“The Academy is apparently growing up and so is Hollywood. “Only in America, the Land of the Free, could such a thing have happened,” the columnist Louella Parsons explained. It will give an idea of the world into which “Native Son” made its uncouth appearance to recall that at almost the same moment that Wright’s novel was entering the best-seller lists-the spring of 1940-Hattie McDaniel was being given an Academy Award for her performance as Mammy in “Gone with the Wind.” McDaniel was the first black person ever voted an Oscar, and she gave Hollywood (as all Oscar winners ideally do) an occasion for self-congratulation. In three weeks, the book sold two hundred and fifteen thousand copies. Nobody in America had ever before told a story like this, and had it published. When that scheme fails, he murders his black girlfriend, and even after he has finally been captured and sentenced to death he refuses to repent. The man, Bigger Thomas, feels so invigorated by what he has done that he tries to extort money from the woman’s wealthy parents. It involves the asphyxiation, decapitation, and cremation of a white woman by a poor young black man from the south side of Chicago. “Native Son” was that book, and it is not a novel for sentimentalists. “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about,” he complained, and he vowed that his next book would be too hard for tears. The reviews were admiring, but they did not please Wright. He had better luck with a collection of short stories, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” which appeared in 1938.
In 1935, he finished a short novel called “Cesspool,” about a day in the life of a black postal worker. He became active in literary circles, and in 1933 he was elected executive secretary of the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, a writers’ organization associated with the Communist Party. In 1927, he fled to Chicago, and eventually he found a job in the Post Office there, which enabled him (as he later said) to go to bed on a full stomach every night for the first time in his life.
He was born in a sharecropper’s cabin in Mississippi and grew up in extreme poverty: his father abandoned the family when Wright was five, and his mother was incapacitated by a stroke before he was ten. Richard Wright was thirty-one when “Native Son” was published, in 1940. Photograph by Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche / Getty
0 kommentar(er)
