When the eminent sociologist Robert Park met Richard Wright in Chicago in 1941 he exclaimed, “How in hell did you happen?”1 For a relatively conservative thinker like Park who believed character was a function of environment and environment was slow to change, Wright was indeed a puzzle. For Wright, who had a year earlier achieved national prominence as writer with the publication of Native Son, had grown up in the worst possible environment, the brutally segregated world of the Deep South, but had somehow risen well above the society that had tried to put severe limitations on his development.
By the time Wright died in 1960 at the age of fifty-two, he had achieved extraordinary success as a writer, political thinker, and cultural critic, becoming one who changed the course of American and African American literatures. He published seven novels, including Native Son, a book that transformed the ways Americans envision race by revealing truths that previous writers were either blind to or lacked the courage to confront. His two collections of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men, are noteworthy for their formal artistry and honest treatments of social problems that continue to startle and disturb their readers. Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy/American Hunger, has established itself as one of the seminal texts in American autobiographical writing. Moreover, he published more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays. His groundbreaking critical articles such as, “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” and “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” set high aesthetic standards for black literature and established a solid theoretical framework that exerted strong influence over several generations of African American writers. Wright was also one of the first novelists to put American racial dilemmas into a global perspective, publishing three penetrating studies late in his career: Black Power, The Color Curtain, and Pagan Spain. He also achieved success as a poet, writing a powerful series of political poems at the outset of his career and creating a large body of haiku verse at the very end of his life. Very few other major American writers have achieved more success in such a wide variety of literary forms and intellectual inquiry.
Born to Ella and Nathan Wright on September 4, 1908, on Rucker’s Plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, Wright was raised in a world of stark poverty and systematic discrimination, a rigidly segregated society that was designed by those in power to make sure that he and other black people would stay forever in their “place.” And as Wright would later reveal in all of his writings about the South, this “place” was calculated not only to deprive him of the education he needed to rise in American life but was also intended to reduce him to a subhuman level and relegate him and his people to the extreme margins of American life. As Wright stressed in Black Boy, the social environment he experienced growing up in the Deep South put the most extreme limits on him, becoming a world “ringed by walls,”2 which would make him feel “forever condemned.” The South, therefore, was to Wright not only a naturalistic trap depriving him of economic opportunities and social development but also a Dantean hell that threatened his very soul. But Wright’s life, which has been so ably captured by biographers such as Michel Fabre, Margaret Walker, and Hazel Rowley, can also be regarded as the extraordinary American success story that astonished Robert Park. Facing long odds that very few, if any, major American writers had to face, Wright eventually used his extraordinary talent and will to overcome the repressive environment, which would have crushed many lesser writers. In the process, he became a seminal writer who changed the course of American and African American literatures. As Keneth Kinnamon has observed, Wright became “one of the most important figures of twentieth-century American fiction.”3 He revolutionized American and African American literatures because he was courageous enough to attack old taboos that previous writers dared not approach and created startling new images of black experience that continue to inspire writers and disturb readers.
His early life was spent shifting back and forth between a bewildering number of locations in Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee as his family sought suitable work that would provide them with some degree of security and stability. His father, an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, moved the family to Natchez in 1911 to work in a sawmill and two years later moved them to Memphis, Tennessee, where he became a night porter in a Beale Street drug store. He abandoned his wife and children in 1915, condemning them to desperate poverty. When Wright’s mother contracted a serious illness shortly thereafter, Richard was placed for a while in a Memphis orphanage, an experience that terrified him and left in him an enduring sense of his own loneliness and a tendency he notes in Black Boy to “distrust everything and everybody” (BB, 34). Wright’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolton Wilson, joined the family in Memphis in 1916, taking them back to her house in Jackson, Mississippi. Over the next few years Wright, along with his mother and brother Leon, lived in an assortment of places, staying for a while with his Aunt Maggie in Elaine, Arkansas, and later in West Helena, Arkansas. After his mother suffered a paralyzing stroke in 1919, which made her a semi-invalid for the rest of her life, the Wrights moved back to Jackson where they were forced again to move frequently because of their problems paying rent. Except for a short and unhappy stay in Greenwood, Mississippi, to live with his aunt and uncle, Clark and Jody Wilson, Wright spent the remainder of his boyhood in Jackson in his grandmother’s household.
Wright’s childhood thus was characterized by family disorganization, emotional anxiety, and physical deprivation, which often took the form of severe hunger. All of these problems were compounded by the racism he was forced to endure as a young black person living in the Deep South during one of the worst periods of racial discrimination and violence in U.S. history. The intricately fashioned Jim Crow laws of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee racially segregated all aspects of public life and many aspects of private life, harshly relegating black people to marginal existences, stripped of civil rights, economic opportunities and social equality. White and black children attended altogether separate but absolutely unequal schools. (Black schools were under-funded, poorly equipped, and often staffed by inadequately trained teachers. Jackson, like most southern towns and cities, had no public high school for black children.) Public accommodations, likewise, were completely segregated in restaurants, transit, restrooms, hospitals, and even cemeteries. Black people were also excluded from skilled trades and higher-paying factory jobs, leaving them to work at poorly paid menial jobs in cities and sharecropping on plantations. Jim Crow laws, moreover, strictly forbade marriage and sexual activity between the races.
This vast and intricate system of white dominance over blacks was enforced in a number of ways. First of all, black people were systematically disenfranchised through white primaries, poll taxes, literacy tests, and physical intimidation. Denied the vote, they possessed no legal mechanism by which they could modify or eliminate Jim Crow laws and practices. Secondly, the South’s segregated system was upheld by a court system that excluded blacks from juries and extralegal violence in the form of lynchings, beatings, and mob violence. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and white citizens councils severely punished even the smallest deviations from Jim Crow law with terrorist violence. (Between 1882, when records of reported lynchings began to be kept, and 1950, 4,739 Americans, the majority of them black southerners, were lynched. Wright’s home state of Mississippi reported 539 lynchings during this period, far more than any other state in the United States.)
Wright experienced what he called the “horror” of southern racism in his own personal life, and it left an indelible mark on his consciousness and shaped his work in all of its phases. As many critics and biographers have pointed out, Wright’s southern experiences remained at the core of his personality and even though he traveled widely as an adult and lived in a great variety of places outside the South, he was never able to shake the alienation, fear, and anger that the segregated South induced in him as a child and young man. His uncle Silas Hoskins was murdered in 1917 by whites who resented his business success and Wright and his family had to flee Hoskins’s home in the middle of the night to avoid further violence being inflicted on them. Wright also knew a young black man named Ray Robinson who was castrated when he allegedly had sex with a white prostitute. As Hazel Rowley has pointed out, Wright would “never forget Ray Robinson’s fate” (39) and learned at a young age to distance himself from most white people. And Wright himself was once overwhelmed by the fear of being lynched when he worked as a handyman for a white family in Jackson and accidentally witnessed their daughter naked when he entered her room without knocking to deliver firewood. (He later revealed to psychiatrist Albert Wertham that this disturbing episode was the germ of the scene in Native Son where Bigger, fearing a fate similar to Ray Robinson’s, panics in Mary Dalton’s bedroom.)
As Wright stressed in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” his growing up in the Deep South provided him with a series of traumatic experiences that shaped his consciousness and ingrained in him “gems of Jim Crow wisdom,”4 which always forced him to realize that he was a black outsider in a white-dominated world and that terrible punishments awaited him if he violated the harsh written and unspoken codes of the Jim Crow South. The fear that he knew as a southern black person would later turn into rage but, as John Reilly has pointed out, he would triumph over this potentially “self-destructive rage” by transforming it into powerfully controlled “art.”5
Wright’s sense of himself as a lonely outsider was deepened by chronic family problems. After his mother became a semi-invalid when Wright was eleven, Wright and his family moved to Jackson, Mississippi, where they became part of his grandmother’s household. Wright always felt like an outsider in this extended family, partly because of temperamental differences between him and his grandmother, but also because his grandmother was a staunch Seventh Day Adventist who tried to impose her sternly puritanical religious vision on his rebellious sensibility. This led to Wright distancing himself strongly from all members of his family, with the exception of his mother, and to developing what would become a lifelong distaste for formal religion and other forms of externally imposed authority.
Wright rebelled strongly against being placed in a Seventh Day Adventist grammar school under the tutelage of his equally pious Aunt Addie and by 1921 was enrolled in Jim Hill School, a public elementary school which his grandmother despised. Although Wright’s nomadic life had put him behind in his studies and he was placed at Jim Hill School two years behind his age group, he thrived in public education and began to develop a strong habit of reading, devouring detective magazines, dime novels about the West, and pulp fiction focusing on American success stories, especially the novels of Horatio Alger. Wright’s habit of reading opened up a new and liberating world for him that was in stark contrast to the harshly restrictive life he was directed to live by his family and southern society. He entered Smith Robertson Junior High School in 1923 and graduated as class valedictorian on May 29, 1925. While a student at Smith Robertson, Wright published his first short story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre” in the Spring 1924 issue of the Southern Register, Jackson’s black newspaper. Wright’s growing rebelliousness and individualism was later displayed vividly when he refused to deliver the graduation speech prepared for him by the school principal and instead wrote and delivered his own speech, “The Attributes of Life.”
Because Jackson’s segregated school system provided no high school for black students, Wright was unable to pursue his education further and worked in a number of odd jobs such as hotel bellboy, movie theater usher, and a janitor and delivery boy at American Optical Company. As he revealed in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” he tried to gain the skills necessary to attain better work in the optical company but was severely chided by his white coworkers for aspiring to have “white man’s work” (UTC, 10). Reminded again of the “boundaries” (UTC,11) that black people faced in the segregated South, he became determined to leave Jackson, and in 1925 he went to Memphis, Tennessee, where he boarded with a black family and worked a series of menial jobs as a dishwasher, delivery boy, and porter at the Merry Optical Company.
His experience in Memphis proved to be a turning point in life because he was free at last to read widely without his grandmother’s disapproval and was also able to begin imagining for himself alternatives to the “place” prescribed for him by Mississippi whites. Borrowing a library card from a white Catholic coworker who was not threatened by a young black man’s desire to educate himself, Wright withdrew many books from the Memphis Public Library, two of which would radically change his life, H. L. Mencken’s Prejudices and A Book of Prefaces. He was immediately impressed by Mencken’s iconoclastic mind and was especially intrigued by Mencken’s sharp criticisms of the American South as a backward society crippled by mindless prejudice and an irrational fear of modern freedom and individualism. Moreover, Wright found in A Book of Prefaces a reading list of modern masterworks, which became for him a program of self-education.
As Wright revealed in Black Boy, Mencken’s example and the works Mencken approved of convinced him that books could not only become “vicarious cultural infusions” (BB, 282), which could revive him after he had been devastated by a static and decadent southern culture, but he also learned from Mencken that words could be “weapons” to fight the “blind ignorance and hate” he had experienced in the South. Such books could provide Wright with “a sense of freedom” that he needed to liberate himself from “southern darkness” (BB, 282, 284).
The authors whom Mencken cited from the realistic and naturalistic traditions in modern literature proved particularly useful and inspiring to Wright. In Black Boy he stressed that “All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel and I could not read enough of them” (BB, 295). In particular, he mentioned Theodore Dreiser, Fyodor Dostoevsky (two novelists he would later claim exerted the most influence over his writing), Stephen Crane, Henrik Ibsen, Sinclair Lewis, and Emile Zola as especially strong influences. Such reading provided him with “new ways of looking and seeing” and “a sense of life itself ” helping him to understand and artistically shape his own experiences in vital, coherent ways (BB, 294, 295).
Wright left Memphis in November, 1927, to go to Chicago with his aunt Maggie where the two would live on the South Side in one of America’s largest racial ghettos. From the beginning, Wright perceived Chicago in powerfully ambivalent terms, sensing it both as a coldly mechanical modern environment and also a place of twentieth-century possibility. In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” he would describe it as “a city of extremes,” which was both a “huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, raw, stark, brutal” urban environment and also a young and “fabulous” world of American change and modern freedom. However much Wright might criticize northern cities like Chicago, he remained an urbanite for the rest of his life and was never tempted to idealize pastoral locations or return to the South. He certainly endorsed the folk wisdom enunciated by a black man in 12 Million Black Voices who claimed “We’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the president of Dixie.”6
Arriving in Chicago less than two years before the onset of the Great Depression and forced to live in a massive ghetto that was particularly hard hit by the economic disasters of the 1930s, Wright experienced Chicago as a harshly naturalistic environment, which reduced him and his family to the same hunger and poverty they had known earlier in the South. For nearly ten years, Wright and his mother and brother lived in crowded, overpriced “kitchenettes,” which he would later describe in 12 Million Black Voices as a “prison” for black people, “our death sentence without a trial” (12M, 106). Working at a series of low-paying jobs as ditchdigger, hospital attendant, and dishwasher while often times being unemployed and at the mercy of a stingy, demeaning welfare system, Wright lived out in his own life the betrayals of the Great Migration, which promised blacks a new life in the North but delivered new forms of racial discrimination, social injustice, and poverty.
