Wright was born on a plantation not far from Natchez, Mississippi, in 1908. When he was six years old, his family moved to Memphis, and soon after that his father, an illiterate farmer, left his mother; and although she had been educated as a school teacher, she was forced to work as a cook to keep the family afloat. It was during this time that Richard had to stay in an orphanage. The next move, brought on by his mother's poor health, was to Jackson, Mississippi, where his grandmother lived. Here Richard wrote his first story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," which was printed by a local black newspaper, Southern Register. He was sixteen. Before he was twenty, he was in Chicago writing articles and stories for the Communist Party Daily Worker and the New Masses. His first major story, "Superstition," was published in Abbot's Monthly in April of 1931. He continued to be interested in the Communist Party through the 'Thirties. In 1937 he moved to New York and became the editor of the Harlem Daily Worker and, for a short time, a literary magazine, the New Challenge. In 1938 his Uncle Tom's Children (a version made up of four novellas) was published, and he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. This allowed him to finish his first novel, Native Son, in 1940. Back in 1939 he had married Dhimah Rose Meadman, a white dancer; but this marriage soon failed. In the following year he married another white woman, this one a member of the Communist Party. This marriage resulted in two daughters, Julia and Rachel, born in 1942 and 1949, resepectively. During this time he participated in the Federal Writers' Project, joined the Communist Party, and began to publish poetry and short stories in Communist Party magazines, such as Left Front, Anvil, and New Masses.
In 1942 Wright quietly resigned from the Communist Party, and in 1944 he publicly broke with it but continued to to follow liberal ideologies. In 1946 in Paris he published The Outsiders, which revealed that he was going through an existentialist phase. He had by this time become acquainted with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. In 1947, he became a French citizen; and in 1954, he completed a short novel, Savage Holiday,
On November 18, 1960, Richard Wright died of an apparent heart attack. He was cremated on December 3 and buried in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery, with a copy of Black Boy, a biography of his youth.