After the death of his mother, he was sent at the age of four to live with his maternal grandmother, who encouraged a love of reading in him.
He dropped out of high school, and his only further education was a brief stint at the Handy Writers' Colony in Marshall, Illinois, taught by James Jones.
In 1955, Wright moved to Manhattan, New York, and worked a number of low-paid jobs while writing his first novel, The Messenger, which was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1963.
[2] His second novel, The Wig, received positive reviews, with Conrad Knickerbocker calling it "brutal, exciting and necessary" in The New York Times.
In his New York Times column "American Beauties", devoted to undersung American books, Dwight Garner compared reading Wright to "a steep, stinging pleasure", while Ishmael Reed has described Wright as "Richard Pryor before there was a Richard Pryor.