Paradoxically, Chicago also gave Wright many new opportunities for his own development as an individual and as a writer. In 1929 he began work at the central post office as a clerk and mail sorter. Although this monotonous job did not pay very well, it did soften Wright’s isolation by bringing him in contact with Joe Brown and other schoolmates from Mississippi who had also found menial jobs as postal workers. Even though Wright lost his position in the aftermath of the Stock Market Crash, he regained it in 1932 and worked intermittently at the post office until he left for New York in 1937. It was a fellow postal worker, Abe Aaron, who helped to change Wright’s life dramatically when he recruited him in 1933 to join the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, an organization of young leftists and Communists. This would prove to be a critically important development in Wright’s life because it ended his long personal and intellectual isolation and connected him with a group of like-minded writers and organizers. The John Reed Club offered Wright for the first time in his life a community that welcomed him as a black person and joined him to people of diverse ethnic, racial, and social backgrounds who shared his social vision and encouraged his writing. It became what Hazel Rowley has called “Wright’s university” (78), because it made available to him reading lists, books, study groups, and lectures as well as leftist journals that published his writing. (By 1934 Wright had published three poems in Left Front, two poems in Anvil, and one poem in New Masses.) Wright’s program of self-education, initiated independently in Memphis, became more organized and disciplined because of his membership in the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club. For the first time in his life, he had become an important part of an intellectual and political community that anchored his restless spirit, shared some of his deepest thoughts and impulses, and formed a foundation for him as a writer.
It was through the John Reed Club that Wright became acquainted with professors from the University of Chicago such as the sociologist Louis Wirth and the literature professor Robert Morss Lovett. The John Reed Club also enabled him to form friendships with novelists Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, and Michael Gold. And his positive experiences in the club encouraged Wright to become involved with other groups that nourished him artistically and personally. In 1936 he became a member of the South Side Writers Group, a group of African American writers and intellectuals whose regular meetings were of tremendous benefit to Wright as he worked out his social vision and literary strategies. He also became strongly involved in three W.P.A. organizations, the Federal Writers’ Project, the Federal Theatre Project, and the Illinois Writers’ Project. He joined the League of American Writers in 1935. His activities in these groups enabled him to make important friendships with writers such as James T. Farrell, Langston Hughes, and Margaret Walker. As Walker has stressed, Wright had “a great need for such associations” because they ameliorated the “deep alienation”7 dating back to traumatic experiences that he had endured growing up in the South, experiences that threatened to blight his spirit and cripple his imagination.
Chicago, therefore, provided Wright with a surprisingly rich cultural environment that nurtured his art and helped him to play a pivotal role in the Black Chicago Renaissance. Unlike its counterpart at the turn of the century, which was catalyzed by Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Carl Sandburg and took place in an energetic city undergoing enormous growth, the second renaissance grew out of the sufferings brought on by the Great Depression and was created by African American writers and thinkers. Wright, whom Walker described as “the exciting hot center” (71) of the South Side Writers Group, was also the focal point of the Black Chicago Renaissance. He helped to change the direction of modern African American literature by centering it on militant social protest and a meticulous examination of the dynamics of the American urban environment. This renaissance combined the efforts of older Chicago writers like Fenton Johnson and the work of a new generation of black poets, novelists, and sociologists such as Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, St. Clair Drake, and Horace Cayton. This remarkable rebirth of black culture continued into the 1940s and 1950s, producing what Robert Bone has called the “Wright school” of novelists such as Willard Motley, Chester Himes, Anne Petry, William Demby, each of whom was deeply impressed by Wright’s powerful naturalistic techniques and radically new vision of black life in America (Bone 446–68).
But perhaps the most important aspect of Wright’s life in Chicago was his involvement with the Communist Party of America, which was headquartered in Chicago where one of the strongest John Reed Clubs in the United States also existed. Wright became interested in Marxist ideas in the early 1930s and finally joined the Communist Party in 1934. Communism provided Wright with what he would later describe in “I Tried to Be a Communist” with “the first total commitment of my life,”8 a new faith to replace the old beliefs shattered by the disappointments of the Great Migration and the cultural and economic shocks of the Great Depression. Communism helped him to develop as a man and a writer, for it gave him a coherent philosophical vision, “an organized search for truth” that intellectually stabilized him in a world that was rapidly falling apart. It also provided him with an imaginatively potent vision of human unity, “a common vision that bound us all together” (Crossman, 141), which Wright needed both for his writing and his psychological well-being. Indeed, it helped to repair the enormous damage done to Wright by his growing up in the American South, for it replaced southern segregation, which had induced a terrible alienation in Wright, with a colossal vision of human integration, a classless society in which all people would be equal and interrelated.
Although Wright would eventually become disillusioned with Communism and leave the Party in 1942, his commitments to the Socialism underlying Communism would remain with him throughout his life. Some of the literary principles which Wright developed as a Communist would also help to shape some of his best work, particularly Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. Wright’s “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” which he wrote in 1937 as he completed Uncle Tom’s Children and was beginning to write Native Son, was deeply rooted in Marxist thinking and was quite consistent with the literary strictures issued by the Party. It is not only a manifesto of a committed Communist writer but also contains some of the literary beliefs that Wright would adhere to long after he had formally broken with Communism.
“Blueprint for Negro Writing” calls for a radically new form of black American literature, which is centered in the actual experiences of the masses of black people, using “channels of racial wisdom,” black folk art as it is expressed in the blues, spirituals, and folktales. The essay also called for an end to the isolation of earlier African American writers, replacing it with a deeply social and political consciousness embedded in the responsibility to express “a collective sense of Negro life in America.” For Wright at this point in his career, only “a Marxist concept of reality and society”9 could truly capture the present and historical experience of African Americans. Wright would, later in his career, reject a narrowly Marxist vision but he would always maintain that the roots of African American literature were deeply set in the experience of ordinary black Americans rather than DuBois’s “talented tenth.”
Wright left Chicago in 1937, turning down a permanent position in the post office so that he could better pursue his career as a writer in New York. He became the Harlem editor of the Communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, a job that deepened his understanding of black urban life and provided him with many opportunities to develop as a politically engaged writer. In his first year alone he wrote over two hundred articles for the Daily Worker and over the next three years he would continue to write on an extremely wide variety of topics, including the trials of Angelo Herndon and the Scottsboro boys, Joe Louis’s championship fights, racial discrimination in housing, violence in Harlem, and the spread of fascism in Europe. Like the research he did for various W.P.A. agencies in Chicago, his journalism in New York became a powerful form of education for Wright, deepening his awareness of the plight of black people in the United States and helping him to connect their problems to crises developing abroad.
Wright’s years in Chicago and New York were crucial for his personal development and offered him a unique training as a writer who would create important new directions in American and African American literatures. Although he wrote a few apprentice pieces while living in the South, his serious writing began in Chicago when he produced a series of free verse poems for leftist journals and began work on a Joycean novel about one day in the life of a Chicago postal worker. (This book, which was originally titled Cesspool, was rejected by publishers because of its harsh language and frank treatment of sex and was published posthumously as Lawd Today! in 1963.) Wright’s first real break as a writer came in 1937, when his story “Fire and Cloud” won the coveted first prize in Story Magazine’s annual contest. A year later, this piece was included with four other novellas in Wright’s first book Uncle Tom’s Children, which drew national attention and established Wright as a fresh voice in American literature. It was favorably reviewed by critics such as Lewis Gannett, James T. Farrell, and Sterling Brown, and it drew high praise from Eleanor Roosevelt in her column in the New York World-Telegram.
What makes Uncle Tom’s Children such a groundbreaking work is its brutally ironic style and its unremittingly honest treatment of racial injustice and violence in the American South. Hailed by James T. Farrell as “a new and powerful work by a new American writer,”10 Uncle Tom’s Children boldly departs from the traditional ways in which black life had been depicted by earlier generations of American and African American writers. As its title suggests, it aggressively challenges the long-standing stereotype of Uncle Tom, the Negro who is spiritually ennobled by passively enduring with Christian forbearance the sufferings inflicted upon him by racist whites. But in Wright’s book, the modern descendents of Uncle Tom often seethe with anger against white people and act upon their deep feelings of resentment by striking out in terrible violence when threatened by white aggression. Moreover, some of this new generation of blacks have translated their rage into political action, becoming Communists who are committed to overturning an unjust social system and replacing it with a revolutionary “classless” society of workers who are racially integrated equals.
The central character of the collection’s first story, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” for example, kills the white man who murdered his two friends, and the protagonist of the next story, “Down by the Riverside,” does likewise when a white man calls him a “nigger,” shoots two of his buddies, and threatens to kill him. In “Long Black Song,” Silas dispenses similar violent punishment to the white traveling salesman who rapes his wife, first whipping the man and then shooting him. In the book’s final two stories, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star,” the black characters go beyond personal resistance to racial injustice and organize themselves politically, joining the Communist Party and engaging in demonstrations and other acts of disobedience designed to make radical changes in the Jim Crow South. In each of these stories, Wright depicts black people confronting an oppressive white system with powerful acts of rebellion. Like Silas in “Long Black Song,” they ultimately are “unafraid” and willing to sacrifice their lives as they avoid the passive suffering of characters like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom.
Wright’s black characters in Uncle Tom’s Children are given plenty of good reasons for feeling such negative impulses toward white people since they are imperiled on a daily basis by a social system reducing them to stark poverty and acts of terror if they demonstrate any kind of resistance to this system. Each of the five stories and the autobiographical sketch, “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” which prefaces the collection, is suffused with brutal violence, which whites administer to blacks. In “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” Wright laments the fate of a bellhop with whom he worked in a Jackson hotel who was “castrated and run out of town” (UTC, 15) when he was caught having consensual sex with a white prostitute. And several stories describe the ultimate form of intimidation and social control devised by southern whites, lynching. In “Big Boy Leaves Home” Wright depicts in graphic detail the beating, burning, and mutilation of a young black man by a white mob. At the end of “Down by the Riverside,” Mann is killed in a hail of bullets as he runs away from whites who cry out “Lynch him!” (UTC, 89) as they try to satisfy their need for avenging Mann’s justified killing of a white man. Reverend Taylor in “Fire and Cloud” is immediately threatened with lynching when he opposes the will of the town’s mayor, and he does indeed come close to being lynched when he is later tied to a tree and whipped nearly to death by town officials. “Long Black Song” concludes with a bizarre variation of lynching when vigilantes burn Silas alive by setting fire to his house as they shout “Cook the coon” (UTC, 115).
In addition to reducing to absurdity the myth of Uncle Tom, Wright’s book also broke away from other conventional ways of representing African American experience in literature. It strongly challenged the tradition of dialect writing established by white authors such as Joel Chandler Harris and black writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar. Whereas these writers presented black vernacular speech as a means of cultivating a soft and picturesque vision of the rural South, Wright used the language of black peasants in a terse, naturalistic manner to achieve powerfully ironic effects. Uncle Tom’s Children also broke with the tradition of representing the experience of rural blacks as exotic primitives who were somehow immune from the pressures of mechanized modern life. Novels like Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter, Jean Toomer’s Cane, and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, while pointing out racial injustices suffered by rural blacks, nevertheless ascribe a unique vitality and spirituality to these people because of their separation from the dehumanizing forces of modern industrialization, technology, and urbanization. Wright, a thoroughgoing modernist who detested the stagnancy and backwardness of southern rural life, presents an altogether unexotic vision of rural life in Uncle Tom’s Children. There is nothing picturesque about Wright’s Mississippi as a bleak landscape serves as an appropriate reflector of the barren lives that his characters are forced to live. The harsh extremities of southern weather—enervating heat and cataclysmic floods—likewise serve as a powerful reflector of his characters’ emotional extremes, alternating between fatalistic acceptance and explosive violence. Wright’s South, far from being a lush escape from the ravages of modern life, is, in many ways, a concentrated version of the most crippling forms of modernism, a brutally naturalistic environment stripping people of free will and crushing them with forces beyond their understanding and control.
A guarded and sternly qualified hope, however, is suggested in Uncle Tom’s Children with the political vision contained in the final two stories, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright and Morning Star.” Reverend Taylor in the former story finally realizes the truth of his earlier intimation that “maybe them Reds is right” (UTC, 117), and he joins the march organized by Communists who demand food and social justice for poor people. While he marches, “A baptism of clean joy” (UTC, 161) sweeps over him as he realizes that his new faith in leftist politics can provide “the way” to a better life for himself and his people (UTC, 161). “Bright and Morning Star” also transforms conventional religious meanings, investing them with new political significance. Its protagonist Sue moves from a faith in Christ to a faith in Communist revolution, a “star that grew bright in the morning of a new hope” (UTC, 191). After one son, Sug, has been jailed for his political activities and her other son Johnny-Boy has been tortured to death in a failed attempt to get him to inform on his comrades, she becomes a political martyr by killing Booker, a Judas figure who is about to reveal the names of the people who are organizing political dissent in the area. The story concludes with whites murdering Sue, but her “faith” in the “fight of black men for freedom” (UTC, 170) makes her a political martyr who, in the story’s final words, becomes part of “the dead that never dies” (UTC, 184).
