The biographer who chronicled the life of esteemed Black author Richard Wright and a handful of other figures, including Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, died earlier this month from complications from multiple strokes, according to The Washington Post.
Hazel Rowley passed away at a Manhattan hospital March 1. She was 59.
In 2001 she penned a far-reaching biography about Wright, one of the first Black writers to gain mainstream acclaim in the early 1940s for his signature novels “Native Son” and “Black Boy.” It is titled “Richard Wright: The Life and Times”
In interviews, Rowley, who is White, said she questioned whether she could do justice to a story about a Black American, but she became captivated by the Wright saga.
“The figure of Richard Wright loomed before me,” Rowley wrote, according to the Post. “His whole life was about courage, daring and determination. He always grappled with the sense that he was an interloper in a territory meant only for Whites.”
The English-born writer quit her teaching job at an Australian university to move to the U.S. and research Wright’s experiences. She found a home as a visiting fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.
Rowley had earned a Ph.D in French Studies, but according to a note on her Web site, she was drawn to documenting the lives of “progressive” individuals and “outsiders.”
“Above all,” the Web site stated, “they (the subjects of her books) were passionate people who cared about the world and felt angry about its injustices.”
One such work, published in 2005, recounted the romantic relationship between French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre and feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir, “Tete a Tete: The Tumultous Lives & Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte”.
Her last manuscript, called “Franklin and Eleanor,” hit store bookshelves last year, and divulged details of the private relationship of the Roosevelts, “Franklin and Eleanor An Extraordinary Marriage”.