This volume presents a collection of stories by Richard Wright. All were completed between 1936 and 1940. The texts of the five stories and one essay in Uncle Tom’s Children are from their first collected appearance, and these texts are the last, or last-known, versions that Wright approved. A great deal of material pertaining to the publication of this work, including typescripts, page proofs, and correspondence between Wright and his publishers, is contained in the James Weldon Johnson Collection of the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Other significant materials are held in the Fales Collection of the New York University Library and the Firestone Library at Princeton University.
Uncle Tom’s Children was Wright’s first book to be published. Issued by Harper and Brothers in 1938 as a Story Press Book, it contained four stories, two of which had been published previously: “Big Boy Leaves Home” in The New Caravan in 1936; and “Fire and Cloud” in the March 1938 Story Magazine. The other two stories—“Long Black Song” and “Down by the Riverside”—appeared for the first time in the Harper collection in 1938. Wright had entered the stories in a contest for members of the Federal Writers’ Project sponsored by Story Magazine, and “Fire and Cloud” won the first prize of $500. Collation of the periodical texts of the two previously published stories with the book publication reveals a number of differences, and the extant typescripts and proofs for Story Magazine reveal that the book publication of “Fire and Cloud” follows the typescript rather than the periodical version. In addition, the correspondence between Wright and Edward Aswell, his editor at Harper and Brothers, shows that Wright oversaw the production of the book collection in each of its stages—from assembling the manuscript to reading proofs. Therefore the text of these four stories presented in this volume is that of the first book printing, published by Harper and Brothers in 1938.
Wright sent a fifth story, “Bright and Morning Star,” in January 1938 for inclusion in the first edition of Uncle Tom’s Children, but Harper and Brothers rejected it. The story was first published in a literary supplement to the May 10, 1938, issue of New Masses and was later collected in Edward O’Brien’s Best Short Stories of 1939 and in The Fifty Best American Short Stories 1914–1939. In 1940 Wright arranged for a second printing of Uncle Tom’s Children and offered to pay the costs of including “Bright and Morning Star” and his essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which had first appeared in American Stuff: WPA Writers’ Anthology, published by Viking in 1937. Harper and Brothers absorbed the costs of including the new pieces, and correspondence between Wright and Aswell shows that Wright read and corrected proofs for the two additions. The second printing of Uncle Tom’s Children in 1940 used the 1938 plates for the first four stories and new plates for the additional two parts. The texts of “Bright and Morning Star” and “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” presented in this volume are those published in the expanded second printing of Uncle Tom’s Children, published by Harper and Brothers in 1940.
This volume presents the texts of the original edition or typescripts chosen for inclusion; it does not attempt to reproduce features of the typographic design, such as the display capitalization of chapter openings. The text is reproduced without change, except for the correction of typographical errors. Spelling, punctuation, and capitalization often are expressive features and they are not altered, even when inconsistent or irregular. The following is a list of the typographical errors corrected, cited by page and line number: 49.35, trou; 90.24, says; 90.24, boys; 109.17, Ahll; 139.26, mantle; 141.31, mantle; 143.28, mantle; 144.12, Eh; 148.24, cried; 180.29, “There; 191.3, gonan; 204.18, days; 218.1, though; 226.23, chile; 231.14, mucha like; 240.17, Gut; 249.17–18, on way; 259.29, sheriffs.