It’s the birthday of Richard Wright (1908-1960), whose novel Native Son (1940) was one of the first major novels by a black author to protest racism and thus established Wright as the father of black American literature (though James Baldwin would take issue with that). Native Son was also both the first bestseller and the first Book-of-the-Month Club selection by an African American author.

Wright was born on Rucker’s Plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, to a sharecropper and a schoolteacher. Wright’s father left when Wright was only five, and he and his brother were at an orphanage for a time while his mother worked. (Shall we create a category called American Writers Who Spent Time in an Orphanage Even Though They Had at Least One Living Parent? It would be a nice complement to the extant category, British Writers Who Were Sent to Boarding School and Somehow Survived, However Embittered and Scarred for Life.) His mother later became a paralytic, so she and her sons eventually moved in with her parents in Jackson. Wright’s grandmother was a very religious Seventh-Day Adventist and also illiterate, and she thought “fiction was the work of the devil” and wouldn’t have books in the house. So that’s fun.

Wright was an excellent student but dropped out after the ninth grade to work. He moved to Memphis at 17, then Chicago shortly after that, working jobs at a post office, an animal lab, an insurance agency. He joined the Communist party in the early 30s and began writing under the Federal Writers’ Project, working for a theater. (He had already published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half-Acre,” in 1924 in the Southern Register. No copies of this story are thought to survive, so check your attics, people.) He moved to New York City in 1937, edited magazines, and published his first story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), which won a Story magazine contest. In 1940, Native Son came out and sold 215,000 copies in three weeks. (NB: That’s a lot.)

Native Son is about Bigger Thomas, a young black man from Chicago’s South Side ghetto, and the novel managed to make everyone from both sides of the racial divide vastly uncomfortable, and others besides. Whites were confronted with the ugliness of their racism. Blacks felt that Bigger, who accidentally kills a white girl and later murders his girlfriend, fed into the worst stereotypes of black men that they were working to correct. Communists were blamed for not understanding the blacks who supported them.

Wright in fact dropped out of the Communist party in the early 40s, but the CIA said, “Not good enough,” and shadowed him ever after. In 1945, Wright’s memoir of boyhood and adolescence, Black Boy, was published. (This one’s going right on my list. Speaking of which, I should really write down my list.) In 1946, Wright, fed up with good old American racism, moved permanently to Paris with his second wife and their daughter; a second daughter was born a few years later. (Wright’s wife was white, and one thing he was sick of was the racism his mixed-race family encountered even in New York City.) Wright went on to write more novels, stories, and nonfiction books, including the novel The Outsider (1953), but in general his later work was not as acclaimed as his earlier. His died in Paris of a heart attack after struggling with amoebic dysentery for over a year. A number of his works were published posthumously, including A Father’s Law (2008).

Have a tall glass of iced tea and lemonade on this muggy Tuesday, or whatever your thing is, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.