The only significant negative review of Uncle Tom’s Children came from Zora Neale Hurston, who objected to the book’s bleak portrayal of black life and what she felt was the naiveté of its political vision. Her review in Saturday Review of Literature, which can be seen as a “tit-for-tat” for Wright’s harshly negative review of Their Eyes Were Watching God a year earlier, accused Wright of writing a book about hatreds, which failed to fairly represent the broader and more fundamental aspects of Negro life. Moreover, Hurston felt that the solution of the Party that Wright embraced narrowed his vision. She also found Uncle Tom’s Children, with all its violence and getting even with white people, to be primarily designed to satisfy black male readers. Hurston’s criticisms, while not given much notice in the late 1930s, would assume much more prominence with subsequent critics in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s who would take Wright to task by becoming increasingly critical of his politics and his bleak portrait of black culture. Hurston’s criticism of Wright on gender grounds would resurface strongly in the last two decades of the twentieth century when feminist critics would make serious complaints about Wright’s portrayal of women.
While still at work on the stories that would comprise Uncle Tom’s Children and “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” Wright was beginning to imagine another book, which would have an even more startling and dramatic effect on American and African American literatures. Keneth Kinnamon estimated that “preliminary notes”11 for Native Son were sketched in 1935 when Wright was in Chicago and counseled troubled youth at the South Side Boys Club. His work on his novel, “Cesspool,” poems such as “Between the World and Me,” and short stories such as “Big Boy Leaves Home” had forced Wright to place this new book on his back burner where it simmered for several years. But when some of the initial reviews of Uncle Tom’s Children drew some responses that Wright considered sentimental and blunted the political impact of the book, he returned to his novel and resolved, as he observed in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” to “make it so hard and deep” that “bankers’ daughters” would have to face it without “the consolation of tears.”12 He sent a preliminary outline of Native Son to his editor, Edward Aswell, in early 1938 and a rough first draft on October 24 of that year. He then engaged in several months of careful research and revision. The research he carried out focused on two notorious Chicago criminal cases: Robert Nixon’s murder of a white woman in 1938 and the Leopold/Loeb “thrill killing” of Bobby Franks in 1924. As he stressed in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” he worked hard on the manuscript, substantially reducing its size and weaving into its narrative important motifs that provided the novel with heightened intensity and increased formal unity and coherence. He also revisited the novel’s central character, endowing him with a richer, more complex inner life. He completed the novel in the spring of 1939, and it was published as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection on March 1, 1940.
As Irving Howe has exclaimed, “The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,”13 since the novel revealed long repressed truths about racial relations in the United States and “made impossible a repetition of the old lies.” The book opens with a clock sounding its abrasive alarm, which wakes the Thomas family out of their sound sleep and makes them frighteningly aware of a serious problem, a huge rat that has entered their crowded one-room kitchenette. In a similar way, the entire novel is calculated by Wright as a loud wakeup call to Americans, jolting them out of their long “sleep,” their lack of consciousness of the serious racial problems that have afflicted the nation from the beginning of its history and threaten to plunge it into widespread chaos and violence during the Great Depression.
The shocking newness of Native Son can also be clearly seen in a rough summary of its plot. The opening episode, which in many ways telescopes the entire novel, is a grimly naturalistic scene of entrapment and death that sets the tone of the entire novel and dramatizes its central themes. Just as the rat is cornered and killed, the Thomas family is trapped by the poverty and racism of the ghetto in which they are forced to live. Bigger Thomas reacts to this desperate situation like the rat, lashing out with defiant violence. And this violence takes two forms, the physical crushing of the rat’s head and the emotional taunting of his sister Vera by dangling the rat’s corpse in front of her terrified eyes, something he does to cover up his own intense fear.
The other major sequences in Book One are artful variations on the opening scene. After Bigger leaves his family’s decrepit apartment, he meets up with his friend Gus and later with members of his gang, and they discuss their plans to rob at gunpoint a white-owned delicatessen. To hide his fear of robbing a white man, Bigger again lashes out in reflexive violence, attacking Gus with the sharp point of his knife, in much the same way that the cornered rat had attacked him with its “yellow tusks.”14 The next day, Bigger goes to work for the Dalton family, wealthy white people who are trying to assuage their guilt for being slumlords by offering an impoverished black youth a job as their chauffeur. Feeling like an unwanted intruder in the strange and opulent world of white people, which he perceives as “a cold and distant world” (NS, 44), Bigger again assumes the role of the cornered rat. When he is given the task of chauffeuring the Daltons’ daughter Mary around Chicago later that night, he feels emotionally confused and is brought to near panic when she and her boyfriend begin drinking and assuming a forced familiarity with him that triggers all of his pent-up fears and resentments toward white people. The sequence comes to a terrifying climax when Bigger takes Mary home and carries her to her upstairs bedroom. After the two become sexually aroused and Mrs. Dalton enters the bedroom, Bigger is reduced to “hysterical terror” (NS, 85) and accidentally smothers Mary with a pillow to keep her quiet. He then decides to destroy the evidence of his actions by burning her body in the basement furnace and is forced to decapitate her in order to fit her into the furnace.
Book Two and Three are also structured as a series of entrapment episodes culminating in death. After Mary’s charred remains are discovered by reporters who question Bigger in the basement of the Dalton home, he escapes and wanders through the South Side, taking refuge in abandoned buildings. Fearing that his girlfriend Bessie would reveal details of his killing of Mary to the police, he takes her with him and, in the novel’s most brutal scene, rapes her and crushes her skull with a brick. (In this way he resembles Robert Nixon who also killed his victim by smashing her head with a brick.) He is eventually caught by the police who trap him on the roof of an abandoned building and subdue him by freezing him with water hoses and knocking him unconscious with blows to the head.
The novel’s final section, appropriately titled “Fate,” describes Bigger’s experiences in jail and at the trial, which condemns him to death in the electric chair. While outwardly immobilized, Bigger grows inwardly, becoming more conscious of his world and experiencing guilt for his actions. He also feels strongly connected to his family and, for the first time in his life, develops a positive relationship with white people, especially Boris Max, his lawyer. Wright stresses a powerful irony in Book Three as Bigger is doomed to be executed precisely at the point where his psychological, moral, and emotional growth indicates that he is no longer the environmentally produced killer he was seen as in the novel’s first two books. By the end of Native Son, the narrative has come full circle with Bigger being treated like the rat in the opening scene. And just as he destroyed the rat by crushing its skull, the state will dispense with him by placing electrodes on his head and reducing him to a corpse with a violent surge of electricity. The novel, which began with Bigger turning on an electric light so that he could better see and think, concludes with him awaiting death by electricity, which will destroy his powers of vision and thought.
What makes Native Son such a revolutionary work is not only its sensation-alistic outer plot, which boldly depicts a young black man reduced by society to the level of a rat, but, more importantly, its extraordinary inner narrative, which enabled Wright to explore black psychology as no other previous writer had ever done and to make us see the humanity of the central character which almost all of the figures in the novel are blind to. For Wright always makes us aware of the important fact that there are “two Biggers” (NS, 252), a person who performs societally induced monstrous acts and a man with a deeply human inward self. To underscore the powerlessness and futility of the socially constructed Bigger, Wright probes in an altogether honest way his character’s most shocking impulses as he experiences a perverse “elation” (NS, 107) when he ponders his killing of Mary. (The Nietzschean pride he takes in such a gruesome act certainly resembles the chilling satisfactions that Leopold and Loeb took in their killing of Bobby Franks.) Indeed, Bigger feels that “His crime seemed natural” (NS, 106) and expresses “the hidden meaning of his life.” Wright clearly is not endorsing Bigger’s destructive violence, as some critics have argued, but is pointing out that a pathological environment “naturally” produces murderous behavior and that in a world that strips people of all meaningful forms of action, any action, especially violent behavior, will produce a dangerous illusion of empowerment.
Native Son is also a radically new kind of book in several other ways. It was the first American novel to portray in meticulously realistic detail life in an American urban ghetto. And it did so not from the perspective of a privileged omniscient narrator who could supply sociological information about racial ghettos but from the point of view of one of its victims, a young, undereducated, and inarticulate black man. Wright’s skilled use of third person narration makes us dramatically experience Bigger’s world instead of clinically analyzing it. Wright also explores the complexities of interracial sex more fully than any other previous American writer, brilliantly exploring the sexual fears at the core of segregation. And by making Bigger a representative figure, a “native son,” he stressed another disturbing irony, which very few other writers would explore—Bigger, far from being an aberrant monster, was a symbol of all Americans. Wright, who deeply believed that “The Negro is the metaphor of America,” confronted his readers with the troubling notion that Bigger was a reflection of them and that his problems were also their problems.
When Native Son appeared on March 1, 1940, it was an immediate popular success, selling 215,000 copies in three weeks. Almost overnight, Wright became a nationally prominent figure and in January 1941 he won the Spingarn Medal, the NAACP’s prestigious award for outstanding achievement by a black American. Moreover, Native Son ignited a firestorm of critical debate, some of which continues to the present day. Many important critics praised it as a groundbreaking novel creating bold new directions in American literature while many other reviewers dismissed it as a crudely written piece of propaganda. Henry Seidel Canby asserted that Native Son was “the finest novel written by an American Negro,”15 and Sterling Brown celebrated the book as a “literary phenomenon” because it was the first novel about American blacks that provided a “psychological probing of the outcast, the disinherited, the generation lost in the slum jungles of American civilization.”16 Harry Hansen remarked that the novel “packs a tremendous punch, something like a big fist through the windows of our complacent lives.”17
But several other readers were sharply critical of the novel on aesthetic and political grounds. Howard Mumford Jones found too much “dull propaganda”18 in the book, while leftist critics such as Herbert Gold felt that its politics were not sufficiently in line with Communist ideology. David Cohn, a white Mississippian, argued that Native Son was “a blinding and corrosive study of hate”19 which gave a distorted picture of black American life. Jonathan Daniels saw Wright’s novel as “the story of a rat”20 describing Bigger Thomas as a stereotyped figure who served the needs of a political tract.
What makes these strong reactions to Native Son even more remarkable today is the fact that we now know that the text that reviewers responded to was to some extent a watered down version of the novel that Wright intended. Wright’s agent, Paul Reynolds, his editor, Edward Aswell, and the editorial board of Book-of-the-Month Club were uncomfortable with the manuscript that Wright had sent to them and convinced him to make a series of revisions designed to tone down the novel’s political vision and soften its depiction of sex, especially inter-racial sex. For example, Wright was persuaded to change substantially the scene in Book One in which Bigger and his friends watch a film in a downtown theater. He deleted that part in the scene where they masturbate, and he also eliminated the crudely sexual comments that they make about Mary Dalton when they see her in a newsreel film clip. Bigger’s later sexual encounters with Mary are also carefully revised, downplaying the strong sexual attraction Bigger feels toward Mary and her initiating the sexual foreplay. Wright also partially reduced Max’s Communist speeches at Bigger’s trial, somewhat blunting the novel’s political impact. The novel that Wright intended for publication and Harper agreed to publish was never made available to readers, critics, and scholars until the Library of America edition of Wright’s major works appeared in 1991.
In the years following the dramatic appearance of Native Son Wright published very little fiction but he was deeply involved in a number of important literary projects. In 1940 he collaborated with Paul Green on a stage version of Native Son, which opened a year later in New York. He also wrote “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” to answer critics like Cohn and Daniels who charged him with providing an unrealistic, excessively grim portrait of black life to advance the agenda given him by the Communist Party. This essay, which he first presented as a lecture at Columbia University and which later became attached to Harper’s editions of Native Son, authenticates the novel by proving how it is rooted in Wright’s own experiences and the lives of six black youths he knew while growing up in Mississippi who became prototypes for Bigger.
In January 1941 Wright met WPA photographer Edwin Rosskam who suggested that they collaborate on a photo-documentary book which would focus on the history of black people in America. Their work culminated in 12 Million Black Voices, which was published in October 1941. The book consisted of a series of remarkable photographs taken by Rosskam in Chicago, a series of pictures from the files of the Farm Security Administration, and Wright’s written text interspersed among the photographs. Wright’s survey of African American history was divided into four parts: 1) slavery, 2) post–Civil War segregation and sharecropping, 3) the migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North, and 4) a vision of the future. The first three parts stress the enormous sufferings endured by American blacks but the final section, entitled “Men in the Making,” is strongly optimistic, stressing a new black militancy and forecasting vast changes in American society, which will enable black people to “share in the upward march of American life” (12M, 146). Wright finally envisions his people at a “crossroads” of their history and ends the book with the hopeful statement that “Men are moving! And we shall be with them…. (12M, 147).
