Richard Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. His father was a black sharecropper; his mother, a school teacher. The pressures of city living led his father to desert his family shortly thereafter they migrated to Memphis, and from then on Wright's childhood consisted of moving from one southern town to another.

Wright arrived in Chicago during the Great Depression, worked odd jobs, and drifted until his association with the American Communist party gave him roots of a kind. In 1938, his first book, Uncle Tom's Children, was published. These stories depict the black person in revolt against his environment and reveal the depth of Wright's emotional ties to the South. Wright then went on to publish Native Son, in 1940. With this book Wright gained national attention, especially after it won the $500 prize awarded by Story magazine.

According to Wright himself, he was a member of the Communist party from 1932 to 1944, and the books he wrote during this period reflect his belief in communism as the only existing agency capable of restoring humanitarian values to the earth.Native Son, incorporating this idea, influenced a whole generation of black novelists. The novel's anti-hero, Bigger Thomas, became the murderer he was, not out of choice, but as a result of environmental influences beyond his control; Wright's autobiography, Black Boy (1945), expresses the same Marxist philosophy. A best seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Native Son was successfully dramatized by Orson Welles and was made into a movie, Wright himself playing Bigger Thomas. The book is an integral part of American literary tradition in its struggle to reconcile the innocence of the rural past with the corruption of the urban present.

Wright's break with the Communist party involved a slow process of disillusionment. He discovered that even as a cell member, he was just as isolated, just as abused and misunderstood as he had been before. He finally resigned from the John Reed Club so that he could devote more time to writing and less to political action. Subsequently he was director of the Federal Negro Theater and a member of the Federal Writers' Project. Also, it was about this time that Wright became attracted to the existentialist philosophies of Sartre and, especially, Camus. He became an expatriate in 1947, living in France until his death. Although married, with two daughters, he always felt himself to be rootless, a wanderer.