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Books by Richard
Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works
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Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices
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Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd Today!
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Richard
N. Wright
(1908-1960)
Author of
Uncle Tom's Children &
Native Son
Richard Wright was a brilliant writer
whose collection of short stories (novellas),
Uncle Tom's Children, won a $500-prize competition in 1938. Native
Son, the March 1940 selection of the Book-of-the-Month club,
was his first full-length novel.
In 1935, Wright got on the Federal
Writers' Project in Chicago. By the time he had sold poetry,
articles and some stories to little magazines, and was working
on his first,
Uncle Tom's Children.
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He went to New York in 1937, lived from
hand to mouth for some months, then got on the Writers'
Project. he wrote the essay on Harlem in New York
Panorama. he also did some work on the Daily
Worker (he says he never got orders from Stalin to
cover anything) and became a contributing editor of the New
Masses.
His book of four long short stories,
Uncle Tom's Children, part of which had originally appeared in
in the New Caravan, was a success. The stories won high
critical praise; what one critic had to say of them is
characteristic: "Uncle Tom's Children has its full
share of violence and brutality; violent deaths occur in
three stories and the mob goes to work in all four.
Violence has long been an important element in fiction
about Negroes, just as it is in their life. But where
Julia Peterkin in her pastorals and Roark Bradford in
his levee farces show violence to be the reaction of
primitives unadjusted to modern civilization, Richard
Wright shows it as the way in which civilization keeps
the Negro in his place. And he knows what he is writing
about." In 1939 Wright got a Guggenheim
fellowship, which enabled him to quit the Project and complete
his novel, Native Son. the material for this, he says, was based
partly on boys he met in a Chicago rehabilitation school for
Negro "Dead End" kids, and partly on the Robert Nixon
case. Nixon was a young Negro who died in the electric chair in
Chicago in August 1938 for killing a white woman with a brick. |
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Uncle Tom's Children
Originally published in
1938 by Harper and Brothers as Uncle Tom's Children: Four
Novellas, the volume consisted of "Big Boy Leaves Home," "Down
by the Riverside," "Long Black Song," and "Fire and Cloud." In
1940, Harper reissued the volume as Uncle Tom's Children: Five
Long Stories, incorporating "Bright and Morning Star" as well as
placing "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" as the text's
introduction.
Reviewing the text for the
Saturday Review of Literature (2 April 1938), Zora Neale Hurston
wrote "This is a book about hatreds. Mr. Wright serves notice by
his title that he speaks of a people in revolt, and his stories
are so grim that the Dismal Swamp of race hatred must be where
they live. Not one act of understanding and sympathy comes to
pass in the entire work"[1].
Reviewing the text for the
Partisan Review (May 1938), James T. Farrell wrote "Especially
remarkable is the handling of dialogue. Richard Wright uses
simple speech as a means of carrying on his narrative, as a
medium for poetic and lyrical effects, and as an instrument of
characterization. Through the dialect of his people he is able
to generalize their feelings about life, their fate, the social
situation in which they live and suffer and are oppressed. Here
is a demonstration -- which many writers might study -- of the
possibilities of the vernacular"[2].
Hurston wasn't so excited
about Wright's dialogue, criticizing Wright's use of dialect:
"Since the author is himself a Negro, his dialect is a puzzling
thing. One wonders how he arrived at it. Certainly he does not
write by ear unless he is tone-deaf"[3].
"Big Boy Leaves Home"
presents a child whose innocence is lost violently through a
confrontation with the son of a white landowner. While Big Boy
is aware of the racist society in which he lives, his reactions
are more instinctive than reflective. In "Down by the
Riverside," the protagonist Mann finds himself drawn into
confrontations with the white community through circumstances
beyond his control: first the flood, then the need to transport
his wife, who is in labor, towards town in a boat stolen from a
white man. Mann's responses to these circumstances suggest his
resignation to fate, although he does consider and reject
alternatives that would possibly save him.
With "Long Black Song," the
characters begin to identify the systemic nature of racist
oppression. Silas, who owns his own land but whose wife Sarah
has been unfaithful with a white travelling salesman, confronts
and kills the salesman, then calmly awaits the white mob. As
Sarah looks on, Silas announces, "The white folks ain never
gimme a chance! They ain never give no black man a chance! There
ain nothin in yo whole life yuh kin keep from em! They take yo
lan! They take yo freedom! They take yo women! N then they take
yo life!" [4].
