The Richard Wright Encyclopedia 9780313355196, 9780313312397

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The Richard Wright Encyclopedia

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THE RICHARD WRIGHT ENCYCLOPEDIA Edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. and Robert J. Butler

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut

•

London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Richard Wright encyclopedia / edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. and Robert J. Butler p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-313-31239-7 (alk. paper) 1. Wright, Richard, 1908–1960—Encyclopedias. 2. Novelists, American—20th century—Biography— Encyclopedias. 3. African Americans in literature—Encyclopedias. I. Ward, Jerry Washington. II. Butler, Robert J., 1942– PS3545.R815Z8145 2008 813’.52—dc22 2008010178 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright  2008 by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. and Robert J. Butler All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2008010178 ISBN: 978–0–313–31239–7 First published in 2008 Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.greenwood.com Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Keneth Kinnamon, an exemplary Richard Wright scholar

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Contents

List of Entries

ix

Guide to Related Topics

xv

Preface

xxi

Acknowledgments Introduction: Richard Wright (1908–1960) A–Z Entries

xxiii 1 13

Selected Bibliography

431

Index

437

About the Editors and Contributors

445

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List of Entries Abrahams, Peter Africa ‘‘Ah Feels It in Mah Bones’’ Ailly, France Alger, Horatio Algren, Nelson ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ American Hunger American Mercury Anderson, Lewis Anderson, Sherwood Angelo Herndon Case Anvil Aragon, Louis Argentina Arkansas Aswell, Edward Atlantic Monthly Attaway, William ‘‘Attributes of Life’’ ‘‘Avant Garde Writing’’ Baldwin, James Beale Street Beauvoir, Simone de Belgium Berry, Abner ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears’’ ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ Bilbo, Theodore Gilman Black Boy

‘‘Black Hope’’ Black Marxism Black Metropolis Black Power Blackburn, D. C. ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ blues (music) Bokanowski, He´le`ne Bontemps, Arna A Book of Prefaces (H. L. Mencken) Book-of-the-Month Club Booker, Perry Brewer, Clinton ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ Brooklyn Brooks, Gwendolyn Browder, Earl Brown, Joe Brown, Lloyd Burns, Ben Busia, Kofi Abrefa Cafe´ Tournon Camus, Albert Canada Cayton, Horace Ce´saire, Aime´ ‘‘Cesspool’’ Challenge Chapman, Abraham Chenal, Pierre Chicago ix

List of Entries Chicago Post Office Chicago Renaissance Chicago School of Sociology ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ Civil Rights Movement Cold War The Color Curtain Communism. See Marxism; Socialism Conrad, Joseph Conroy, Jack Crane, Stephen Crossman, Richard Cullen, Countee ‘‘Daddy Goodness’’ Daily Worker Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (Frederic Wertham) Darrow, Clarence Davis, Benjamin, Jr. Davis, Frank Marshall Davis, George detective fiction Deux Magots dime novels Diop, Alioune Dodson, Owen Dostoevsky, Fyodor ‘‘Double Victory’’ ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ the dozens Drake, St. Clair Dreiser, Theodore Du Bois, W. E. B. Eight Men Elaine, Arkansas Eliot, T. S. Ellison, Ralph Waldo England ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ existentialism Fanon, Frantz Farish, Minnie Farrell, James Thomas A Father’s Law Faulkner, William ‘‘FB Eye Blues’’ F.B.I. Federal Theatre Project (FTP)

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Federal Writers Project (FWP) film noir ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ First American Writers Congress First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists Conference Fischer, John Fisher, Dorothy Canfield Flynn’s Weekly Detective Ford, James W. ‘‘Foreword’’ to Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver Fourth American Writers Congress France Franco-American Fellowship Frazier, E. Franklin Freud, Sigmund Garvey, Marcus Ghana Gibson, Richard Gide, Andre´ Gold, Michael Gorky, Maxim the gothic (literary style) Gourfain, Joyce The Great Depression The Great Migration Green, Paul Greenwich Village Greenwood, Mississippi Haiku Hammond, John Harlem Harper’s Magazine Harrington, Ollie ‘‘Hearst Headline Blues’’ Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin Hemingway, Ernest Hill, Herbert Himes, Chester Bomar Hoskins, Silas House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Houseman, John ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ Howe Institute Howe, Irving Hughes, Langston

