Documentary Eloquently Tells Story Of Author’s Life

He came from humble beginnings and rose to become one of America’s more celebrated men of letters.

Yet in the end, like a number of other African-American artists of his day, author Richard Wright fled the country that had shaped, praised and then scorned him, only to live out his days in self-imposed exile in France.

Where once he had enjoyed adulation from the literary world, in his last days, Wright knew only the quiet desperation of poverty, paranoia and ill health.

Paranoia? Well, they did find electronic bugs in his Paris flat.

Ill health? Yes, there were signs he was not well, but whether his death was from natural causes is still being questioned by some close to him.

Poverty? Yes, the man who wrote “Native Son” was, in the end, sustaining himself by writing album liner notes.

That is the sweep of Wright’s 52-year life described so eloquently on PBS in “Richard Wright: Black Boy,” a documentary from the Independent Television Service and Mississippi Educational Television.

The piece, titled after Wright’s biography, “Black Boy,” airs 50 years after that work’s publication and on the 87th anniversary of Wright’s birth.

It follows his childhood in Mississippi as a son of an illiterate sharecropper, the development of his gift for language, his migration to Chicago, his pursuit of fame in New York, and his flight from the Untied States.

The story is told through the testimony of a rich group of spokesmen, including former classmates, fellow literary lights Ralph Ellison (in a final interview before his death last year) and Amiri Baraka, as well as Wright’s daughter Julia.

The Chicago days were amazing. Producer-director Madison Davis Lacy weaves together a number of themes: Wright’s involvement with and ultimate split from the Communist Party and his growing stature as a writer, beckoning him to the publishing houses of New York. In 1937, as he eyed the East Coast, Wright was offered the security of a job in the Chicago Post Office, a veritable beehive of talented black people barred from the better jobs they were educated for.

Instead, Wright chose New York. In 1938, “Uncle Tom’s Children” was published to good reviews. In 1940, he struck literary gold with the best-selling “Native Son,” a milestone in American letters. The novel, the first by a black author to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man who makes a frightening and tragic mistake. Five years later Wright produced “Black Boy,” an account of his Southern childhood.

The glory days of New York gave way to his period of scrutiny by the FBI, aroused by his Communist affiliation and his outspoken views on social issues.

By 1947, the heyday of feature spreads in Life magazine and literary acclaim gave way to permanent residence abroad. He lived the rest of his life as an expatriate, and things were never the same again - interesting and intriguing, for sure, but never the same.

The documentary is a reminder of how well television can treat American history. Unfortunately, there is relatively little footage of Wright himself.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: Special “Richard Wright: Black Boy” airs Monday at 10 p.m. on Spokane’s KSPS-Channel 7 and at 9 p.m. on KCDT-Channel 26 from Coeur d’Alene and KUID-Channel 12 from Moscow.