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However, his novels brought him not only fame and wealth, but also threat from the white. Wright was so depressed to America that he left his country to France with his wife and children in 1947. Wright’s creation was strongly influenced by his own experience.
Richard Wright was born in a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi. Life was tough when he was young. Living in the orphanage and his relative’s home, he was abused and suffered from hunger a lot, and in order to survive in the severe surroundings, he often fought against other children. Because of living in this hostile society, Wright felt he was an outsider and abandoned boy of America, who was full of hatred and fear towards the white, and this mind was reflected vividly in his novel Native Son.
He wrote in his novel Native Son:
Multiply Bigger Thomas twelve million times, allowing for environmental and temperamental variations, and for those Negroes who are completely under the influence of the church, and you have the psychology of the Negro people.(Native Son, 1940:423)
Native Son is the most representative one among his works, which is considered as a milestones in the history of African-American literature, firstly published in 1940 based on the social background in 1930s' Chicago. Shortly after its publication, many critics praised highly its social significance. As Irving Howe said in his 1963 essay Black Boys and Native Sons, "The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever."
This novel stirred up real controversy by shocking the sensibilities of both black and white Americans for the first time in an African American writer's work, for Wright created a quite different black image unlike "Uncle Tom" with absolute submission, but a new one who was estranged from the folk culture and defied the racist order with rebellious personality. The writer set Big Thomas's fate as the main plot line, using an oppressive narration method to sublime the racial memories, reproduce the history and current situation of American black, and reveal their inner pain, leading African-American literature to a new height.
Wright inherited the tradition of American realism, and Native Son was strongly influenced by the novel An American Tragedy, the masterpiece of Theodore Dreiser. These two novels were created according to the real crimes and both revealed the crime as a product of the abnormal development of the capitalist society. But in the era of Wright, Freud's psychoanalytic theory has great influence on the literature, Wright also paid attention to the analysis and description of the morbid psychology of the characters in his writing, but this kind of psychology, according to the author himself, is a reflection of his own mental state.