USPS Honors Richard Wright with Literary Arts Stamp

Richard Wright (1908–1960) is the third Mississippian and the 25th American author honored with a stamp in the United States Postal Service’s Literary Arts series. The dedication of a first-class 61-cent stamp took place on April 9, 2009, in the lobby of the Chicago Main Post Office, just across the street from the building where the author once worked as a letter sorter.

Unveiling of a first-class 22-cent stamp honoring William Faulkner, another author who was a postal worker, took place in Oxford during the 1987 Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference. The first-class 32-cent stamp commemorating Tennessee Williams was unveiled in 1994 in Clarksdale, the author’s childhood home and the setting for many of his plays.

Grandson of former slaves and the son of an illiterate sharecropper, Wright was born on a plantation near Natchez and lived in Jackson, Memphis, and other places before moving to Chicago in 1927. There he worked for the post office from 1928 to 1930, was later hired by the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Writers’ Project, and organized the South Side Writers’ Group, whose meetings helped to inspire a flowering of African American literature. Wright moved to New York City in 1937 and to Paris in 1947. He published 20 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction during his lifetime and posthumously, but is best known for his 1938 story collection Uncle Tom’s Children, his 1940 novel Native Son, and his 1945 autobiography Black Boy, books that vividly portray the racism in American society. The first book by an African American to be a best seller and the first to be selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club, Native Son made a great impact. As literary critic Irving Howe wrote, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever.”

The stamp artwork by Kadir Nelson features a portrait of Richard Wright in front of snowy tenements on the South Side of Chicago, a scene that recalls the setting of Native Son. When asked about the background for the stamp and the place for its unveiling, officials at the U.S. Postal Service said they chose the South Side of Chicago because Wright lived and worked there during a crucial, formative decade. Julia Keller, writing in the Chicago Tribune, explained it this way: “Mississippi made him, but Chicago made him a writer. It was Chicago—with its bright churn of possibilities and its darker realities—that transformed Richard Wright from a shy Southern kid into a popular and internationally acclaimed author. Chicago broke his heart, but it gave him his mission: to illuminate the dehumanizing effects of racial prejudice in 20th-century America.”

“This nation experienced a historical event in our most recent presidential election,” U.S. Postal Service Chicago District/Postmaster Gloria Tyson explained. “It was an event Richard Wright helped to bring about with his often controversial writings; writings of a world view on humanity and politics that were far too forward-thinking for his own generation; writings full of anger, frustration, and indignation stemming from his early life experiences being poor and black in America; writings that appealed to—and appalled—both whites and blacks; writings that eventually helped to direct a change in how America addressed and discussed race relations.”

Richard Wright’s daughter Julia was not able to attend the unveiling, but sent remarks that began with a contemporary reference: “When a young Barack Obama came to Chicago in his 20s to work as a community organizer, he made imaginary chains between his life and the faces he saw, borrowing other people’s memories. ‘In this way’ he wrote in Dreams from My Father, ‘I tried to take possession of the city, make it my own. . . . The mailman I saw was Richard Wright, delivering mail before his first book sold.’”

“In 2009, with the election of the first African American president,” literary scholar Maryemma Graham adds, “Wright would surely be proud to be an American. He continues to inspire because of his belief in writing for the purpose of fostering human understanding and effecting social change.”