Richard Wright

Wright, Richard - 1908–60, American author. An African American born on a Mississippi plantation, Wright struggled through a difficult childhood and worked to educate himself. He moved to Chicago in 1927 and in the 1930s joined the city's Federal Writers' Project and wrote Uncle Tom's Children (1938), a collection of four novellas dealing with Southern racial problems. His novel Native Read More...

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Richard Wright

1 .

Student Companion to Richard Wright
by Robert Felgar. 138 pgs.

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Born in rural Mississippi, the grandson of slaves, Richard Wright overcame every social obstacle, including poverty, racism, and limited education to achieve literary recognition as the creator of some of America's most powerful Black literature. Written with unprecedented candor, Wright's works changed the cultural landscape by challenging old stereotypes and myths about race. Wright scholar Robert Felgar has written a critical volume to help students appreciate the literary significance of such groundbreaking works as Native Son and the autobiographical Black Boy. This study serves students of both literature and social history as it explores the themes of racism and all types of institutionalized oppression that Wright exposed in his provocative writing. Felgar approaches each of Wright's major works in chronological order, offering insightful literary analysis of Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider, as well as Wright's two works published posthumously, Eight Men, a collection of stories, and Lawd Today! The original, censored works are discussed and compared with the more recently republished unexpurgated versions.

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Contents

Series Foreword

1: The Life of Richard Wright

2: Richard Wright's Literary Heritage

3: Uncle Tom's Children (1938, 1940)

4: Native Son (1940, 1991)

5: Black Boy (1945, 1991)

6: The Outsider (1953)

7: Eight Men (1961)

8: Lawd Today! (1963, 1991)

Bibliography

Index

About the Author
2 .

Understanding Richard Wright's Black Boy: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and Historical Documents
by Robert Felgar, Claudia Durst Johnson. 172 pgs.

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In Black Boy, Richard Wright triumphs over an ugly, racist world by fashioning an inspiring, powerful, beautiful, and fictionalized autobiography. To help students understand and appreciate his story in the cultural, political, racial, social, and literary contexts of its time, this casebook provides a rich source of primary historical documents, collateral readings, and commentary. The selection of unique documents is designed to place in sharp relief the pervasive issue of racism in American society. Documents include excerpts from other autobiographies and a novel, legal documents, speeches, an interview, an anthropological study, magazine and newspaper articles, and contemporary editorials. Most of the documents are available in no other printed form.

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Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Literary Analysis: Dominant Themes and Structure of Black Boy

Suggested Readings

2: The Autobiographical Tradition

Suggested Readings

3: The American Dream of Success

Suggested Readings

4: The Dream Deferred

Suggested Readings

5: Race and Racism, Then and Now

Suggested Readings

Index

About the Author
3 .

Richard Wright's Native Son (literary criticism)
by Harold Bloom. 167 pgs.

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The still controversial first novel by Richard Wright is examined in its entirety as part of this series. "School Library Journal" says ". . . these titles fill a void: literary criticism for high school students".

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Modern Critical Interpretations

Native Son

Contents

Editor's Note

Introduction

The Bad Nigger

Bigger's Infernal Assumption

What Had Made Him and What He Meant: The Politics of Wholeness in "How 'Bigger' Was Born"

The Beginnings of Self-Realization

The Tragic Hero

The Dissociated Sensibility of Bigger Thomas

Alienation and Creativity in Native Son

The Re(A)D and the Black

Composing Bigger: Wright and the Making of Native Son

On Reading Native Son

Chronology

Contributors

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index
4 .

Richard Wright's Travel Writings: New Reflections
by Virginia Whatley Smith. 237 pgs.