The imagery that Wright uses throughout the book is quite similar to that found in his fiction. Images of entrapment, paralysis, and death are woven throughout the text to describe various forms of injustice and exclusion, which African Americans have experienced in their “nightmare of history” (12M, 26). Cotton culture thus is pictured as a “hateful web” (12M, 43) and sharecroppers are described as “walled in cotton” (12M, 49). The northern urban areas, likewise, create “death on the city pavements” (12M, 91) while urban blacks are “boxed in stone and steel” (12M, 108). Chicago’s kitchenettes are presented as “our prison” (12M, 106), a “funnel through which our pulverized lives flow to ruin and death” (12M, 111).
What makes 12 Million Black Voices unique in the Wright canon, however, are its point of view and vision of black folk life. Unlike most of his fiction, which is written using a coldly objective third person or omniscient perspective that sometimes suggests Wright’s emotional distance from the black life he describes, 12 Million Black Voices is narrated with a first person plural perspective. Filtering his vision of African American history through the pronoun “we,” Wright achieves an unusual warmth as he closely identifies with his people’s struggles and shares their aspirations. While he could be sharply critical of black folk life in other works, particularly Black Boy where he speaks of “the cultural barrenness of black life” and “the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes” (BB, 43), in this documentary book he consistently praises black people for building a rich folk culture that sustained them through centuries of hardship. He provides a nontypically positive image of black family life, pointing out that “our delicate families are held together by love, sympathy, and pity” (12M, 61). And Wright who in most of his earlier and later work rejects African American religion as a destructive opiate, celebrates the fundamentalist faith of southern blacks, seeing their religious faith as providing them with joy and “vision,” which “lifted [us] far beyond the boundaries of our daily lives” (12M, 73).
Wright also developed three pieces of fiction in the years immediately following the publication of Native Son: a novel about the “woman question” entitled Black Hope, which remains unpublished; a story about juvenile delinquents, The Jackal, which appeared posthumously in 1994 as Rite of Passage; and his extraordinary novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground.” For reasons that are difficult to understand, Wright was not able to publish “The Man Who Lived Underground” in book form but eventually placed it in the 1942 issue of Accent. An expanded version appeared two years later in Cross Section. The inspiration for this story about police brutality came partly from Wright’s indignation over the savage beating of his friend Herbert Newton at the hands of New York policemen in 1941 because of his political activities and partly from a story Wright read in True Detective magazine about a white man who lived under the streets of Manhattan and would surface at night to assume the life of a burglar.
Wright was also influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. He regarded the Russian novelist as one of the strongest influences on his own writing and once described him to Margaret Walker as “the greatest novelist who ever lived” (75). Like Dostoevsky’s nameless antihero, Wright’s protagonist, Fred Daniels, is reduced to marginal status by a repressive society, which regards him as barely human. Both characters withdraw into underground worlds where they discover surprising human resources within themselves but are finally unable to translate their underground discoveries into significant action in the aboveground world.
Fred Daniels’s story clearly illustrates how conventional society dehumanizes him in a variety of ways. Accusing him of a murder he did not commit and brutally extorting a confession from him, the police have forced Daniels to encounter the fate suffered by Bigger Thomas and most of Wright’s central characters in Uncle Tom’s Children, death at the hands of a racist social system. But Daniels is somehow able to escape police custody and hides for a period of time in the sewers underneath the streets of New York. Once underground, however, he develops a lucid vision of how the aboveground society operates and this new knowledge endows him with a “sense of power” (Man, 62) and “freedom” (Man, 59), which he has never experienced in his previous life.
Indeed, he discovers a new self while underground, which is a sharp contrast to the blind and passive self he had prior to moving underground. His new life provides him with deepened, expanded vision as he is able to observe clearly from his undetected perspective beneath the streets the forces in his environment that have denied him a full human life. He observes, for example, a black church service and laughs at their “groveling and begging for something they could not get” (Man, 30). And he also witnesses an aborted human fetus floating in the sewer, a sign of society’s gross indifference to human life. He later observes people in a movie theater being entertained as they laugh at “animated shadows of themselves” (Man, 36) rather than doing something to make their empty lives meaningful. By the end of the story he sees even more disturbing images of the brutality and absurdity of conventional society when he watches a policeman forcing a confession from an innocent man who is so humiliated that he commits suicide.
Daniels’s response to this new vision is to assume for the first time in his life the role of conscious rebel. He steals a number of items such as a radio, money, jewelry, watches, and a gun from unsuspecting people, protected by their inability to see him. He acquires these goods to experience a sense of control over the kind of people who formerly dominated him and he laughs as he does so, savoring his ironic new status as a man who can manipulate people and events. He papers his underground room with money and gold watches, enjoying “brittle laughter” (Man, 55) as he makes a joke of the way the system controls people with money and time management.
He therefore discovers in the underground sewers a place he had earlier equated with death, a “new kind of living” (Man 24), which endows his life with knowledge and power denied him in his aboveground existence. But he is unable to solve the problem of how to translate his personal transformation into social action, and when he returns to the streets at the end of the story he blunders badly. He goes back to the police station and confesses to his various thefts. The policemen, fearing that he might cause trouble for them by revealing their earlier framing of him for a crime they now realize he did not commit, bring him back to his underground retreat where they murder him. He dies ignominiously, “a whirling object rushing alone in the darkness in the heart of the earth” (Man, 84).
Missing from Wright’s novella is the hope created by Marxist values and the promise of Communist revolution in Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. There is no character like Boris Max who can raise Fred Daniels’s consciousness with Marxist ideas and point to the “bright and morning star” of revolution that will provide hope in the future. The nonpolitical vision of “The Man Who Lived Underground” represents an important turning point in Wright’s career. Even as a member of the John Reed Club in 1933, Wright had some suspicions of radically leftist ideology, and, as the years wore on, he felt increased tensions between pressures from the Party to conform to their vision of the world and his desire to remain true to his experience as an African American artist. The Party’s dissolving of all John Reed Clubs in 1934, their harsh punishments of members who were deemed heretical, and their refusal to take a stand on racial discrimination in war industries deeply troubled Wright, and in 1942 he formally broke with the Party. As he would later reveal in “I Tried to Be a Communist,” “I had fled from men who did not like the color of my skin and now I was among men who did not like the color of my thoughts” (Crossman, 119). Between 1941 when he began writing “The Man Who Lived Underground” and 1942 when he found a publisher for the story, Wright’s thoughts were increasingly colored by philosophical concepts developed by European existentialists who offered Wright possibilities he could not find in Marxist determinism. Existentialism, therefore, enabled Wright to recover an outlook that could serve as a basis for humanistic belief and action. Existentialist ideas are central to “The Man Who Lived Underground,” opening up a new range of thematic and technical possibilities that Wright would explore for the remainder of his career.
Rather than being a systematic philosophy centered in one rigorously defined vision of life, existentialism contains a broad range of ideas and assumes many forms, something that was very appealing to Wright in the early to mid-1940s when he felt overly constrained by the absolute formulations of Communist ideology. But it does have two core ideas: 1) The world is “absurd” since it can not be explained in rational terms but operates in unpredictable, often chaotic, ways, and 2) Man is free and through consciously deliberated choice and action can therefore create meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. Wright would have been attracted to both aspects of existentialism. His brutal experiences in the segregated South and the urban North would put him in strong agreement with Fred Daniels’s belief that social systems are “crazy” but he also realized that his own triumph over this absurd world provided compelling evidence that human consciousness and will could enable him to construct a meaningful life for himself and others.
Wright’s Black Boy, the autobiography he had begun to imagine in 1937 when he published “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow” and which gained momentum after he visited his father in Mississippi in 1940 and lectured at Fisk University in 1943, is also centered in an existential vision of life. But unlike “The Man Who Lived Underground,” which stresses the absurd environment that victimized its intellectually immature central character, Black Boy focuses more sharply on the existential consciousness, will, and action of its protagonist, becoming a heroic narrative of human triumph through self creation. Wright stresses this at the end of Chapter I when he contrasts himself as a writer in 1940 with his aging father whom he sees for the last time in Mississippi. Like Fred Daniels, Wright’s father has been crushed by an overwhelming environment that remains an absurd puzzle to him. But Wright, in developing the existential self, which his father lacks, has been “lifted” to “shores of knowing” (BB, 41). He is not a “peasant” who is “a creature of the earth” but a writer who freely constructs the book of his own life. He and his father thus live on “vastly different planes of reality” (BB, 40).
His task, therefore, is first to understand and then to transcend the irrational environment that defeats the characters who populate Wright’s earlier works. From an early age growing up in the Deep South, Wright senses that his social environment does not really make sense to his child’s mind and later makes even less sense when analyzed by the penetrating consciousness he develops as a young adult. The book opens with him undergoing a painfully irrational experience as he is confined at age four to a small room with a lit fireplace and told to “keep still” (BB, 3) by his mother. When he does what most children of that age would naturally do, play with the fire, he is severely beaten “out of [his] senses” (BB, 7) by his mother who comes “close to killing” (BB, 8) him. Black Boy is filled with such absurd incidents, which shock and alienate young Wright. When he is six years old, he is forced to witness a court hearing in which a white judge allows his father to desert his family without making support payments and concludes that the whole proceeding was “useless” (BB, 31). And he is deeply pained by his father laughing throughout the absurd ritual. He is nine when he experiences his “first baptism of racial emotion” (BB, 57) when his uncle Silas Hoskins is murdered by whites who are jealous of his successes in business. Unable to discover any good reason for such violence, Wright is reduced to a paralyzing fear of whites, which remained with him for the remainder of his childhood and adolescence.
When Wright asks his mother why they did not fight back against the whites, he is slapped into “silence” (BB, 64) by her. In the world of Black Boy rational questions are usually answered with irrational responses. Puzzled by the fact that his grandmother is very light-complected and indeed appears to be white, he is again slapped when he asks why she lives in the black community and why she did not marry a white man. Later observing a chain gang composed of black men, he asks his mother “Why don’t the white men wear the stripes?” (BB, 68) and again gets no satisfactory answer. As he grows older, his questions become more penetrating, but he rarely gets useful replies from people. When he works as a janitor and delivery boy at the American Optical Company in Jackson and inquires about what he needs to know in order to advance in the company, he is physically threatened by white coworkers who want to keep him in his place by denying him access to “white man’s work” (BB, 220). After he moves to Memphis and witnesses a black man named Shorty humiliating himself by allowing white people to kick him in the buttocks for a quarter, he asks Shorty “How in God’s name can you do that?” (BB, 269). He gets no adequate response to his question other than Shorty’s “wild laughter” and his statement “Listen nigger … my ass is tough and quarters is scarce” (BB, 269–70). Wright is again reduced to silence by a response that supplies no real answer to his question and concludes “I never discussed the subject with him again” (BB, 270).
As Wright observes the intricately segregated society he is forced to live in, he comes to regard it as something like Shorty’s life, containing rational meanings on the surface that cover up an essentially irrational state of being. (Even if Shorty’s ass is tough, quarters do not represent a reasonable payment for kicking it, and Shorty’s wild laughter covers up his despair and “rage” [BB, 303], which he reveals on the last page of the book.) When Wright tries to “understand” this strangely bifurcated society in which “two sets of people lived side by side” but never touched “except in violence” (BB, 54), he can only conclude that such a conflicted society is centered in irrational fear and hatred. As he tries to develop an understanding of “the secret” (BB, 55) of southern racial codes, he is never able to assign any rational meanings to them. His grandmother, “who looks white” (BB, 55), is defined as a black person and nobody is either willing or able to explain why this is so. When he asks the question “Then what am I?” he is given an arbitrary and meaningless label as a “colored” (BB, 57) person, again reducing him to an angry silence.
Wright is able to avoid being ultimately victimized by such an absurd environment by developing the existential will, consciousness, and action that everyone else in his world lacks. After seeing his mother reduced to “meaningless pain and suffering” (BB, 117) brought about by deteriorated health and accepting her “place” in southern society, he resolves in his own life to existentially “wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering” (BB, 118). From the beginning of Black Boy he is endowed with a rich and active inward life, which separates him from all of the book’s other characters, and throughout his childhood and adolescence he finds ways of nourishing this inner self. His sensitivity to language plays an especially key role in development of a humane personality. When his mother reads him stories as a child, his “imagination blazed” and “reality changed” (BB, 45) and he regards such writing as a “gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land” (BB, 47). When he later begins to read pulp fiction as a teenager, he likewise sees these books as a “gateway to the world” (BB, 151). This process of liberation through reading culminates at the end of Black Boy when he discovers modern writers such as H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Emile Zola, who finally satisfy his inward “hunger” and give him “new avenues of seeing and feeling,” thus helping him “to build a new life” (BB, 296).
Coupled with this expanded, deepened consciousness nurtured by his sensitivity to language is an existential rebelliousness, which Wright seems naturally endowed with. He is deeply suspicious of all of the authority figures in his world, and unlike his mother, never accepts the limits that they place on him. As a child he is intent on developing strategies to “get back” (BB, 12) at his father and at one point threatens to strike him with a poker. When his grandmother annoys him by giving him a bath and forcing him to bend over so that she can scrub his backside, he tells her “When you get through, kiss back there” (BB, 48). And he refuses to read the valedictory speech that the school principal has prepared for him, delivering his own speech “Attributes of Life,” instead.