List of Entries Hurston, Zora Neale ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan’’ ‘‘I Choose Exile’’ ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ Illinois Writers Project Indonesia International Literature ‘‘Introduction,’’ Black Metropolis (St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton) ‘‘Introduction,’’ In The Castle of My Skin (George Lamming) ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ ‘‘The Jackal’’ Jackson, Mississippi James, C. L. R. James, Henry Japan Jim Hill Primary School John Reed Club Johnson, Fenton Jordan, Bill Jordan, Dick Joyce, James Kierkegaard, Soren ‘‘King Joe’’ King, Martin Luther, Jr. kitchenettes Koestler, Arthur Lafargue Clinic Lamming, George Law, Oliver Lawd Today! League of Struggle for Negro Rights Leaner, Arthur Lee, Canada Left Front Leopold and Loeb LeSueur, Meridel Levi, Carlo Le´vi-Strauss, Claude Lewis, Sinclair Library of America Lipton, Lawrence ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States’’ Little Rock, Arkansas Locke, Alain ‘‘Long Black Song’’ The Long Dream

Louis, Joe lynching Malraux, Andre´ ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ Mannoni, Octave March on Washington Marxism McCathyism McCullers, Carson McGee, Willie Meadman, Dhimah Rose Memphis, Tennessee Mencken, H. L. Michael Reese Hospital Minus, Marian ‘‘The Miracle of Nationalism in the African Gold Coast’’ Mississippi River flood of 1927 Moscow show trials Motley, Willard Moulin d’Ande´, France Myrdal, Gunnar Natchez, Mississippi National Negro Congress Native Son Native Son (film versions) Native Son (the plays) naturalism Ne´gritude Nehru, Jawaharlal New Anvil New Caravan New Challenge New Masses New York Newton, Herbert Newton, Jane Nietzsche, Friedrich Nixon, Robert Nkrumah, Kwame Norman, Dorothy ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ ‘‘Note on Jim Crow Blues’’ Nutt, Howard ‘‘Obsession’’ ‘‘Old Habit and New Love’’ Oliver, Paul The Outsider Padmore, Dorothy xi

List of Entries Padmore, George Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past Pan-Africanism Paris, France Park, Robert Partisan Review Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery ‘‘Personalism’’ Peterson, William photography of Richard Wright Plessy v Ferguson PM Poe, Edgar Allan poetry of Richard Wright Poindexter, David Popular Front Prejudices by H. L. Mencken Pre´sence Africaine ‘‘Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People’’ Publishing History of Richard Wright, 1938–2008 race riots Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire ‘‘Red Clay Blues’’ ‘‘Red Leaves of Books’’ ‘‘Red Love Note’’ Reddick, Lawrence ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ Reynolds, Paul, Jr. Rhythm Club fire of 1940 ‘‘Rise and Live’’ Rite of Passage Robeson, Paul Robinson, Ray Roosevelt, Eleanor Rosskam, Edwin Sablonie`re, Margrit de ‘‘Sacrifice’’ Sandburg, Carl Sartre, Jean-Paul Savage Holiday Schopenhauer, Arthur Schwartzman, Victor Scottsboro Trial Seaver, Edwin Second American Writers Congress

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Segregation Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar Settlement House (Memphis) Seventh Day Adventism ‘‘Shame of Chicago’’ Sharecropping Sillen, Samuel Silone, Ignazio Smith Robertson Junior High School Smith, William Gardner Socialism The South of Richard Wright Spain Spingarn Medal ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise’’ Stalinism Stein, Gertrude Steinbeck, John Stock Market Crash of 1929 Story Magazine Strachey, John ‘‘Strength’’ Strong, Anna Louise ‘‘Superstition’’ ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn’’ Targ, William Third American Writers Congress Till, Emmett Town Meeting of the Air ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization’’ ‘‘Transcontinental’’ Trotsky, Leon 12 Million Black Voices Twice a Year Uncle Tom’s Children Universal Negro Improvement Association University of Chicago Van Vechten, Carl Vardaman, James K. ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’ Walker, Margaret Ward, Essie Lee Ward, Theodore ‘‘We of the Streets’’ Webb, Constance Welles, Orson Wertham, Frederic West, Dorothy West Helena, Arkansas

