Wright’s rising prominence correlates with rising eminence, rising fortunes, and changing lifestyles
As Richard Wright had gone through the brunt of his life in the South, he moved north to Chicago, and eventually landing in New York, he began to rise to prominence, with his own lifestyle undergoing significant changes, as well as his literary projects growing beyond novels. and autobiographies in drama and movies.
His brother was now engaged in the Works Progress Administration in which Richard himself was engaged. The employment of his brother and his assumption of some responsibility for the upkeep of the family. he relieved Richard of fully and singularly supporting the family as he had been doing before.
Richard Wright, who placed first in the Chicago postal service exam, didn’t entice him to fall behind. He turns down the resulting offer of a permanent position of about $2,000 a year to move to New York City and pursue his writing career. But along the way, he briefly stays with his well-known artists in Greenwich Village. He then moves to Harlem in mid-June 1937 and gets a furnished room at the Douglass Hotel at 809 St. Nicholas Avenue.
Later in the year he attends the Second Congress of American Writers as a delegate and was promoted to session president. He also becomes the Harlem editor for the Daily Worker and writes more than 200 articles throughout the year. Among the pieces he wrote are a series of articles on blues singer Lead Belly. He also collaborates with other writers such as Dorothy West and Marian Minnas to launch New Challenge magazine, which was designed to present black life in relation to the fight against war and fascism. By the end of the year, Wight was already writing the Harlem section for New York Panorama and was also working on “The Harlems” in The New York City Guide.
The following year, he rents another furnished room at 139 West 143rd Street. and he announces plans to marry his Harlem landlady’s daughter, but later cancels and reveals to his friends that a medical test had indicated the young woman had congenital syphilis.
Not long after, he moves house again, this time to the home of friends from Chicago, Jane and Herbert Newton, at 175 Carleton Avenue in Brooklyn. Newton’s landlord evicts them. Wright then moves in again, this time with the Newtons at 5222 Gates Avenue.
In 1939, Wright moved into the Douglas Hotel at 809 St Nicholas Avenue, renting the room next door to a Chicago friend, Theodore Ward. Around this time, he becomes close to Ellen Poplar and was considering marrying her when another woman stole her heart. Later that year, he married the woman who stole Ellen Poplar’s heart, Dhima Rose Meadman, a modern dance teacher and ballet dancer of Russian Jewish descent at an Episcopal church on Convent Avenue, to fellow African-American novelist Ralph Ellison, serving as his best man. He lives with his wife, his two-year-old son from a previous marriage and his mother-in-law in a large apartment on elegant Hamilton Terrace in Harlem. But the two didn’t last long together as they parted ways soon after.
Also in 1940 Richard Wright made his first airplane flight. He was accompanying Life magazine photographers to Chicago for an article being written about the South Side of which Richard had intimate knowledge. He toured the area with sociologist Horace Cayton, beginning a relationship that would last a long time. In February 1940, during a visit to Chicago, he bought a house for his family on Vincennes Avenue and had lunch with leading African-American writers, WEB Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Arna Bontemps.
In April, Wright sailed with his wife, son, mother, and his wife’s pianist for Veracruz, Mexico for a few months. He rents a ten-bedroom villa in the Miraval neighborhood in Caenevaca. There he begins to learn Spanish, taking lessons in it. He takes the opportunity to learn to play the guitar. Meeting up with Herbert Kline, an old friend from the John Reed club days who was now filming a documentary with John Steinbeck titled The Forgotten Village was another opportunity for Wright to make the most of it. complete. Developing an interest in filming, Wright followed them across the field. He then signed Orson Welles and John Houseman to a contract for the stage production of Native Son.
The tensions in the marriage began to become apparent and then Wright, realizing he was growing apart, leaves Mexico and travels the South alone. His father during this visit was described in Black Boy as “standing alone on the red clay of a Mississippi plantation, a sharecropper, clad in ragged overalls, holding a muddy hoe in his gnarled, veined hands… when I tried to speak with him I realized that… we were always strangers, we spoke a different language, we lived in very distant planes of reality.”
She returned to New York and divorced Dhimah in 1940.
In 1941 he married Ellen Poplar, a daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants, a white woman and a member of the communist party with whom he had worked and been in love before marrying Dhimah. A year later, their first daughter, Julia, was born in 1942. Rachel was born in Paris in 1949. In 1942, Wright moved back into 7 Middagh Street, a 19th-century house near the Brooklyn Bridgesharing House, sharing the house with several other writers. and artists like Carson. McCullers.
During 1940-1941, Wright collaborated with Paul Green to write a stage adaptation of Native Son which ran on Broadway in the spring of 1941 and was produced by John Houseman and staged by Orson Welles. Simultaneously, Wright published his sociological-psychological treatise Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941), with photographs collected by Edwin Rosskam; the book was well received. He was elected vice president of the League of American Writers.
Native Son, starring Canada Lee, also opens at St James Theater on March 24 after a benefit performance for the NAACP to rave reviews except for the Hearst pages which have been hostile to Orson Welles following his performance in Citizen Kane . The production will be in New York until June 15. Welle’s flashy but expensive staging caused the production to lose some money, which was nevertheless recouped during successful tours of Pittsburgh, Boston, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, and Baltimore.
Wright’s reputation and stature were now so great and impressive that he could single-handedly champion selfless and noble social causes, such as asking the governor of New Jersey to parole Clinton Brewer, a black man who had been imprisoned since 1923. for murdering a young woman, arguing that Brewer, who had taught himself musical composition, had sufficiently rehabilitated himself to be reabsorbed into society. Brewster is then released on July 8. But while Brewer didn’t avoid getting into more trouble, Wright never got tired of trying to bail him out.
His autobiography, Black Boy, came out in 1945, and it too emerged as a bestseller and Book of the Month Club selection, though the United States Senate denounced it as “obscene.”
The last section on his life in Chicago and his experience with the Communist Party was not published until 1977 under the title American Hunger. Wright’s publishers in 1945 only wanted the story of his life in the South. Then they cut what followed about his life in the North.
He worked during 1949-1951 on a film version of Native Son, in which he himself played Bigger. Forty-year-old and overweight, Wright had to train and stretch the verisimilitude to play the nineteen-year-old Bigger. During filming in Buenos Aires and Chicago, the production was plagued with problems. The film was released briefly but was not successful. European audiences acclaimed it, but the shortened version flopped in the United States and the film disappeared.