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Attracted to remote lands by his interest in the postcolonial struggle, Richard Wright (1908-1960) became one of the few African Americans of his time to engage in travel writing. He went to emerging nations not as a sightseer but as a student of their cultures, learning the politics and the processes of social transformation.
When Wright fled from the United States in 1946 to live as an expatriate in Paris, he was exposed to intellectual thoughts and challenges that transcended his social and political education in America. Three events broadened his world view -- his introduction to French existentialism, the rise of the Pan-Africanist movement to decolonize Africa, and Indonesia's declaration of independence from colonial rule in 1945. During the 1950s as he traveled to emerging nations his encounters produced four travel narratives -- Black Power (1953), The Color Curtain (1956), Pagan Spain (1956), and White Man, Listen! (1957). Upon his death in 1960, he left behind an unfinished book on French West,Africa, which exists only in notes, outlines, and a draft.
Written by multinational scholars, this collection of essays exploring Wright's travel writings shows how in his hands the genre of travel writing resisted, adapted, or modified the forms and formats practiced by white authors. Enhanced by nine photographs taken by Wright during his travels, the essays focus on each of Wright's four separate narratives as well as upon his unfinished book and reveal how Wright drew on such non-Western influences as the African American slave narrative and Asian literature of protest and resistance. The essays critique Wright's representation of customs and people and employ a broad range ofinterpretive modes, including the theories of formalism, feminism, and postmodernism, among others.
Wright's travel books are proved here to be innovative narratives that laid down the roots of such later genres as postcol

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Contents

Introduction

Essays on Black Power (1954)

Richard Wright's Black Power: Colonial Politics and the Travel Narrative

Gazing Through the Screen: Richard Wright's Africa

“no Street Numbers in Accra”: Richard Wright's African Cities

Essays on the Color Curtain (1956)

The Color Curtain: Richard Wright's Journey into Asia

Richard Wright's Passage to Indonesia: The Travel Writer/Narrator as Participant/Observer of Anti-Colonial Imperatives in the Color Curtain

Essays on Pagan Spain (1957)

Richard Wright as Traveler/Ethnographer: The Conundrums of Pagan Spain

Wright, Hemingway, and the Bullfight: An Aficionado's View

The Good Women, Bad Women, Prostitutes and Slaves of Pagan Spain: Richard Wright's Look Beyond the Phallocentric Self

Essay on “french West Africa” (C. 1959)

“french West Africa”: Behind the Scenes with Richard Wright, the Travel Writer

Notes

Works Cited

Contributors

Index
5 .

America's 93 Greatest Living Authors Present This Is My Best: Over 150 Self-Chosen and Complete Masterpieces, Together with Their Reasons for Their Selections ("Richard Wright: Why He Selected 'How "Bigger" Was Born'" begins on p. 448)
by Whit W. Burnett. 1188 pgs.

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Foreword

I the Man's Story

Theodore Dreiser Why He Selected the Hand

Ernest Hemingway Why He Selected the Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber

John Steinbeck the Leader of the People

Stephen Leacock Why He Selected My Remarkable Uncle

Conrad Aiken Why He Selected Strange Moonlight

Morley Callaghan Why He Selected Two Fishermen

Ii the American Dream

Archibald Macleish Why He Selected America Was Promises

Willa Cather Neighbour Rosicky

Sinclair Lewis Dinner with the Babbitts

James Truslow Adams Why He Selected the American Dream

Mark Van Doren Why He Selected America's Mythology

Dorothy Parker Why She Selected the Standard of Living

Wolcott Gibbs Why He Selected the Customer is Always Wrong

Iii A Goodly Heritage

EnÉt Why He Selected the Devil and Daniel Webster

Van Wyck Brooks Why He Selected Hawthorne in Salem

Mary Ellen Chase Why She Selected the Lord's Day in the Nineties

Robert Frost Why He Selected Sixteen Poems

Robert P. Tristram Coffin Why He Selected Maine is a Perpetual Poem

Dorothy Canfield Fisher Why She Selected the Night on the Cobble

Edmund Wilson Why He Selected the Old Stone House

Erskine Caldwell Why He Selected Country Full of Swedes

Henry Seidel Canby Why He Selected Home in the Nineties

John P. Marquand Why He Selected Last Days of a Bostonian

Ellen Glasgow Why She Selected the Deep Past

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings Why She Selected Hyacinth Drift

Jesse Stuart Why He Selected Another April

Conrad Richter Why He Selected Lutie

William Allen White Why He Mary White

Iv the Jungle

James T. Farrell Why He Selected Studs

Richard Wright Why He Selected How "Bigger" Was Born

Elmer Rice Why He Selected the Adding Machine

E B. White Why He Selected Quo Vadimus?