In "Fire and Cloud" and
"Bright and Morning Star," Wright turns to an examination of the
economic uses of racism, particularly the way in which skin
color divides the working class and reinforces the capitalist
power structure. In "Fire and Cloud," Reverend Taylor's
realization that his leadership position in the Black community
doesn't shield him from racist violence and in fact depends a
good deal on his leading his people toward decisions that
benefit the status quo leads him to reject the mayor's demand
that he tell his hungry congregation not to participate in a
communist led march. He tells his congregation, "All the time
they wuz hepin me, all the time they been givin me favors, they
wuz doin it sos they could tell me t tell yuh how t ack!" [5]
Taylor sides with the
communists' cause, although he doesn't identify with the
communists themselves. As his revelation comes to him, Taylor
exclaims to his son, "Gawds wid the people! N the peoples gotta
be real as Gawd t us! We cant hep ourselves er the people when
wes erlone...All the will, all the strength, all the power, all
the numbahs is in the people!" [6].
In "Bright and Morning
Star," Wright continues an examination of the competing roles of
religion and communism in his characters and their community.
Johnny-Boy's mother Sue must come to grips with a new vision:
"The wrongs and sufferings of black men had taken the place of
Him nailed to the Cross; the meager beginnings of the party had
become another resurrection" [7]. As in the other stories, Sue
is finally forced to act through the physical violence visited
upon her by the white community. In shooting the stoolpigeon
Booker, Sue knows she has given up her own life. Her final
sacrifice is not only a defense of her son, but also a defense
of the Communist Party, for whom Johnny-Boy works as an
organizer.
Wright's treatment of
communism in the African American community in these stories is
hardly simplistic. Taylor's understanding that his people's
interests and the communists' goals are in tandem arises through
his experiences in the food crisis. However, the text also
allows Taylor to remain ambiguously independent of the Communist
Party. Likewise
in "Bright and Morning
Star," the racial solidarity suggested or promised by communism
is shown to be easily undermined through infiltration. In other
words, although Johnny-Boy rejects the racial paradigm in favor
of an economic analysis ("Ah cant see white n Ah cant see
black...Ah sees rich men n Ah sees po men" [8].), he still must
function in a community that hasn't thoroughly rejected it.
1] Appiah, K.A., and Henry Louis Gates,
Jr., eds.
Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present (New
York: Amistad, 1993), 3.
[2] Appiah 5.
[3] Appiah 4.
[4] Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom's Children (New York:
HarperCollins, 1993), 152.
[5] Wright, 217.
[6] Wright, 210.
[7] Wright, 225.
[8] Wright, 234.
Source:
GWU
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Native Son is a powerful, intensely
gripping story of a Negro boy driven to crime by reason
of a Chicago tenement environment and the pressure of
racial injustice. The novel was thought to be the
most striking novel to appear after The Grapes of
Wrath. Critics have acclaimed Native Son as
the most honest and important work written about the
American Negro, daring because its author, himself a
Negro, has presented in frank terms the savage brutality
of a black boy "gone bad." Wright has a good
reportorial style: simple, direct, at times staccato, on
occasion rising to heights of poetic intensity.
Though compared to Dostoyevsky due to its study of
crime and punishment, the story of Native Son
rather parallels, in pattern and theme, Dreiser's An
American Tragedy. Dresier's white boy and Wright's
black boy are both social misfits; both are victims of
the adolescent lure of sex and money; both commit crime
not deliberately but accidentally; both are condemned to
the electric chair. And the conclusion is the same: that
environment was responsible for their crimes--though in
the case of Wright's character there is also the
frustrating, neurosis-producing effect of racial
suppression. Bigger Thomas, who is twenty years old,
lives with his mother, sister, and younger brother in
one rat-infested room, for which they pay $8, in
Chicago's South Side Black belt. |
He has been in a reform school; he and his gang
commit petty neighborhood thieving; he is surly, fearful, and a
bully. he and his friend Gus like to imagine what they'd do if
they were white.
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"If you wasn't black and if you had
some money and if they'd let you go to that aviation
school, you could fly a plane," Gus said. For a
moment Bigger contemplated; then both boys broke into
hard laughter. |
But Bigger gets a job as chauffeur to a millionaire
philanthropist, Dalton, who makes his money in Negro tenement
real estate. His daughter, Mary, is a radical; she asks Bigger
to drive her that evening to a meeting with her Communist
friend, Jan. When they try to treat him as an equal--shake hands
with him, make him eat with them--Bigger is puzzled, scared,
resentful.. They all have drinks; Mary, very intoxicated, is
brought, half-carried, to her room at two in the morning by
Bigger. Her mother who is blind comes into the bedroom and calls
to the daughter. Crazed by the fear that Mary will answer and
betray his presence, Bigger puts a pillow over the girl's face,
and without meaning to, smothers her.