Wright has to be cautious in rebelling against white people since he is fully aware of the terrible punishments they can invoke, but he never accepts the “place” that whites have defined for him and other blacks. When reminded at the optical company he works for in Jackson of the limits of the work he is allowed to do as a black employee, he quits his job and moves to Memphis. As a sixteen-year-old, he develops hopes of “going north and writing books” because his imagination has made the North a symbolic “place where everything is possible” (BB, 199) and his writing is a powerful instrument of self-creation and social criticism. Realizing that “My environment contained nothing more alien than writing” (BB, 199), he envisions artistic creation as a powerful form of creative rebellion, which can enable him to find answers to his questions and can also supply him with the weapons he needs to effectively fight back at the white society that strips him of manhood and relegates him permanently to the status of a black boy. In the book’s final scene, he is sharply contrasted with Shorty who will “never leave this goddamn South” and indeed will die in the South if he ever acts on his desire “to kill everybody” (BB, 303). Wright, who is no longer trapped by his fears and hatreds, is poised to assume a liberating new life centered in existential consciousness and action. His rebellious acts are profoundly creative, not destructive.
Black Boy as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection sold well, becoming number one on the best seller list from late April to early June. By May 10, the Harper edition of the book had sold 195,000 copies, and by August, the Book-of-the-Month Club edition had sold 351,000 copies. It drew a wide range of critical responses, most of them positive but several of them sharply negative. Horace Cayton praised the book for its honest probing of the social realities African Americans face in a segregated society. Charles Lee characterized Black Boy as “one of the most memorable books of our time”21 and claimed it was artistically superior to Native Son. Orville Prescott, although faulting the book for being “strained” and “overwritten,” nevertheless found it “powerful and moving.”22 Ralph Ellison wrote the most sensitive review, likening the book to a blues performance that both explores the pain of African American experience and exults in its joys and triumphs with “a near tragic, near comic lyricism.”23
Leftist critics, deeply resentful of Wright’s departure from the Party, chided Wright for losing sympathy for the black proletariat and cultivating what they considered a self-indulgent individualism. W. E. B. DuBois agreed, complaining about Wright’s portraying black people in an excessively negative way and failing to grasp the richness of their folk culture. He found the book to be centered in a “narcissistic” protagonist whose self absorption is “almost pathological.”24Ben Burns, writing for the Chicago Defender, considered Black Boy a “sorry slander of Negroes,”25 because it neglected to account for the positive features of black cultural life and the heroic attempts to achieve justice and equality in the United States. James Ivy’s review in The Crisis put the case against Wright in even stronger terms, charging that he “put a sword in the back of his race.”26
These critics might have had even stronger views of the book, both positively and negatively, if they had been able to read the autobiography that Wright had intended for publication. As was the case with Native Son, Black Boy was a Book-of-the-Month Club publication and that group’s editorial board was responsible for pressuring Wright to make significant changes in the manuscript before it appeared in print in March 1945. Wright had originally titled his autobiography American Hunger and wrote it in two sections, “Southern Nights,” which contained his life in the Deep South, and “The Horror and the Glory,” which described his experiences in Chicago. When the Book-of-the-Month Club told Harper that it would accept only the first half of the book, Wright agreed to drop the section on his northern experiences, with the assurance that it would be published later as a separate volume. (It finally appeared in 1977 as American Hunger.) But Dorothy Canfield Fisher, an influential member of the editorial board, pressed Wright in private correspondence for more changes that would substantially alter the ending of the book, which was now entitled Black Boy. She wanted a more affirmative conclusion that would celebrate positive American values. Wright was extremely uncomfortable with Fisher’s suggestions, but he ultimately supplied a new ending that was bittersweet, stressing not only the psychological scars of his growing up in the South but his being awakened to new life in the North. The revised text concluded with the protagonist leaving a dark world of southern racism and gazing at the stars in the northern heavens, which direct him to fresh possibilities in Chicago.
As Arnold Rampersad and others have pointed out, the changes that Wright was pressured to make certainly altered the tone and meaning of his autobiography. By deleting the rather grim second section dealing with Wright’s political and personal difficulties in Chicago, the book acquired an affirmative lift that it did not possess earlier. And by cutting the disturbing conversation between Shorty and Wright, which had originally concluded the southern experiences, a conversation in which Shorty expresses a desire “to kill everybody” (BB, 303), Black Boy clearly acquired a more lyrical conclusion in line with what Fisher considered “American ideals.” Wright never recorded his own estimate of these changes and critics continue to debate their merits. The autobiography that Wright had originally written was restored in 1991 in the Library of America series and is now titled Black Boy/American Hunger.
With the popular and critical success of Black Boy, Richard Wright reached a high point in his career and was widely regarded as an important American writer who had produced three significant books and faced the brightest possible future. The royalties from Black Boy and Native Son enabled him to purchase a townhouse in Greenwich Village where he, his wife, Ellen Poplar, and his daughter, Julia, enjoyed a lifestyle unimaginable for them just a few years earlier. As Michel Fabre has observed, for Wright, “1945 finished in security, glory and comfort.”27
Wright’s outward success, however, was undercut by a number of serious anxieties, and by 1946 he began thinking of leaving the United States and taking up residence in France, a place he had admired for some time for its cosmopolitan culture and freedom from racial discrimination. New York in the 1940s was still a place of considerable racial tension and de facto segregation and Wright worried that his young family would be damaged if they established roots there. His neighbors were openly hostile to them, and Wright and his white wife were often the targets of racial slurs when they walked the streets of their neighborhood. Even though the Wrights lived in Greenwich Village, he had to go to Harlem to get his hair cut because white barbers in other parts of the city refused to serve him. And, beginning in 1947, gangs of white youths would come to the village to molest interracial couples and throw black people out of restaurants. Wright was deeply concerned about his daughter’s schooling and was particularly angered on one occasion when she was refused admittance to restroom facilities in a New York department store.
By 1946 and 1947, therefore, Wright was painfully conflicted, both as a man and a writer. Although in an interview in February 1947 he stressed that his work was in the “particular hell” of the United States where he was “fashioned,” he had earlier revealed to Anaïs Nin that “ … as a writer here I am strangled by petty humiliations, and daily insults. I am obsessed with only one theme. I need perspective. I need to get away from my personal hurts, my personal irritations. I am so completely disturbed that I can not even work. I need to live free if I am to expand” (quoted in Rowley, 352). He was invited by the French government to Paris in 1946 and, after resolving hassles about his passport with American officials, left for France on May 1, arriving in LaHarve eight days later where he was greeted by American expatriate Gertrude Stein, who considered Wright one of the most promising American writers. During this trip, lasting little more than six months, Wright formed friendships with French intellectuals and novelists such as Albert Camus, André Gide, Jean Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as leading figures of the Negritude movement like Léopold Senghor and Alioune Diop of Senegal and Aimé Césaire of Martinique. He helped to create with these three revolutionary thinkers Présence Africaine, a journal devoted to Pan-African issues.
Wright’s first trip to France, therefore, was an unqualified success. On May 15, 1946, he wrote to Edward Aswell “Paris is all I ever hoped it to be … there is an absence of race hate that seems a little unreal” (Fabre, Quest, 306). When his visa expired, he sailed back to New York in January 1947, but had strong thoughts of returning to France in the near future. By June of that year, Wright sold his Charles Street home and moved his family back to Paris in what proved to be a permanent exile.
Wright’s decision not to return to the United States was fueled by his growing fears from 1947 onward of two disturbing trends he perceived in post–World War II America, an arrogant triumphalism, which he considered a threat to world peace, and an increasing right-wing hostility to liberal ideas and people espousing those ideas. He realized that the progressive spirit of the New Deal era was over and had been replaced by the “Red Scare,” which would culminate in hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) of the McCarthy period. As the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s, Wright’s fears about these matters deepened, especially after he became aware that files were being kept on him by the FBI since 1941 and that the CIA considered him subversive. When he saw former coworkers Benjamin Davis and James W. Ford sent to prison for their political beliefs and when he witnessed Langston Hughes being bullied by HUAC, Wright resolved to make his exile in Europe permanent. After 1947, he would make only one trip back to the United States in order to shoot footage for the film version of Native Son, rejecting several invitations to visit his native country throughout the 1950s.
Wright’s first five years in France provided him with an excellent opportunity to broaden his vision of his life, which he worried had become too narrowly focused on “only one theme” of racism while he worked in the United States. From the beginning of his exile, he read widely and deeply in the work of European existentialists, studying Kierkegaard’s Concept of Dread while crossing the Atlantic, and plunging into a serious study of the works of Martin Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir after he arrived in Paris. He became actively involved with Camus and Sartre in the formation and conduct of Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire (RDR), an organization of people on the non-Communist Left who were suspicious both of American capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. He also took a strong interest in organizations committed to freeing Africa of colonialist domination. Separating so decisively from America enabled Wright to develop a broader political and cultural vision that was truly global in nature.
His exile, however, was not nearly as fruitful from a literary standpoint. The fiction that Wright produced in France never matched the power and formal artistry of Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and “The Man Who Lived Underground.” He began writing The Outsider in 1948 but did not complete the novel until 1953, creating what Rowley has called “an eight-year publishing hiatus” (Rowley, 374), which contrasts so sharply with the unusually productive seven-year period that preceded it. Part of the problem clearly was Wright’s unusually busy life in his first eight years of exile when he engaged in a wide range of time-consuming projects, such as the filming of Native Son in Chicago and Argentina, his formation of the Franco-American Fellowship, and his writing for journals like Les Temps Modernes, Présence Africaine, Twice a Year, and Ebony. He also served as the unofficial leader of a group of black American expatriate writers gathering around the Café Tournon and traveled widely in England, Italy, and Africa. But the weakening of Wright’s literary output in France must also be explained in terms of his separating his work from the “particular hell” that “fashioned” him, his deeply felt experiences in the American South and northern cities. Ironically, Wright exiled himself from the United States precisely at a time when its turbulent post–World War II history might have provided him with fresh material that could have reenergized his writing.
The Outsider, like much of the fiction Wright wrote during his exile, suffers from his desire to transcend the themes that centered his earlier work in an attempt to reach a broader, more “universal” understanding of the human condition. Its central character, Cross Damon, is black, but his problems are metaphysical, not social or political. He suffers from having what the existentialists called an “inauthentic” life; that is, a life imposed upon him by an absurd environment that causes him to marry a woman he does not love and have three sons by her to whom he feels unrelated. Moreover, he feels shackled to a pregnant mistress for whom he has little genuine feeling and a domineering mother about whom he feels ambivalent. He is released from this inauthentic life when he becomes involved in a train crash and is mistakenly reported as dead.
He then leaves Chicago and goes to New York where he tries to create for himself an existentially authentic life with a series of rebellious actions. His first act of rebellion is to become a member of the Communist Party and to befriend two comrades, Gil and Eva Blount. He shares an apartment with the Blounts in a building owned by a fascist, Langley Herndon. When he tries to moderate a fight between Gil and Herndon, he accidentally kills both and feels a godlike, Nietzschean power in doing so. The book concludes with him being tracked down by Communists intent on avenging Blount’s death. He dies affirming his existential freedom, proclaiming his status as an outsider. When asked in the final pages of the book what he found meaningful in life, he reduces all to absurdity by answering “Nothing.”
This brief plot summary suggests what is wrong with the book and how it falls so short of the power achieved in Wright’s masterpieces. Its melodramatic narrative is grounded in philosophical abstraction rather than lived experience and this reduces the characters to thin stereotypes acting out prescribed roles in an ideological debate. Critics were quick to point out how Wright’s work had flattened out since he had produced Native Son and Black Boy, books that arose from the depths of his experiences as an American black man. Arna Bontemps, who was a strong defender of Wright’s work, disapproved of what he called Wright’s “roll in the hay with existentialism”28 because it moved him away from his forte, a relentlessly honest probing of America’s racial problems. Milton Rugoff, who had high praise for Native Son, saw little to admire in The Outsider, faulting the book for its “sheer melodrama,” which was a “compost of sex and crime.”29 Orville Prescott argued that Wright’s “philosophical novel” had moved him too far away from his own concrete experiences and thus was populated with “unreal characters,” making the book “artificial” and lacking the “impact” that was the trademark of his earlier fiction.30 Lorraine Hansberry offered what was perhaps the most damning criticism of The Outsider when she claimed that Wright had “destroyed his talent” because he had forgotten the “beauty and strength” of working-class black people. By centering the novel instead on a monstrously violent black protagonist who had no feeling for his family or any other blacks, Hansberry claimed that Wright had reinforced the worst stereotypes about African Americans, producing a “propaganda piece for the enemies of the Negro people.”31
Wright’s next novel, Savage Holiday, which was published a year later, did little to recuperate Wright’s declining reputation as it was rejected by both Harper and World publishers and appeared as an Avon paperback, which received no American reviews. The book grew out of Wright’s association with Clinton Brewer, a man whom Wright helped to release from prison in 1941 after he had served nineteen years for the fatal stabbing of his teenage wife. Three months after he was paroled, Brewer committed a strikingly similar crime when he stabbed to death a woman who had refused his offer of marriage and was returned to prison for the remainder of his life. Wright dedicated Savage Holiday to Brewer and used him as a model for the novel’s central character, Erskine Fowler, who also compulsively stabs a woman to death after she turns down his proposal of marriage.