Louis Adamic Why He Selected Girl on the Road

Langston Hughes Why He Selected Poems of American Negro Life

Maxwell Anderson Mio and Miriamne

William Faulkner That Evening Sun Go Down

Katherine Anne Porter Why She Selected Flowering Judas

John Dos Passos Why He Selected Escape to the Proletariat

Frank Sullivan Why He Selected the Jukes Family

Booth Tarkington Why He Selected Bridewater's Half Dollar

V the Dust Which Is God

Edna St. Vincent Millay Fifteen Sonnets

William Rose BenÉt Why He Selected from the Dust Which is God

Louis Untermeyer Why He Selected Three Poems

Christopher Morley Why He Selected a Song for Eros

(james) Branch Cabell Why He Selected Dedications in Acrostics

Robinson Jeffers Why He Selected Tamar Dancing

William Carlos Williams Why He Selected Some Flower Studies

Marianne Moore Why She Selected What Are Years?

Muriel Rukeyser Why She Selected Song from "Mediterranean"

H. D. Why She Selected the Islands

Wallace Stevens Why He Selected Domination of Black

Vi the Masters

Agnes Repplier Why Selected Horace

Edgar Lee Masters Why He Selected To-Morrow is My Birthday

Carl Van Doren Why He Selected Swift and Vanessa

Hendrik Willem Van Loon Why He Selected Beethoven

Joseph Wood Krutch Why He Selected the Second Part of "Don Quixote"

Vii the Drama

George Jean Nathan Why He Selected Aesthetic Jurisprudence

Eugene O'Neill Why He Selected the Great God Brown

Robert E. Sherwood Why He Selected the Election of Lincoln

Stark Young Why He Selected Mei Lan-Fang

Thornton Wilder Why He Selected the Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden

William Saroyan Why He Selected A Preface

Clifford Odets Why He Selected Rocket to the Moon

E. E. Cummings Why He Selected Speech from a Play

Viii Kitchen Bouquet

Irvin S. Cobb Why He Selected "Speaking of Operations--"

Cornelia Otis Skinner Why She Selected the Body Beautiful

Robert Benchley Why He Selected the Treasurer's Report

Ogden Nash Why He Selected Two and One Are a Problem

S. J. Perelman Why He Selected Kitchen Bouquet

James Thurber Why He Selected the Night the Ghost Got In

Ludwig Bemelmans Why He Selected Sacre Du Printemps

Ix They Weren't Going to Die

Irwin Edman Why He Selected M. Platon

Pierre Van Paassen Why He Selected the Street of Our Lady

Louis Bromfield Why He Selected the Rains Came

Pearl Buck Why She Selected the Old Demon

John Gunther Why He Selected the Outbreak of International Gangsterism

Vincent Sheean Why He Selected the Thirteen Bus

X the Realm of Being

Biographies and Bibliographies

Acknowledgments

Index by Authors

Index by Titles
6 .

The Failure of Folklore in Richard Wright's Black Boy, in Journal of American Folklore
by Jay Mechling. 20 pgs.

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7 .

A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics ("Black Boys and Native Sons" begins on p. 98)
by Irving Howe. 310 pgs.

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Contents

Introduction

The Hero and History

Contours of American Fiction

The Quest for Moral Style

Mass Society and Post-Modern Fiction

Black Boys and Native Sons

A Quest for Peril Norman: Mailer

Three American Poets

Robert Frost: a Momentary Stay

Wallace Stevens: Another Way Of Looking at the Blackbird

Some European Moderns

CÉline: the Sod Beneath the Skin

Sholom Aleichem: Voice of Our Past

The Fiction of Anti-Utopia

Politics and Culture

This Age of Conformity

A Minds Turnings

God, Man and Stalin

Edmund Wilson and the Sea Slugs
8 .

The Critical Response to Richard Wright
by Robert J. Butler. 199 pgs.

