Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen

Upon meeting thirty-three-year-old Richard Wright in 1941, the renowned sociologist Robert Park famously demanded, "How in hell did you happen?" Having been born into poverty in a sharecropper's cabin in 1908, Wright managed to complete only an eighth-grade education. Yet by the time he met Park he was the best-selling author of Native Son (1940), a searing indictment of racism that is a classic of American literature. Although Wright died prematurely at the age of fifty-two, he published nea…