary of the local John Reed Club. In 1934, he accepted a position as supervisor in a club for young black men, an experience c

13、ontributing a lot to the creation of Native Son. Wright moved to New York in 1937 to take the position of Harlem editor for Daily Worker, the major communist newspaper in the United States. Shortly after winning the Stor

14、y competition, he proposed to a middle-class black woman, but was rejected cruelly by her father owing to his financial conditions. In 1939 he married Dhima Rose Meadman, a modern-dance teacher of Russian Jewish ancestry

15、, but the couple divorced a year later. He then married Ellen Poplar in 1941 who was an active member of the Communist Party despite her family’s strong objections.They had two daughters, Julia and Rachel. In 1942 he wit

16、hdrew from the Communist party without publicity and two years later announced his break with the party in an Atlantic Monthly article, “I Tried to Be a Communist”. After World War II, Wright accepted the French governme

17、nt’s invitation to visit Paris where he was received eagerly by French intellectuals. In 1947 to escape from racism, he returned to Paris with his wife and daughter, where they became permanent expatriates. In France, he

18、 struck a good relationship with important French writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simonr De Beauvoir, who exerted a great influence on Wright and his works. During his stay in France, he travelled through Europe, Af

19、rica and Asia, which laid a good foundation for his numerous nonfiction works. He died of heart failure on November 28, 1960 in Paris. Wright won international fame for his fictions, which included Uncle Tom’s Children (

20、1938), Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), Savage Holiday (1954), The Long Dream (1958), and Lawd Today (1963). He first attracted attention with Uncle Tom’s Children exploring the brutal reality of

21、 Southern racism. It won a $500 Story magazing prize for the best work from the Federal Writers’ Project. He then reached the career peak with the publication of Native Son, generally considered as his masterpiece. It wa

22、s the first Book of the Month Club recommendation from a black writer, selling 250,000 copies in its first run. In 1945 he published Black Boy, the first half of his autobiorgraphy. Likewise, it was selected by the Book