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Richard Wright is widely recognized as one of the most important African-American writers and as a significant 20th-century author. With the publication of Native Son in 1940, Wright established his enduring reputation. This volume is a survey of critical responses to Richard Wright from Native Son to the present day. Selections range from seminal works by Blyden Jackson, James Baldwin, and Keneth Kinnamon to more recent works by a new generation of Wright scholars.

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Title Page

Copyright Acknowledgments

Contents

Series Foreword

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

Biographical Overview

Richard Wright: Black Boy from America's Black Belt and Urban Ghettos

Native Son: The Personal,: Social, and Political Background

Notes

Native Son (1940)

Review of Native Son (Canby)

Review of Native Son (Poore)

Uneven Effect

A Powerful Novel about a Boy from Chicago's Black Belt

Review of Native Son (Sillen)

Wright's Invisible Native Son

Richard Wright's Women Characters and Inequality

Notes

Wright's Native Son and Two Novels by Zola: A Comparative Study

Black Boy (1945)

Review of Black Boy

Black Hunger

Richard Wright Looks Back

Richard Wright Adds a Chapter to Our Bitter Chronicle

Creation of the Self in Richard Wright's Black Boy

Notes

Sociology of an Existence: Richard Wright and the Chicago School

Notes

Introduction to the Harperperennial Edition of Black Boy (American Hunger)

The Outsider (1953)

Review of the Outsider (Prescott)

Review of the Outsider (Bontemps)

Review of the Outsider (Hansberry)

Richard Wright and the French Existentialists

Notes

Richard Wright's the Outsider: Existentialist Exemplar or Critique?

Notes

Eight Men (1961)

Lives of More Than Quiet Desperation

Review of Eight Men

Richard Wright: A Word of Farewell

The Paradoxical Structure of Richard Wright's "The Man Who Lived Underground"

Notes

Works Cited

Thematic and Formal Unity in Richard Wright's Eight Men

Notes

Richard Wright Today

Too Honest for His Own Time

The Problematic Texts of Richard Wright

Notes

The Library of America Edition of Native Son

The Library of America Edition of the Outsider

Notes

Authority, Gender, and Fiction

The Invisible Woman in Wright's Rite of Passage

Works Cited

Selected Bibliography

Index

About the Editor
9 .

The World of Richard Wright
by Michel Fabre. 268 pgs.

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Wide-ranging essays in which Wright's biographer probes the career, ideology, complex life, & achievements of America's premier black writer. "A major contribution to Wright studies"--Keneth Kinnamon. "Full of insights into cultural history & radical politics, race relations, & literary connections...sets a high standard for scholarship to come"--Werner Sollors.

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Contents

Introduction

Wright's First Hundred Books

Black Cat and White Cat: Wright's Gothic and the Influence of Poe

From Revolutionary Poetry to Haiku

Beyond Naturalism?

Wright's South

From Tabloid to Myth: "The Man Who Lived Underground"

"The Man Who Killed a Shadow": a Study in Compulsion

Fantasies and Style in Wright's Fiction

Wright's Image of France

Wright and the French Existentialists

Wright's Exile

Wright, Negritude, and African Writing

Appendixes

Index
10 .

The Art of Richard Wright
by Edward Margolies. 184 pgs.

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Preface

Acknowledgments

Contents

1: Life and Works

2: The Fractured Personality Black Boy; 12 Million Black Voices

3: The Fractured Personality Black Power; Pagan Spain

4: The Shattered Civilization the Color Curtain; White Man, Listen!

5: The Short Stories Uncle Tom's Children; Eight Men

6: Foreshadowings: Lawd Today

7: Revolution: Native Son

8: The Existential Freud the Outsider; Savage Holiday

9: Social Freudianism the Long Dream

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index
11 .

Voice of a Native Son: The Poetics of Richard Wright
by Eugene E. Miller. 272 pgs.

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Wright's works most often have been judged by his own ideological polemics, seldom by the terms of art. This, however, is a study of Wright's poetics, rich in a black aesthetic force that was the elemental voice in his writings.