Seeking again to avoid the racial themes of his earlier work and elevating his art to a more “universal” level, Wright made all of the main characters in the novel white and placed them in an upper-class world. Fowler is a wealthy, recently retired insurance executive who employs a black maid and lives in the stylish “upper seventies of Manhattan.”32 Just as The Outsider is grounded in the principles of existentialism, Savage Holiday is a consciously written “novel of ideas” centered in Freudian psychology. But Wright’s attempt to extend his vision of life by moving beyond his own lived experience and infusing his novel with new ideas produced the same disappointing literary results achieved by The Outsider. The plot is even more strained and the characters are even less plausible in this abstractly driven novel.
While The Outsider suffers from being a kind of philosophical treatise, Savage Holiday’s bizarre plot makes it a curious case study in support of Freudian theories. Fowler’s problems begin when Tony Blake, the five-year-old son of Mabel Blake, dies after accidentally falling off the balcony of Fowler’s high-rise apartment. He then tries to atone for the child’s death by somehow convincing himself that he can make things right by marrying Mabel. When she refuses his proposal and eventually learns the circumstances of her son’s death, Fowler compulsively stabs her to death. His altogether strange behavior is finally explained in unconvincing Freudian terms by tracing his pathological impulses to a hatred of his mother who at one point in his childhood had punished him for stabbing one of his dolls.
After completing Savage Holiday Wright published three works of nonfiction in three years, Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). These works also reflect his attempts to transcend his American background by focusing on his growing interest in cultures other than his own and in matters of international importance. Black Power grew out of his trip to the Gold Coast in the summer of 1953. He met Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah in Accra, as well as many other African leaders, as he traveled nearly 3,000 miles by automobile throughout the country. Black Power expresses his strong ambivalence about post–World War II Africa. Although he celebrated the prospect of independence of African nations from colonial rule and predicted a momentous role for Africa to play in twentieth-century history, he was greatly disturbed by the political divisiveness, diseases, and overall backwardness he observed everywhere he went in what was soon to become Ghana. A confirmed rationalist and modernist, Wright saw Africa’s only real hope was to embrace western industrialism, technology, and urbanization. He returned from Africa after only two and one-half months out of a projected six month’s stay, disillusioned and painfully aware that he was a westerner who was scarcely at home in his people’s ancestral continent.
The next summer Wright toured Spain in hopes of collecting material for a book on a culture that had fascinated him from the time he had read Hemingway in the late 1920s and later when he became acutely interested in the Spanish Civil War. Wright’s response to Spain, like his assessment of Africa, was fundamentally ambivalent. He very much admired the Spanish people, finding them, ironically, friendlier and easier to relate to than the Africans he had met. And he enjoyed the Spanish cities, particularly Barcelona and Madrid. Like Hemingway, he was intrigued by the bullfights but was more interested in victimization of the bulls rather than the heroic deportment of the matadors.
Wright, however, was appalled by other aspects of Spanish culture and at many points likened it to the worst features of life in the American South. He objected to the Franco government’s treatment of the Protestant minority, sensing that a kind of “slavery” had been imposed upon them. He felt that Spanish gypsies were treated as “white Negroes” who had been stripped of their rights. And he was repulsed by the ways in which women were also treated as marginalized, second-class citizens. Wright’s view of the Catholic Church in Spain resembled his condemnation of formal religion in the American South, regarding it as a force that maintained medieval conditions in all aspects of Spanish life. Wright’s solution to the problems he witnessed in Spain was identical to the solution he proposed to African problems. He argued strongly that both Africa and Spain, like the American South, must abandon their inhibiting pasts and become part of a progressive modern world.
Wright’s next book, The Color Curtain, grew out of his attendance in the spring of 1955 at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Bandung, Indonesia, which brought together twenty-nine independent nations of Asia and Africa to discuss the problems of western colonialism. Wright saw the conference as an event with the potential to initiate a process that could eventually unite colored people from all over the globe, forming a new world free from colonial domination. In a journal entry that he wrote on April 8, 1955, as he was about to take the long flight to Indonesia, he observed that he was “flying from the old world of Spain to the new world of Asia” (Rowley, 461). But he was deeply suspicious of any attempts to revive what he called the “past and dead cultures” (Rowley, 466) by reviving their religious traditions and racial animosities. Rather, he advocated a “welding”33 of the consciousness of colored peoples to “the techniques of the twentieth century.” For this reason, he described Prime Minister Nehru of India, the driving force behind the Bandung Conference, as a great man because he was able to harmonize the best features of eastern and western cultures.
In The Color Curtain, Wright expresses a deep fear that nations that were newly liberated from colonial control would become “flooded, drowned in an irrational tide of racial and religious passions” (CC, 219) if they did not “shake loose … from a static past” (CC, 220). He also feared that if the West was either unwilling or unable to assist emerging nations with financial and technical assistance that they would be vulnerable to the “murder and terror” (CC, 220) of either Fascism or Communism.
By 1957, therefore, Wright had become detached not only from his earlier commitments to Marxism and Communism, but also had developed substantial anxieties about the new political theories circulating in the Third World, which rejected western modernism. He came to see himself as one of the “lonely outsiders,” whom he described in the inscription of his next book, White Man, Listen! (1957), who were part of a “westernized and tragic elite” and who “existed precariously on the clifflike margins of many cultures.”34 This new book of literary and cultural essays, which Wright had presented as lectures in Europe over the past four years, attempted to combine “the best of two worlds” by fusing progressive western ideas with the political and social traditions of emerging nations.
In his final five years before his unexpected death in 1960, Wright devoted considerable time and energy to his fiction. In the summer of 1955 he sketched out plans for an ambitious series of novels, including one set in Aztec, New Mexico, which would explore the conflicts between the individual and society. The title for the entire sequence was Celebration and one novel, A Strange Daughter, focused on a white woman who had several affairs with black men. Island of Hallucinations was begun in 1958 and centered on the personal, sexual, and political intrigues of black expatriates in Paris. In the summer of 1960, Wright worked on A Father’s Law, which dealt with a man who goes on a murder spree after discovering that his fiancée has contracted syphilis. By 1960, Wright had also put together a series of short stories, along with a longer version of “The Man Who Lived Underground,” in a new book, Eight Men, which was published shortly after his death.
But the only fictional project that Wright was able to complete and publish before his death was The Long Dream, a novel set in Mississippi, which drew upon some of his experiences growing up in the South. The central character’s mother Emma is modeled to some extent after Wright’s own mother Ella, as both women are presented as religionists who constantly warn their sons about the sins of the flesh and the dangers presented by white people. And two of the book’s most important events are drawn from actual happenings. Chris Sims, a young black man, is castrated and murdered after he is discovered having consensual sex with a white woman, suffering a punishment similar to that endured by Ray Robinson, the brother of one of Wright’s classmates at Smith Robertson Junior High School. And the fire at Grove Dance Hall which is so vividly depicted in The Long Dream is based upon a 1940 fire in Natchez’s Rhythm Club, which resulted in the deaths of 209 black people. Wright, who once claimed in an unpublished lecture that “All writing is a secret form of autobiography” (Rowley, 410), drew heavily from actual experiences as he wrote The Long Dream.
The novel, like Black Boy, describes a journey from twentieth-century forms of slavery to existential freedom and self-creation. The book’s central character, Fishbelly Tucker, like Wright, envisions the South as “a kind of purgatory,”35 which he must first understand and then transcend. His father, Tyree Tucker, resembles Wright’s father in certain ways. Although he achieves middle-class status by operating a black funeral home, he is essentially trapped by a segregated world that forces him to behave in a servile manner before whites, and he thus becomes for his son a symbol of black victimhood. When he offends the white system, he, like Wright’s Uncle Silas, is murdered. Fishbelly then takes over his father’s business and is later sent to prison on trumped-up rape charges. After he is released, he flees the South by taking a path quite similar to the one Wright took, first boarding a train for Memphis and then taking planes to New York and Paris.
The ending of the novel bears a striking resemblance to the conclusion of Black Boy. Fishbelly acts upon his friend Zeke’s advice to “leave … shake the dust off your feet and don’t look back once (LD, 372). Inspired by the “high blue stars glazing a black velvet sky,” he extricates himself from the trap of southern culture and destroys “all the bridges to the past” (LD, 375). On the flight to Paris, he has the same perception that Wright had on his train ride to Memphis, believing that “He had fled a world … that had emotionally crucified him,” and he looks forward to “a new possible life” (LD, 383). In the novel’s final paragraph, Fish-belly, like the young Wright, feels renewed by “space” (LD, 384) as he imagines his life in a world of terrifying new challenges and liberating fresh possibilities.
Wright’s final years were characterized by painful self-doubt and a series of personal disasters, which deepened his isolation, making him what Gunnar Myrdal described in his introduction to The Color Curtain as “a free and lonely intellectual” (CC, 7). His marriage suffered serious strains after his wife had discovered a series of his affairs dating back to 1951 when he became involved with Madelyn Jackson during the filming of Native Son in Argentina. By 1960 Ellen and their two daughters lived apart from Wright in London and a divorce was a strong possibility. Wright had also become deeply disillusioned with France as a result of the Algerian War, and only visa problems prevented him from living elsewhere. Moreover, he had lost faith in his earlier political enthusiasms and felt persecuted by the FBI and CIA. And by 1960 several of the friends and relatives he felt most strongly connected to had died. Edward Aswell, his longtime editor and close friend, died suddenly in 1958, and George Padmore, whom Wright greatly admired and saw as one of the few persons who shared his views, died in 1959 at the age of fifty-six. Wright was also deeply shaken by the passing away of his Aunt Maggie in 1957 and his mother in 1959.
His final years were also plagued by serious health problems, perhaps dating back to the amoebic dysentery he had contracted during his visit to the Gold Coast. He became quite ill in August 1959 with a painful gastrointestinal disorder and was treated with heavy medications such as bismuth and emetine hydrochloride, which had dangerous side effects, particularly those pertaining to cardiac problems. The acute stress that Wright experienced as a result of his growing personal and professional difficulties exacerbated his medical problems and he suffered greatly in his final year from exhaustion and pain. Afflicted by what he thought was a heavy flu, he checked himself into the Eugene Gibez Clinic on November 26, 1960, and died of a heart attack a day later. His premature death at age 52 has never been adequately explained.
Wright died, ironically, on the cusp of a great revival of interest in his work as, throughout the 1960s, he was reevaluated as an important writer who had transformed American and African American literary traditions. The increasing militancy of the Civil Rights Movement and a new interest in “Black Power,” gave his work new relevance. Whereas the critics of the late 1940s and 1950s were likely to view Wright’s aggressive politics as an aesthetic liability, critics from the mid-1960s onward, particularly those connected with the Black Arts Movement, saw him as a model of the politically and socially committed black writer. Earlier critics such as James Baldwin and Lorraine Hansberry were likely to view a character such as Bigger Thomas as a dangerous stereotype of the “bad nigger” who would make people think twice about integration, but sixties’ critics such as Amiri Baraka were apt to view Bigger as a revolutionary black hero who wanted to challenge white society rather than integrate with it. While novelists like Ralph Ellison faulted Wright in the 1950s for writing “protest novels,” more militant writers of the next decade like John H. Williams praised Wright for writing ideologically charged books loudly protesting American racism.
Several of Wright’s important books were published after his death, contributing greatly to a revival of interest in his work. Eight Men, a collection of stories written over more than twenty years and which Wright had attempted to publish as a shorter collection in 1944, appeared in 1961. It included “The Man Who Lived Underground” as well as seven other pieces set in a variety of locations. Two of the stories, “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” and “The Man Who Saw the Flood,” were set in the South in the 1930s and examined problems quite similar to those explored in Uncle Tom’s Children, describing how black men are destroyed by a series of overwhelming environmental forces. “Big Black Good Man” and “Man, God Ain’t Like That,” two of the collection’s least successful pieces, are mostly set in Europe. The remaining stories take place in Chicago and New York and rank among Wright’s finest achievements in fiction. Taken as a group, the eight stories dramatize a movement from naturalistic victimization to existential triumph over environmental forces by the achievement of enriched consciousness leading to action resulting in existential selfhood.
Contemporary reviewers responded in largely negative terms to Eight Men. Irving Howe, a longtime advocate for Wright, complained that the book revealed the literary faults of Wright’s later work. He argued that Wright’s efforts to break away from an outdated naturalistic tradition were “clumsy” and resulted in surrealistic writing that was at its best “uneven.”36 Saunders Redding claimed that Eight Men “is not one of the works by which Richard Wright deserves to be judged,”37 because it was mired in a sterile nihilism brought about by his European exile. Richard Gilman called the collection of stories “a dismally stale and dated book,” which “reached the lowest point to which Wright’s career had ever sunk.”38 Later critics, however, have taken issue with these extremely harsh reviews, assigning Eight Men an important position in the Wright canon. Three stories in particular, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” “The Man Who Killed a Shadow,” and “The Man Who Was Almost a Man,” have been cited by many scholars as some of Wright’s most accomplished fictions, and they have been frequently anthologized.