List of Entries ‘‘What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You’’ White Man, Listen! Whitman, Walt Wilson, Addie (Aunt) Wilson, Clark (Uncle) Wilson, Jody (Aunt) Wilson, Maggie (Aunt) Wilson, Margaret Bolden (Grandmother) Wilson, Richard (Grandfather) Wilson, Thomas Booker (Uncle) Wirth, Louis Wirth, Mary Wittenber, Jan

women in Richard Wright’s fiction Works Progress Administration (WPA) World War II Wright, Ella (Mother) Wright, Ellen (Wife) Wright, Julia (Daughter) Wright, Leon Alan (Brother) Wright, Nathan (Father) Wright, Nathanial (Grandfather) Wright, Rachel (Daughter) The Wright School Zero Zola, Emile

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Guide to Related Topics

To facilitate access to specialized information, the entries for this encyclopedia have been arranged in topical categories. The index should be consulted for more detailed access to items. Agents, Collaborators, Editors, Publishers Aswell, Edward Book-of-the-Month Club Burns, Ben Cayton, Horace Chenal, Pierre Green, Paul Houseman, John Hughes, Langston Library of America Reynold, Paul Rosskam, Edwin Sablonie`re, Margrit de Targ, William Welles, Orson Awards Spingarn Medal Conferences, Cultural and Political Events, Movements, Organizations Angelo Herndon Case Black Marxism Chicago Renaissance Chicago School of Sociology Civil Rights Movement Cold War

Double Victory Existentialism F.B.I. Federal Theatre Project Federal Writers Project First American Writers Congress First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists Conference Fourth American Writers Congress Franco-American Fellowship The Great Depression The Great Migration House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Illinois Writers Project John Reed Club League for Struggle for Negro Rights lynching March on Washington Marxism Moscow Show Trials National Negro Congress Ne´gritude Pan-Africanism Plessy v Ferguson Popular Front race riots xv

Guide to Related Topics Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire Scottsboro Trial Second American Writers Congress Segregation Seventh Day Adventism Socialism Stalinism Stock Market Crash of 1929 Third American Writers Congress Town Meeting of the Air Universal Negro Improvement Association Works Progress Administration (WPA) World War II Culture, African American blues (music) the dozens film noir The Great Migration kitchenettes Events Mississippi River flood of 1927 Rhythm Club fire of 1940 Family Members Wilson, Addie (Aunt) Wilson, Clark (Uncle) Wilson, Jody (Aunt) Wilson, Maggie (Aunt) Wilson, Margaret Bolden (Grandmother) Wilson, Richard (Grandfather) Wilson, Thomas Booker (Uncle) Wright, Ella (Mother) Wright, Ellen (Wife) Wright, Julia (Daughter) Wright, Leon Alan (Brother) Wright, Nathan (Father) Wright, Nathanial (Grandfather) Wright, Rachel (Daughter) Film and Photography film noir Native Son (film versions) photography of Richard Wright Literature and Genres the gothic (literary style) xvi

naturalism poetry of Richard Wright the South of Richard Wright women in Richard Wright’s fiction the Wright School Magazines and Newspapers American Mercury Anvil Atlantic Monthly Challenge Daily Worker Flynn’s Weekly Detective Harper’s Magazine International Literature Left Front New Anvil New Challenge New Masses PM Partisan Review Pre´sence Africaine Story Magazine Twice A Year Zero People Anderson, Lewis Berry, Abner Bilbo, Theodore Gilman Blackburn, D. C. Bokanowski, He´le`ne Booker, Perry Brewer, Clinton Browder, Earl Brown, Joe Chapman, Abraham Darrow, Clarence Davis, Benjamin Davis, George Diop, Alioune Farish, Minnie Fischer, John Garvey, Marcus Gourfain, Joyce Hill, Herbert Jordan, Bill Jordan, Dick King, Martin Luther, Jr.