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1: Political Forms

2: Folkloric Transformulations

3: Modern Forms: Uses of Stein and Surrealism

4: Undergound" Formulations"

5: Archetypal Forms

6: Free Will: Uses of Twain

7: Orientation: Uses of Kenneth Burke

8: The Cosmos: Uses of Orgone and Haiku

Works Cited

Index
12 .

Richard Wright: Books and Writers
by Michel Fabre. 308 pgs.

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A bibliography of Wright's library, this will serve as the key to understanding the development, the philosophies, & the aesthetics of this greatest of black American writers.

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Contents

Introduction

A

B

C

D

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

U

V

W

Y

Z

Appendixes

Index
13 .

Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Poetics and Politics of Modernism
by Gertrude Stein, Richard Wright, M. Lynn Weiss. 154 pgs.

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Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright began their careers as marginals within marginalized groups, and their desire to live peacefully in unorthodox marriages led them away from America and into permanent exile in France. Still, the obvious differences between them - in class, ethnic and racial origins, and in artistic expression - beg the question: What was there to talk about? This question opens a window onto each writer's meditations on the influence of racial, ethnic, and national origins on the formation of identity in a modern and post-modern world.

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

1: Two Lives

2: Innocents Abroad: Gertrude Stein's Paris France and Richard Wright's Pagan Spain

3: American Odyssey

4: Lecture Notes

Conclusion

Works Cited

Index
14 .

The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin
by Jean-Franois Gounard, Joseph J. Rodgers Jr., Jean F. Beranger. 303 pgs.

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Both writers reflect the profound desire of black Americans to be recognized as first-class citizens: Wright aroused white America's conscience, Baldwin made that conscience experience guilt.

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Copyright Acknowledgments

Contents

Foreword

Foreword to the English Edition

Introduction

Notes

I: Richard Wright

1: The Life of Richard Nathaniel Wright (1908-1960)

2: Conditions in the South

3: Conditions in the North

4: Flight

5: Conclusion

II: James Baldwin

6: The Life of James Arthur Baldwin: The Formative Years

7: Conditions

8: New Behavior

9: Demands

10: Conclusion

General

Notes

Bibliography

Index of Authors and Works Cited
15 .

The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Chap. 5 "Richard Wright and the Triumph of Naturalism")
by Bernard W. Bell. 426 pgs.

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Introduction

1: The Roots of the Early Afro-American Novel

2: The Early Afro-American Novel: Historical Romance, Social Realism and Beyond

3: The Pre-World War I Novels of the Old Guard: Romance, Realism, and Naturalism

4: The Harlem Renaissance and the Search for New Modes of Narrative

5: Richard Wright and the Triumph of Naturalism

6: Myth, Legend, and Ritual in the Novel of the Fifties

7: The Contemporary Afro-American Novel, 1: Neorealism

8: The Contemporary Afro-American Novel, 2: Modernism and Postmodernism

Conclusion

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index
16 .

American Culture in Europe: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Chap. 7 "Choosing Exile: Richard Wright, the Existentialists, and Cultural Exchange")
by Mike-Frank G. Epitropoulos, Victor Roudometof. 212 pgs.

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These essays examine the proliferation of American culture in Europe and focus on the degree and manner in which American cultural influences are spread. Topics range from German advertising in the 1980s to US influence in post-Soviet Russia to Greek youth's fascination with American commercial culture.

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Contents

Preface

Introduction: America and Europe, Fragile Objects of Discourse

References

1: The U.S. Center of World Science and Emulating Centers: Japan and Western Europe

Note

References

2: Peripheries in World Science: Latin America and Eastern Europe

References

Note

3: The Specter of Amerikanisierung, 840-1990

Notes

References

4: The Colonization of the Russian Political and Legal System

Notes

5: Youth Culture and Lifestyle in Modern Greece

References

Notes

6: African-American Images in German Advertising, 1987-1992: The Uses of Imagined Diversity

Notes

References

7: Choosing Exile: Richard Wright, the Existentialists, and Cultural Exchange

Notes

References

8: The Space Between the Boundaries: Globalization and Americanization

Notes

References

Index

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