Lawd Today!, which was rejected by eight major publishing houses after Wright wrote it in the early 1930s, and which was turned down by World Publishing Co. in 1961, was finally published by Walker and Co. in 1963 through the determined efforts of Ellen Wright. While editors during Wright’s lifetime objected to the book because they felt that its harsh subject matter and experimental style made it an economic liability, late twentieth-century readers have responded favorably to the book and regard it as one of Wright’s most significant literary achievements. Arnold Rampersad, the editor of The Library of America’s editions of Wright’s major books, has argued that it is “among Wright’s most compelling works.39
Like Joyce’s Ulysses, the novel ironically juxtaposes the antiheroic present with a heroic past. Just as Ulysses contrasts Leopold Bloom’s bumblings with the heroic achievements of Odysseus, Lawd Today! contrasts Jake Jackson’s futile actions as a twentieth century “slave” with the heroic story of the emancipation of black people as a result of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s heroism. As the radio recounts events from the American past on the national holiday commemorating Lincoln’s birthday, Jake’s life in Depression America is presented as a very “uncivil” war, which he clearly loses. While the radio broadcast concludes with Lincoln’s heroic words “with malice toward none and charity for all,”40 Jake’s story ends with his being consumed by his self-destructive hatreds and his inability to feel love for anyone but himself.
Jake’s deterministic narrative comes in three parts, an opening scene in which he awakens from a deep sleep and has a violent argument with his wife; a middle sequence describing his day of work in the Chicago Post Office; and a concluding section where he goes to a whorehouse, gets drunk and beaten up, and then returns home where he has another violent altercation with his wife. The futility of Jake’s life is dramatized by this circular structure where he indeed ends, as he tells his friends, “right where I started” (LT, 212). The novel opens with Jake resisting his wife’s attempts to awaken him, because he prefers the soft world of his dreams to the hard pain of his waking life and ends with him falling into a “drunken sleep” (LT, 219) after he is knocked unconscious by his wife when she defends herself against his attack. Throughout the book Jake is presented as incapable of handling the demands of his actual life and retreating into various forms of “sleep” which provide him with the illusion of power.
Jake’s violent personal narrative is reinforced by the novel’s cultural narrative, which is revealed by the radio broadcasts and newspaper reports interspersed throughout the novel. The news from the outer world always gives evidence of a world which, like Jake’s life, is out of control and on the verge of collapse. As Jake argues with his wife, he reads of mounting violence in Germany, gangsters terrorizing innocent people in Chicago, Communists rioting in New York, and black people being lynched in Mississippi. He later hears radio reports of the Japanese army invading Manchuria and enjoys talking with his coworkers at the post office about several women in Chicago who have performed macabre murders. They also discuss the “crime of the century,” the Loeb/Leopold murder of Bobby Franks, a “thrill killing” that is a grisly parallel to the pleasure Jake experiences as he contemplates doing violence to his wife, his bosses, and a wide assortment of enemies.
Wright also broadens the significance of Jake’s narrative by making his place of work, the Chicago Post Office, a metaphor of modern American society. Like the deterministic environment in which Jake is trapped, the post office is an elaborate “squirrel cage” (LT, 159), which dehumanizes workers with mindless routine, low pay, and constant surveillance. The mechanical work of sorting mail produces a “numbing weariness of spirit” (LT, 150), which turns people into robots. To make matters worse for Jake and his friends, the post office is a rigidly segregated society controlled by whites, who supervise blacks who have no alternative but to continue working in menial jobs and white college students who regard such work as only a temporary phase in their moving upward in American life. But Jake fully understands that “when a black man gets a job in the Post Office, he’s done reached the top” (LT, 118). The “top” for African Americans, ironically, turns out to be a Dantean underground. Jake envisions his eight hours of work each day as “a series of black pits” (LT, 130), and he has difficulty talking above the din of the sorting machines which are described as “rumbling like an underground volcano” (LT, 117).
The only releases that Jake and his friends find from their dreary work, ironically, make their lives even worse in the long run. The movies that entertain them with “action … suspense, thrills, and stolen love” (LT, 52) provide only temporary escapes from their grim lives and dull their resolve to pragmatically change their environment. And the liquor, hot jazz, and cheap sex, which they find in whorehouses, compound their problems by depleting their stores of money and endangering their health. When Jake tries to solve his problems at the end of the book by borrowing one hundred dollars and going out for a night on the town at Rose’s cat house, he is robbed of his money and savagely beaten when he complains. The treatment he gets there turns out to be no better than the treatment he gets at the post office where he is bullied by supervisors and cheated with low pay.
American Hunger, the second part of Wright’s autobiography, which was rejected by Book-of-the-Month Club in 1944, was finally published by Harper and Row in 1977. It greatly resembles Lawd Today! in terms of its portrait of the social environment, depicting Chicago as a naturalistic world, a city of “steel and stone,”41 which can reduce its inhabitants to the level of victimized animals. In American Hunger Wright faces the same economic and racial problems that defeat Jake Jackson as he is forced to endure extreme poverty and live in a segregated world that makes him feel like a “slave” (AH, 51). He describes the discrimination he experiences in Chicago as a “racial attack that went to the root of my life” (AH, 5), something which erodes his conception of self and makes him wonder if he can “survive” (AH, 1) as a human being.
Like Jake, he works at the Chicago Post Office and feels demeaned and enervated by his work there. When he is laid off from his postal job, he is forced to work at even lower paying, harsher jobs such as sweeping streets, selling fraudulent insurance policies and being an orderly at a large Chicago hospital. His position at the hospital, like Jake’s job at the post office, becomes a metaphor of American society, as whites occupy professional and supervisory roles while blacks are relegated an “underground position” (AH, 47) in the basement as janitors and orderlies. Like Jake, he feels that the authorities at work do not perceive him as a “human being” (AH, 58) but treat him and his black coworkers as animals. The parallels between the two books are also strongly suggested by Wright’s careful use of allusions to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. At the end of Lawd Today! Jake is described as a denizen of “Rat’s Alley” as he descends into a world of drunkenness, prostitution, and violence, while in the first paragraph of American Hunger Wright characterizes Chicago as “an unreal” city (AH, 1).
But the two books are altogether different in terms of their central characters’ responses to the modern waste land. While Jake lacks the inward resources either to understand or cope with his nightmarish environment, Wright can survive and even triumph in the “machine-city” (AH, 2) of Chicago because he possesses the psychological and imaginative powers that enable him to construct a human life. American Hunger, far from being a book about human failure, is instead a kind of autobiographical version of a bildungsroman, a text celebrating the transformative powers of education. Unlike Jake, who numbs himself with alcohol, cheap fantasy, and “a fever of bitterness” (LT, 143), which reduce him to animal rage or a minimal level of human consciousness, Wright experiences life as a powerful learning process. His job selling fraudulent insurance policies to poor blacks provides him with “a new kind of education” (AH, 31), which gives him valuable insights into how ghetto life operates. Likewise, his relief job working with delinquent youth at the South Side Boys Club becomes “deeply engrossing” (AH, 88), because it teaches him about the social forces that send black youth down the road Jake is traveling, which leads to “the clinics, morgues, prison, reformatories, and the electric chair” (AH, 88). Even the grim job he has at the hospital cleaning rat cages and devocalizing dogs provides him with valuable lessons. The dogs become for him “a symbol of silent suffering” (AH, 48), which characters like Jake’s wife, Lil, endure and which Wright’s own mother experienced. The foolishly violent antics that his black coworkers, Brand and Cooke, indulge in are seen by Wright as behaviors to avoid as he envisions a productive new life for himself. While they inadvertently act out the stereotyped roles that whites have constructed for them, Wright consciously rebels against such roles.
This new life is nurtured by Wright’s reading, writing, and political commitments. While Jake believes that “Too much reading’s bad” because it “addles your brains” (LT, 69), Wright regards his reading of books such as Dostoevsky’s The Possessed and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives as life-giving because they lead to “new realms of feeling” (AH, 19). Jake has no time for or interest in writing, but Wright follows his long days of work with writing fiction at night. This enables him to transform the chaos of his raw experiments into ordered art. He believes that “wrestling with words gave me moments of deepest meaning” (AH 88) and concludes that writing helped him “to build a bridge of words between me and that world outside” (AH, 135).
Jake dismisses all politics as useless and labels Communists as “crackbrains” (LT, 50), but Wright discovers “a new faith” (AH, 45) in leftist ideals. Although by the end of American Hunger he rejects Communism as a perversion of Socialist values, he maintained a strong belief in these values, and they helped him to overcome his despair and feel connected to important matters beyond himself. Jake, in sharp contrast, is finally destroyed by his own egoism and inability to establish sustained meaningful human relationships.
After Wright had completed American Hunger in 1944, he was already at work on a short novel, The Jackal, which he was unable to publish in his lifetime but which appeared in 1994 as Rite of Passage. This book about teenage gangs in New York was rooted in Wright’s work with juvenile delinquents during the Depression at the South Side Boys Club in Chicago, and later at the free clinic, which he and Dr. Frederic Wertham had set up in Harlem, as well as his involvement with the Wiltwyck School for Boys in Esopus, New York. Indeed, an actual case study of a boy sent to Wiltwyck provided Wright with the germ of Rite of Passage.
Johnny Gibbs, like the boy at Wiltwyck, was placed in a foster home that provided him with a stable, loving family life, but he was arbitrarily removed from that family at age fifteen by authorities at the New York Welfare Department. Both boys then ran away from “home” and entered the sinister and violent world of Harlem street life, becoming members of gangs engaging in crimes ranging from petty theft to violent muggings. Rite of Passage, like “The Man Who Was Almost a Man” and so much of Wright’s best work, stresses the existential fragility of its protagonist with a narrative that describes how his life is completely transformed by a single dramatic event. Like Dave Saunders who is detached from a relatively stable and familiar life when he accidentally kills his boss’s mule, Johnny’s whole world falls apart when welfare department authorities attempt to place him with another family. Like Bigger Thomas, Cross Damon, and Fred Daniels, whose lives are forever changed when they are accused of breaking the laws of impersonal societies that deny them any real legal protection, Johnny finds his old life suddenly dissolved when he returns home from school one day to discover that he is in fact a foster child who has been living since infancy with people who are not his real parents. He therefore is confronted with the same dilemma troubling the protagonist of Black Boy—should he accept an identity imposed upon him by a social world that refuses to perceive him as a human being, or should he rebel absolutely and begin the task of constructing a new self? Not surprisingly, he chooses the latter alternative and by the end of the book he is described as “alone,” attempting “to make a life for himself by trying to reassemble the shattered fragments of his lonely heart.”42
What makes this book quite different from Wright’s other work is the fact that hope is finally created, because Johnny is not really alone since a number of women offer him love, guidance, and kinship. Unlike so many of Wright’s works in which women are presented as a threat to male identity, Rite of Passage portrays women in a consistently positive way. Johnny’s best self is nurtured by feminine values and influence while his worst self is defined by macho violence and egoism. In the novel’s final scenes, Johnny’s humane self is activated by his desire for contact with women. As he trudges “the empty streets” (R, 102) with the gang as they make their way to Central Park to randomly attack white people, his inner self “yearned to sink to his knees to some kind of old black woman” and sob: “Help me … I can’t go through with this!” (R, 102). After he has participated in the mugging, he hears the voice of a “Negro woman” screaming her disapproval of the gang’s senseless behavior by shouting “You boys! You boys!” (R, 107). Although it is highly unlikely that this woman is objectively real since only Johnny hears her repeated calls, she is crucially important in the story because she is presented as a human voice within Johnny, a moral consciousness that, like his foster mother and his teacher, directs him away from self-destructive violence and encourages him to respond to the world in intelligent, creative ways. They try to motivate him to see his world as a school, not a prison, an educational process leading to human growth.
Late in his life Wright was also engaged in writing two other novels, “Island of Hallucinations” and A Father’s Law, but his untimely death made it impossible for him to complete either work. “Island of Hallucinations” was planned as a sequel to The Long Dream, focusing on African American expatriate life during the Cold War. The core of the book examines Fishbelly Tucker’s love affairs with various white women and the Byzantine personal and political intrigues experienced by black American writers and intellectuals. The novel in its uncompleted form stops when Fishbelly is deported after one of his friends betrays him by falsely reporting him to French authorities as a dangerous revolutionary.
