Category: American literature, Yale University, Dorothy Canfield Fisher

1 July 1944 Richard Wright (1908-1960) is perhaps best known for his critically-acclaimed collection Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas (1938), his groundbreaking novel Native Son (1940) and his autobiography, first published as Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945). Black Boy was the on the bestseller list from April 29 to June 6 of that year, despite being denounced as obscene in the U.S. Senate by Democrat Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi, and it solidified Wright’s reputation, at the time, as the most famous black author in America.