Frantic then, he burns her body in the furnace hoping to
leave no trace of the crime, and tries to implicate Jan, the
Communist: dimly he knows that the Reds are also an object of
mob hatred. When the Negro mistress, Bessie, learns of this
crime, he kills her to protect himself and throws her body down
the air shaft of an old building. it is not long, however,
before the death of Mary Dalton is traced to him (to the
authorities, the Negro girl's death was negligible, as he knew
it would be) and Bigger is caught while trying to escape over
the tenement housetops.
The bloodshed, the horror, the tension--the swiftly paced
melodramatic sequence of events--are at this point over. the
latter part of the book is about Bigger's trial and defense: an
exposition of an individual tragedy that symbolizes the tragedy
of a race. it is Jan, the Communist, who calls on Bigger in his
cell (and this time Bigger knows him for a friend) and arranges
to have Max, a radical lawyer, defend him.
Max's plea for Bigger, which the author bases to some extent
on the arguments used by Clarence Darrow in the Loeb-Leopold
case, follows the social premise that the hate of the whites
toward Bigger is a subconscious feeling of guilt: by keeping him
within rigid and sordid limits, they themselves actually were
responsible for the murder of Mary Dalton. Bigger killed in
order to keep from being killed, i.e., to preserve his integrity
as a person, an individual. Max's plea becomes a defense of the
twelve million Negroes in America--a nation without social,
economic, or property rights.
Naturally, no plea can save Bigger. he is sentenced to die.
As he says: "Now I come to think of it, it seems like
something that just had to be." And Bigger, searching for
some meaning in his act, some self-justification, tells max:
"When a man kills, it's for something. . . I didn't know I
was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough
to kill for 'em."
And for the first time in his life, because he had done
something the white world really noticed, he felt a sense of
freedom and power. he had always wanted, in his confused groping
way, to belong, to feel an equality with other men. in prison he
at last comes to know that Max, and Jan, accept him on
man-to-man terms. And he can accept them. Bigger's last words,
implicit with his self-realization and self-redemption, are:
"Tell Mister. . . Tell Jan hello."
Source: Current Biography (1940)
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The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers . It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
is a marvelous resource! It's not like any
encyclopedia I've seen before. Already, I have spent hours reading
through the various entries. So much is there: people, themes,
issues, events, bibliographies, etc., related to Wright. Yours is a
monumental contribution! The more I read Wright (and about him), the
more I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his work and its impact
on the worlds of literature, philosophy, politics, sociology,
history, psychology, etc. He was formidable!
Floyd W. Hayes
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American Creation
Triumphs and Tragedies in the Founding
of the Republic
By Joseph J. Ellis
This subtle,
brilliant examination of the period
between the War of Independence and the
Louisiana Purchase puts Pulitzer-winner
Ellis (Founding
Brothers)
among the finest of America's narrative
historians. Six stories, each centering
on a significant creative achievement or
failure, combine to portray often flawed
men and their efforts to lay the
republic's foundation. Set against the
extraordinary establishment of the most
liberal nation-state in the history of
Western Civilization... in the most
extensive and richly endowed plot of
ground on the planet are the terrible
costs of victory, including the
perpetuation of slavery and the cruel
oppression of Native Americans. Ellis
blames the founders' failures on their
decision to opt for an evolutionary
revolution, not a risky severance with
tradition (as would happen, murderously,
in France, which necessitated
compromises, like retaining slavery).
Despite the injustices and brutalities
that resulted, Ellis argues, this
deferral strategy was a profound insight
rooted in a realistic appraisal of how
enduring social change best happens.
Ellis's lucid, illuminating and ironic
prose will make this a holiday season
hit.—
Publishers Weekly /
American Creation (Joseph Ellis
interview) |
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The Last Holiday: A Memoir
By Gil Scott Heron
Shortly after we republished The Vulture and The Nigger Factory, Gil started to tell me about The Last Holiday, an account he was writing of a multi-city tour that he ended up doing with Stevie Wonder in late 1980 and early 1981. Originally Bob Marley was meant to be playing the tour that Stevie Wonder had conceived as a way of trying to force legislation to make Martin Luther King's birthday a national holiday. At the time, Marley was dying of cancer, so Gil was asked to do the first six dates. He ended up doing all 41. And Dr King's birthday ended up becoming a national holiday ("The Last Holiday because America can't afford to have another national holiday"), but Gil always felt that Stevie never got the recognition he deserved and that his story needed to be told. The first chapters of this book were given to me in New York when Gil was living in the Chelsea Hotel. Among the pages was a chapter called Deadline that recounts the night they played Oakland, California, 8 December; it was also the night that John Lennon was murdered. Gil uses Lennon's violent end as a brilliant parallel to Dr King's assassination and as a biting commentary on the constraints that sometimes lead to newspapers getting things wrong. —Jamie Byng, Guardian / Gil_reads_"Deadline" (audio) |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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