1 Chicago’s thriving theater scene inspired him creatively.
When he moved here from Memphis in 1927, at the age of 19, Wright worked initially as a ditch digger, waiter, and letter sorter, not earning enough money to splurge on show tickets. Once he established himself as a writer, though, “Chicago sharpened his understanding of formal theater and introduced him to an odd assortment of playwrights, actors, and producers who would influence his writing for years to come,” Bruce Allen Dick writes in Thunder on the Stage, out March 26.
2 He abandoned his first attempt at playwriting.
In 1935, Wright tried to adapt his then-unpublished novel Lawd Today!, hoping the magazine New Theatre would run the script in an issue devoted to Black playwrights and actors, but he completed only one act.
3 He was an ardent communist.
For a 1939 pageant in New York to memorialize Lenin, Wright contributed a manuscript endorsing the Soviet regime, titled ‘United, We Stand, Divided We Fall,’ in which an old man and his grandson walk across a map of Russia while the grandfather quotes from a book by Stalin. The pageant, however, never took place.
4 His ego helped torpedo the big-screen version of Native Son.
Though the Orson Welles–directed theater adaptation of Wright’s acclaimed novel got a Broadway run, the 1951 film version was a disaster, due in part to Wright’s shortcomings as an actor. Wright insisted on not only cowriting the script but also playing 20-year-old main character Bigger Thomas, even though Wright was in his early 40s. Despite working out and dieting to try to melt away 20 years, he still wasn’t credible in the role. “Wright’s performance lacks flair and rarely conveys the tormented Bigger that we see in the novel and the play,” Dick writes.
5 His final attempt at staging a play was a dud.
In 1959, while living in France, he tried to mount a Parisian production of Daddy Goodness, a satirical work, based on the life of Father Divine, about a Harlem preacher who drives a Cadillac and carries on affairs with female parishioners. Wright was unable to find investors, and his play never made it past a staged reading. He died of a heart attack the next year, aged 52.