Born in Mississippi in 1908, Richard Wright was the son of an illiterate sharecropper father and a schoolteacher mother. when wright was five years old, his father left the family and his mother was forced to take domestic jobs away from home, wright’s first published story, "The Voodoo of Hell's Half Acre," appeared in three parts in the Southern Register in 1924. He moved to Memphis at age seventeen, borrowing the library card of an Irish coworker in order to satisfy his voracious literary appetite. Wright moved to Chicago in 1927 and joined the Communist Party. He worked with the Federal Negro Theater in Chicago under the Federal Writers Project. In 1937 Wright moved to New York City and helped start New Challenge magazine. During this time his short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children, won first prize in a Story magazine contest. wright’s novel Native Son was published in 1940, becoming the first best-selling novel by an African American writer Black Boy, wright’s personal and emotional account of his childhood and adolescence in the Jim Crow South, was published in 1945 and also became a best-seller In 1947 wright moved permanently to France, settling in Paris, though he traveled extensively. This international outlook broadened the scope of his writing until his death in 1960 of a heart attack.