Guide to Related Topics Law, Oliver Leaner, Arthur Lee, Canada Louis, Joe McGee, Willie Meadman, Dhimah Rose Minus, Marian Nehru, Jawaharlal Newton, Herbert Newton, Jane Nixon, Robert Nkrumah, Kwame Padmore, Dorothy Peterson, William Poindexter, David Robinson, Ray Roosevelt, Eleanor Schwartzman, Victor Seaver, Edwin Sillen, Samuel Strong, Anna Louise Till, Emmett Trotsky, Leon Vardaman, James K. Ward, Essie Lee Wirth, Mary Wittenber, Jan Places Africa Ailly, France Argentina Beale Street Belgium Brooklyn Cafe´ Tournon Canada Chicago Chicago Post Office Deux Magots Elaine, Arkansas England France Ghana Greenwich Village Greenwood, Mississippi Harlem Howe Institute Indonesia

Jackson, Mississippi Japan Jim Hill Primary School Lafargue Clinic Little Rock, Arkansas Memphis, Tennessee Michael Reese Hospital Moulin d’Ande´ Natchez, Mississippi New York Paris Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery Settlement House (Memphis) Smith Robertson Junior High School the South of Richard Wright University of Chicago West Helena, Arkansas Works by Richard Wright Publishing History of Richard Wright, 1938–2008 Drama and Film Daddy Goodness Native Son (film versions) Native Son (the plays) Essays ‘‘Attributes of Life’’ ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ ‘‘I Choose Exile’’ ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States’’ ‘‘The Miracle of Nationalism in the African Gold Coast’’ ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ ‘‘Personalism’’ ‘‘Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People’’ ‘‘Shame of Chicago’’ ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization’’ ‘‘What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You’’ Manuscripts ‘‘Black Hope’’ xvii

Guide to Related Topics ‘‘Cesspool’’ ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ ‘‘The Jackal’’ ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn’’ Nonfiction Black Power The Color Curtain Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past White Man, Listen!

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Short Fiction ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ ‘‘Long Black Song’’ ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ ‘‘Superstition’’ ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’

Autobiography, Novels, and Short Fiction Collections American Hunger Black Boy Eight Men A Father’s Law Lawd Today! The Long Dream Native Son The Outsider Rite of Passage Savage Holiday Uncle Tom’s Children

Introductions and Forewords ‘‘Foreword,’’ Blues Fell This Morning (Paul Oliver) ‘‘Introduction,’’ Black Metropolis (St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton) ‘‘Introduction,’’ In The Castle of My Skin (George Lamming)

Poems ‘‘Ah Feels It in Mah Bones’’ ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ ‘‘FB Eye Blues’’ Haiku: This Other World ‘‘Hearst Headline Blues’’ ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan’’ ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ ‘‘King Joe’’ ‘‘Note on Jim Crow Blues’’ ‘‘Old Habit and New Love’’ ‘‘Red Clay Blues’’ ‘‘Red Leaves of Books’’ ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ ‘‘Rise and Live’’ ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise’’ ‘‘Strength’’ ‘‘Transcontinental’’ ‘‘We of the Streets’’

Writers Abrahams, Peter Alger, Horatio Algren, Nelon Anderson, Sherwood Aragon, Louis Attaway, William Baldwin, James Beauvoir, Simone de Bontemps, Arna Brooks, Gwendolyn Busia, Kofi Abrefa Camus, Albert Ce´saire, Aime´ Conrad, Joseph Conroy, Jack Crane, Stephen Cullen, Countee Davis, Frank Marshall Dodson, Owen Dostoevsky, Fyodor Drake, St. Clair Dreiser, Theodore

Works by Other Writers A Book of Prefaces (H. L. Mencken) Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (Frederic Wertham) Prejudices (H. L. Mencken)

Guide to Related Topics Du Bois, W. E. B. Eliot, T. S. Ellison, Ralph Waldo Fanon, Frantz Farrell, James Thomas Faulkner, William Fisher, Dorothy Canfield Frazier, E. Franklin Freud, Sigmund Gibson, Richard Gide, Andre´ Gold, Michael Gorky, Maxim Harrington, Ollie Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Heidegger, Martin Hemingway, Ernest Himes, Chester Bomar Howe, Irving Hurston, Zora Neale James, C. L. R. James, Henry Johnson, Fenton Joyce, James Kierkegaard, Soren Koestler, Arthur Lamming, George LeSueur, Meridel Levi, Carlo Le´vi-Strauss, Claude Lipton, Lawrence Locke, Alain

