Richard Wright died in a Paris clinic in 1960; his daughter and friends said the US government may have had him killed

Richard Wright, 52, went to the Eugene Gibez clinic in Paris with stomach pain and amoebic dysentery and died that night, 28 November 1960. The recorded cause was a heart attack. He had no known heart trouble. His biographer Hazel Rowley reports that a woman visited him about an hour after admission, and accounts differ on who she was; some say she gave him an injection. A nurse found him in good spirits at 9 p.m. and dead two hours later. His daughter Julia Wright and his friend, the cartoonist Ollie Harrington, said the US government may have had him murdered. These are allegations. The FBI watched Wright from 1942 to 1963 and kept him on its Security Index while he lived abroad. No documentation of a role in his death has been found. He was cremated without a post-mortem and buried at Pere Lachaise. His widow Ellen Wright was executor and lost a lawsuit against biographer Margaret Walker, Wright v. Warner Books. His papers are at Yale's Beinecke Library. Julia Wright published his unfinished novel A Father's Law in January 2008.