Richard Wright was born September 4, 1908, on a farm near Natchez, Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper and his mother was a teacher. Extreme poverty and family disintegration made it impossible for Wright to attend school regularly, so he was largely self-taught. He did well in school, especially in reading and writing, but he often had to leave school for weeks at a time to beg or work to supplement the family's income. In 1924, when he was only fifteen, he published his first short story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," in an African-American newspaper. He continued writing and read whatever major magazines of the day he could find-as well as any books he could manage to check out of the whites-only library on a borrowed card

In 1927 he left the South for Chicago, where he took a Job as a postal clerk. When the Great Depression...