Malraux, Andre´ Mannoni, Octave McCullers, Carson Mencken, H. L. Motley, Willard Myrdal, Gunnar Nietzsche, Friedrich Norman, Dorothy Nutt, Howard Oliver, Paul Padmore, George Park, Robert Poe, Edgar Allan Reddick, Lawrence Sandburg, Carl Sartre, Jean-Paul Schopenhauer, Arthur Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar Silone, Ignazio Smith, William Gardner Stein, Gertrude Steinbeck, John Strachey, John Van Vechten, Carl Walker, Margaret Ward, Theodore Webb, Constance Wertham, Frederic West, Dorothy Whitman, Walt Wirth, Louis Zola, Emile

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Preface

Richard Wright (1908–1960) is considered among the most important figures of twentiethcentury American fiction. Because of his courage and insistence in attacking taboos and hypocrisy that previous writers had rarely dared to address, he revolutionized American and African American literature. He created bold and true images of black American experiences, which continue to inspire and disturb readers. Wright’s published works include seven novels; one collection of essays; two collections of short fiction; an autobiography; the dramatized versions of Native Son; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; 817 haiku verses (out of a total of nearly 4,000 he wrote); a photo-documentary; and three travel books. The Richard Wright Encyclopedia is designed to provide users, whether they are specialized scholars, students, or general readers, with a new way to gain comprehensive information about Wright’s extraordinary life and works as well as the momentous times in which he lived. Arranged in alphabetic order, the 370 entries include these types: biographical entries, which profile the significant people who influenced Wright or who were influenced by him; place entries, which describe the many towns, cities, and countries in which Wright lived or visited; contextual matter entries, which document and analyze the historical and cultural background of Wright’s life; and works entries, which contain information on Wright’s important published novels, stories, poems, and essays as well as descriptions of his most significant unpublished writings. Works by other writers relevant to Wright are also profiled. Most entries close with a ‘‘Selected Bibliography.’’ While most entry bibliographies include a variety of resources, a number of them cite Michel Fabre’s significant books on Wright, especially his 1973 biography, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright and Hazel Rowley’s 2001 biography, Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. Without ignoring the importance of other secondary sources, Wright scholars are indebted to the works by Fabre and Rowley for the quantity of factual information that they make available. The book concludes with a full and updated bibliography of 151 primary and secondary sources. This encyclopedia makes available to readers, as no previous book has done, a comprehensive, detailed and easily accessible compendium of essential information about Wright’s artistic achievement and the rich cultural and political environments out of which it grew. We xxi

Preface hope that it will stimulate new studies of Wright’s work that can reassess and extend the body of commentary and scholarship detailed in Keneth Kinnamon’s A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933–1982 and Richard Wright: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Commentary, 1983–2003. The entries were written primarily by Robert Butler and Jerry Ward, with some contributed by eighteen other Wright scholars. If the entry is unsigned, it indicates that Robert Butler or Jerry Ward wrote the entry; entries by other contributors are signed. Brief biographies of the editors and contributors are presented at the back of the book.

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Acknowledgments

This book was made possible by the ongoing help and steady encouragement of many people over a six-year period. We are deeply grateful to our technical assistants, Geri Pawelek, Sylvia Bigler, and Lucy Jagodzinski for word processing the manuscript and seeing it through many revisions. We are also very much indebted to our research assistant, Amy Siena, whose tireless work and skilled research were essential to the success of this project. We would also like to express our gratitude to Greenwood editors George Butler and Anne Thompson for wise advice and patience. Robert J. Butler Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

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Introduction: Richard Wright (1908–1960)

When the eminent sociologist Robert Park met Richard Wright in Chicago in 1941 he exclaimed, ‘‘How the hell did you happen?’’ (Rowley 2). 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. Wright, who had just achieved national prominence as a writer with the publication of Native Son a year earlier, had grown up in the worst possible environment, the brutally segregated world of the Deep South, but had somehow risen well above the society which had tried to put severe limitations on his development. Park’s assumptions precluded his understanding that Wright did not merely happen; Wright authored the significant traces of his being-in-this-world by exercising the will to be powerful and to influence how and what the audiences he addressed should think. Explanation of Wright being somehow atypical must begin with consideration of his intellectual kinship with David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and other nineteenth-century exemplars of the African-American will to triumph over the limits of environment. Arnold Rampersad, in his biography of Ralph Ellison, provides a crucial insight about Wright’s personality in claiming that ‘‘no writer [before Wright created Native Son] had ever applied the abrasive of naturalism so ruthlessly to black life, or used Marxism to cut so deeply into its core’’ (118–119). Had Park been privy, as contemporary readers are, to Wright’s scathing indictment of the herd mentality in Lawd Today!, he might never have raised the question. 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 also was intended to reduce him to 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 1