A Father’s Law, in contrast, is set in Chicago and centers on the struggles of a black middle-class family. Its protagonist, Rudolf Turner, is a successful police chief who lives in Brentwood Park, a neighborhood loosely modeled after Kenwood, an exclusive white suburb of Chicago, which was the setting for the crimes committed in the 1920s by Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold. Turner has been given the task of solving a series of brutal killings in his neighborhood and comes to suspect his son, Tommy, of being a serial murderer. Although Wright came close to completing the novel in his final days, he was not able to fashion an ending that would identify the killer or resolve the issues raised in the book. A Father’s Law was eventually published by HarperCollins in its uncompleted form in 2008. Wright’s daughter, Julia, provided a brief introduction placing the novel in the context of Wright’s previous work and the personal difficulties he faced late in life.
In his final two years Wright engaged in one other unusual literary project, the writing of haiku poetry. In 1959 he became fascinated with Japanese haiku, reading widely in this area, and writing approximately four thousand of these delicate, three-lined poems. For the most part, Wright’s haiku are a melancholy reflection of the isolation and illness he experienced at the end of his life, focusing on a lonely individual contemplating a desolate landscape and the prospect of death. As Hazel Rowley has pointed out, they were a form of “meditation” (505), which gave Wright “a modicum of inner peace in the worst period of despair and self-doubt he had ever known.” World Publishing Company rejected Wright’s book of haiku poems in June 1960, but a substantial collection of his best haiku was edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Tener and published in 1998.
In a literary career spanning over twenty-five years and unfortunately cut short by his unexpected death at age fifty-two, Wright achieved remarkable success. Acknowledged by many as the father of modern African American literature, he revolutionized both American consciousness and black writing, because he was courageous enough to challenge old taboos and to boldly articulate disturbing truths about America’s racial problems, which previous writers were either unable or unwilling to explore. As Arnold Rampersad has noted, “Compared with him, some of the bravest earlier black writers seem almost timid” (3). Wright’s example as a socially committed artist and his writing of masterpieces such as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, “The Man Who Lived Underground,” and Black Boy/American Hunger helped to inspire a wide range of black writers throughout the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. And he continues to exert a strong influence over contemporary novelists such as Albert French, Jeffrey Renard Allen, and Walter Mosley. Moreover, his novels, stories, and essays have been translated into many languages and are read today all over the world. Wright’s best work, while growing out of his own rich experiences that were deeply embedded in the times and places in which he lived, ultimately generates truly universal meanings. In the words of his reluctant admirer, James Baldwin, “Wright’s unrelentingly bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South or of Chicago, but that of the world, of the human heart.”43
1. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001, 25. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
2. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993, 296. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
3. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study of Literature and Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971, 118.
4. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories. New York and London: Harper, 1940, 8. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
5. Reilly, John M. “Afterword.” In Native Son by Richard Wright. New York: Harper and Row, 1966, 397.
6. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. 1941. Rpt. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988, 88. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
7. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988, 284. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
8. Wright, Richard. “I Tried to Be a Communist.” In The God That Failed by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1965, 117.
9. Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” In The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997, 1382, 1384.
10. Farrell, James T. “Lynch Patterns.” Partisan Review (May 4, 1938): 57–58.
11. Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990, 4.
12. Wright, Richard. “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” In Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2008, 454.
13. Howe, Irving. “Black Boys and Native Sons.” In A World More Attractive. New York: Horizon, 1963, 98.
14. Wright, Richard. Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Harper Perennial Classics, 2008, 6. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
15. Canby, Henry Seidel. “Review of Native Son.” Book-of-the-Month Club News (February 1940): 2.
16. Brown, Sterling. “Review of Native Son.” Opportunity (June 18, 1940): 185.
17. Hansen, Harry. “Review of Native Son,” New York World-Telegram, March 2, 1940, 17.
18. Jones, Howard Mumford. “Uneven Effect,” Boston Evening Transcript Book Section, March 1, 1940, 1.
19. Cohn, David. “The Negro Novel: Richard Wright.” Atlantic Monthly (May 1940): 660.
20. Daniels, Jonathan. “Review of Native Son,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, March 31, 1940, 13.
21. Lee, Charles. “Review of Black Boy,” Philadelphia Record, March 1, 1945, 20.
22. Prescott, Orville. “Review of Black Boy,” New York Times, February 28, 1945, 30.
23. Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” The Antioch Review (Summer 1945): 5.
24. DuBois, W. E. B. “Richard Wright Looks Back,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, March 4, 1945, 2.
25. Burns, Ben. “Review of Black Boy,” Chicago Defender, March 3, 1945, 11.
26. Ivy, James. “American Hunger.” The Crisis 52 (April 1945): 118.
27. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973, 294. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
28. Bontemps, Arna. “Review of The Outsider,” Saturday Review, March 28, 153, 15.
29. Rugoff, Milton. “Review of The Outsider,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, March 22, 1953, 14.
30. Prescott, Orville. “Review of The Outsider,” New York Times, March 18, 1953, 29.
31. Hansberry, Lorraine. “Review of The Outsider.” Freedom (April 1953): 7.
32. Wright, Richard. Savage Holiday. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995, 34. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
33. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Banding Conference. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995, 219. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
34. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957, iv. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
35. Wright, Richard. The Long Dream. Chatham, N.J.: The Chatham Bookseller, 1969, 164. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
36. Howe, Irving. “Richard Wright: A Word of Farewell.” The New Republic 114 (February 13, 1961): 17.
37. Redding, Saunders. “Richard Wright’s Posthumous Stories,” New York Herald Tribune Book Review, January 22, 1961, 33.
38. Gilman, Richard. “The Immediate Misfortunes of Widespread Sympathy.” Commonweal (April 28, 1961): 130.
39. Rampersad, Arnold. “Too Honest for His Own Time,” The New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1991, 3.
40. Wright, Richard. Lawd Today. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986, 201. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
41. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977, 2. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
42. Wright, Richard. Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994, 115. All subsequent references are to this edition and page numbers are cited parenthetically after the quote.
43. Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dial Press, 1961, 149.
Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas (New York: Harper, 1938; London: Gollanz, 1939); enlarged as Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories (New York: Harper, 1940; London: Gollanz, 1940).
Native Son. New York: Harper, 1940; London: Gollanz, 1940.
How “Bigger” Was Born. New York: Harper, 1940.
Native Son (The Biography of a Young American): A Play in Ten Scenes, by Wright and Paul Green (New York: Harper, 1941); revised by Green in Black Drama, An Anthology, edited by William Brasmer and Dominic Consola (Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1970), 70–178.
Twelve Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States. New York: Viking, 1941; London: Drummond, 1947. Reprinted by Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.
Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth. New York: Harper, 1945; London: Gollanz, 1945.
The Outsider. New York: Harper, 1953; London: Angus and Robertson, 1953.
Savage Holiday. New York: Avon, 1954. Reprinted by University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954. Reprinted by Harper Perennial, 1995.
The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland: World, 1956; London: Dobson, 1956. Reprinted by University of Mississippi Press, 1994.
Pagan Spain: A Report on the Journey into the Past. New York: Harper, 1957; London: Bodley Head, 1960. Reprinted by Harper Perennial, 1995.
White Man, Listen! Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1957. Reprinted by Harper Perennial, 1995.
The Long Dream. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958; London: Angus and Robertson, 1960.
Eight Men. Cleveland: World, 1961. Reprinted by Harper Perennial, 1996.
Lawd Today! New York: Walker, 1963; London: Blond, 1965. Reprinted by Northeastern University Press, 1986.
American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977; London: Gollanz, 1978.
Richard Wright, Early Works: Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, and Native Son. New York: Library of America, 1991.
Richard Wright, Later Works: Black Boy/American Hunger, The Outsider. New York: Library of America, 1991.
Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.
A Father’s Law. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Native Son, by Wright and Paul Green, New York, St. James Theatre, March 24, 1941.
Daddy Goodness, by Wright and Louis Sapin, New York, St. Mark’s Playhouse, June 4, 1968.
Native Son (Classic Films, 1951), screenplay by Wright.
“The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, an Autobiographical Sketch.” In American Stuff: An Anthology of Prose & Verse by Federal Writers’ Project. New York: Viking Press, 1937, 39–52.
“I Tried to Be a Communist.” In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Harper, 1950, 115–63.
“Introduction to George Padmore’s Pan Africanism or Communism? London: Dobson, 1956.
“Five Episodes.” In Soon One Morning, edited by Herbert Hill. New York: Knopf, 1963, 149–64.
“The American Problem—Its Negro Phase.” In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973, 9–16.
“Blueprint for Negro Writing.” New Challenge II (Fall 1937): 53–65.
“Not My People’s War.” New Masses 39, 13 (June 17, 1941): 8–9.
“US Negroes Greet You,” Daily Worker, September 1, 1941, 7.
“Richard Wright Describes the Birth of Black Boy,” New York Post, November 30, 1944, 36.
“Psychiatry Comes to Harlem.” Free World 12 (September 1946): 49–51.
“How Jim Crow Feels.” True: The Man’s Magazine (November 1946): 25–27, 154–56.
“Urban Misery in an American City: Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem.” Twice a Year 14–15 (Fall 1946–Winter 1947): 339–45.
“American Negroes in France.” The Crisis 58 (June–July 1951): 381–83.
“The Shame of Chicago.” Ebony 7 (December 1951): 24–32.
“Harlem.” Les Parisiens 1 (December 1960): 23.
Davis, Charles T. and Michel Fabre. Richard Wright: A Primary Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Kinnamon, Keneth, with the help of Joseph Benson, Michel Fabre, and Craig Werner. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Commentary and Criticism, 1933–1982. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1988.
Kinnamon, Keneth. Richard Wright: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Commentary, 1983–2003. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Sons, 2006.
Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973.
Gayle, Addison, Jr. Richard Wright: The Ordeal of a Native Son. New York: Anchor Books, 1980.
Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.
Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man and a Critical Look at His Work. New York: Amistad, 1988.
Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam’s, 1968.
Williams, John A. and Dorothy Sterling. The Most Native of Sons: A Biography of Richard Wright. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.
Baldwin, James. “Alas, Poor Richard.” In Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dial Press, 1961, 181–89.
———. “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” In Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon, 1955, 85–114.
Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Views: Richard Wright. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2009.
———, ed. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Butler, Robert. “The Loeb and Leopold Case: A Neglected Source for Richard Wright’s Native Son,” African American Review (Winter 2005): 555–67.
———. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991.
———. “Signifying and Self-Portraiture in Richard Wright’s A Father’s Law.” College Language Association Journal 51:1 (September 2008): 55–73.
———, ed. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995.
Callaloo 9 (Summer 1986): 21–30. [Issue devoted to Wright].
Capetti, Carla. “Sociology of an Existence: Richard Wright and the Chicago School.” MELUS 12 (Summer 1985): 25–43.
Cayton, Horace. “Fear and Hunger in Black America,” Chicago Sun Book Week, March 4, 1945, 3.
DuBois, W. E. B. “Richard Wright Looks Back,” New York Herald Tribune Weekly Book Review, March 4, 1945, 2.
Ellison, Ralph. “Richard Wright’s Blues.” The Antioch Review (Summer 1945), 1–13.
Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990.
———. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., and K. A. Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993.
Gibson, Donald B. “Wright’s Invisible Native Son.” American Quarterly 21 (Winter 1969): 728–39.
Graham, Maryemma. “Richard Wright.” Callaloo 9 (Summer 1986): 21–30.
Green, Tara. “The Virgin Mary, Eve, and Mary Magdalene in Richard Wright’s Novels.” College Language Association Journal (December 2002): 168–93.
Griffiths, Frederick. “Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and the Case of Angelo Herndon.” African American Review 35 (Winter 2001): 615–36.
Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996.
———, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Higashida, Cheryl. “Aunt Sue’s Children: Reviewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism.” American Literature 75, 2 (June 2003): 395–425.
Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study of Literature and Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.
———. New Essays on ‘Native Son.’ New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.
Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993.
Miller, James, ed. Approaches to Teaching Richard Wright’s Native Son. New York: Modern Language Association, 1997.
Mitchell, Hayley R., ed. Readings on ‘Native Son.’ San Diego: Green Haven Press, 2000. Rampersad, Arnold. “Too Honest for His Own Time,” The New York Times Book Review, December 29, 1991, 17–19.
Redding, Saunders. “Home Is Where the Heart Is.” The New Leader 44 (December 11, 1961): 24–25.
Reilly, John. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978.
Smethurst, James. “Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son.” African American Review 35 (Spring 2001): 29–40.
Smith, Virginia Whatley, ed. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.
Ward, Jerry W., Jr. “The Wright Critical Paradigm: Facing a Future.” Callaloo 9 (Summer 1985): 25–43.
Ward, Jerry W., Jr. and Robert J. Butler. The Richard Wright Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2008.
Wertham, Albert. “An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son.” Journal of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychotherapy 6 (Winter 1944): 111–15.
Wright, Julia. “Introduction to A Father’s Law.” In A Father’s Law. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
The major collection of Wright’s papers is in the Richard Wright Archive in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. A manuscript of Black Power is held at Northwestern University. Eighteen letters by Wright are collected at Kent State University. Many magazines and newspapers that include Wright’s work are in the Schomburg Collection of the New York Public Library, the American Library in Paris, and the Harvard University libraries.