Each of the stories, in its violence and moral passion, is a preparation for his major publication, Native Son, in 1940. These stories depict the black person in revolt against his environment and reveal the depth of Wright's emotional ties to the South. In 1938, his first book, Uncle Tom's Children, was published. He was particularly attracted to the American naturalists Mencken, Dreiser, Lewis, and Anderson and his first publications included articles, short stories, and poetry, mostly printed by the Communist party press. Since the age of twelve, Richard Wright had not only dreamed of writing, but had written. He arrived in Chicago during the Great Depression, worked at odd jobs, and drifted until his association with the American Communist party gave him roots of a kind. The pressures of city living led him to desert his family shortly thereafter, and from then on Wright's childhood consisted of moving from one southern town to another, of intermittent schooling and sporadic jobs. In 1914, when cotton prices collapsed at the outbreak of the war, Wright's father was one among thousands who traveled North to the industrial centers he got as far as Memphis, where he found work as a night porter in a drugstore. His father was a black sharecropper his mother, a school teacher. Richard Wright was born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi.
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