For Immediate Release

Richard Wright's Story Now a Screenplay

Hollywood, California, [DATE]––The first work by an African-American writer to hit the Book of The Month Club List, Black Boy, the 1945 best-selling autobiography of Richard Wright, has been adapted for the screen.

According to George Conda, the businessman who optioned the classic American story and is now marketing the script, the adaptation process was a challenge. "It was rather daunting to reinterpret, while doing justice to, what is not only a great work of literature, but also the story of an important writer’s life." He adds, "But we were aided by the fact that Mr. Wright’s early years, though an incredible struggle, were laced with personal triumph, irony, humor and genuine action."

Born in 1908, the son of an itinerant sharecropper, Wright faced a formidable, repressive, sometimes violent childhood. His father deserted the family leaving Ella Wright struggling to support her two young boys, Richard and his younger brother, Alan Leon. The family rarely had enough to eat and Richard endured hunger well into adulthood, at times forgoing meals to purchase books.

Driven to learn, write and better himself, and overcoming the longest of odds, as a young adult Wright escaped what was for him a deeply repressive South. He would go on to travel the world and work with the likes of Orson Welles. Shunning what he saw as entrenched racism throughout America, he established himself in Paris, an expatriate and member of the international literary set.

Not long after his death in 1960, his works would be rediscovered and studied in American colleges and high schools. But over the years his books were periodically banned in Southern communities.

Earlier this year, the Jacksonville, Florida, school system pulled Black Boy from the shelves.

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