Introduction South put the most extreme limits on him, becoming a world ‘‘ringed by walls,’’ which would make him feel ‘‘forever condemned’’ (Wright 196). The South, therefore, was to Wright not only a naturalistic trap depriving him of economic opportunities and social development but also a Dantean hell which 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 remarkable American success story which 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 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’’ (Kinnamon 118). He revolutionized American and African-American literature because he was courageous enough to attack the old taboos that previous writers dared not approach and created startling new images of black experience which continue to inspire 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 Nathan Wright, an illiterate sharecropper and mill worker, moved the family to Natchez in 1911 to work in a saw mill 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 Ella 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’’ (Wright 34). Wright’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson, joined the family in Memphis in 1916, when Richard was about 8, 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. It is reasonable to say that ‘‘hunger’’ became the dominant metaphor of his writing. 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 American history. The intricately fashioned Jim Crow laws of Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee ensured racial segregation of 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 underfunded, poorly equipped, and often staffed by inadequately trained teachers. Jackson, like most southern towns and cities, had no public high school for

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Introduction black children.) Public accommodations, likewise, were completely segregated in restaurants, transit rest rooms, 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, or to migrate to the North. 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, black people were systematically disenfranchised through white primaries, poll taxes, literacy tests, and physical intimidation. Denied the vote, they possessed no legal mechanism that they could use to modify or eliminate Jim Crow laws and practices. Second, the South’s segregated system was upheld by a court system that excluded blacks from juries and that condoned extralegal violence in the form of lynchings, beatings, and mob violence. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizen 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 America.) 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 of the South, he was never able to shake the alienation, fear, and anger which 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’’ and learned at a young age to distance himself from most white people (Rowley 39). 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 Frederic 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.) Wright left Mississippi for Memphis, Tennessee in the fall of 1925 where he first boarded with a black family at 570 Beale Street and later established a household with his mother and brother at 370 Washington Street. To support himself and his family, he worked a number of menial jobs, including dishwasher, delivery boy, and porter at the Merry Optical Company. His experience in Memphis proved to be a turning point in his life because he was free at last to read widely 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 co-worker who was not threatened by a young black man’s desire to educate himself, Wright withdrew from the Memphis Public Library two books 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 irrational prejudice and an equally irrational fear of 3

Introduction 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, not only did Mencken’s example and the works Mencken approved of convinced him that books could become ‘‘vicarious cultural infusions’’ (Wright 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’’ (Wright 293) he had experienced in the South. Such books could provide Wright with ‘‘a sense of freedom’’ (Wright 282) which he needed to liberate himself from ‘‘southern darkness’’ (293). 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’’ (Wright 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’’ (Wright 294) and ‘‘a sense of life itself ’’ (Wright 295), helping him to understand and artistically shape his own experiences in vital coherent ways. Although Memphis provided Wright with possibilities for growth that he could not secure in Mississippi, it still was a southern, legally segregated city, and Wright was determined to leave it and pursue a better life in the North. In November 1927 he went to Chicago where he would live on the South Side in one of America’s largest ghettoes. 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 as a young and ‘‘fabulous’’ world of American change and modern freedom (Wright 433). 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 character in 12 Million Black Voices who claimed ‘‘We’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the president of Dixie’’ (Wright 88). 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 that reduced him and his family to hunger and poverty not so very different from that they had known in the South. For nearly ten years, Wright, his mother, and brother lived in crowded, overpriced ‘‘kitchenettes,’’ which he would later describe in 12 Million Black Voices as ‘‘prison[s]’’ for black people, ‘‘our death sentence without a trial’’ (Wright 106). Working at a series of low paying jobs as ditch digger, 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 development as a person and 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

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Introduction bringing him into 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. Proving to be a critically important development in Wright’s life, 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’’ (Rowley 78), since it made available to him reading lists, books, study groups, 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 also through the John Reed Club that Wright became acquainted with professors from the University of Chicago such as sociologist Louis Wirth and 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 experience 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 Works Progress Administration (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’’ (Walker 286) dating back to traumatic experiences that he had endured growing up in the South, experiences which threatened to blight his spirit and cripple his imagination. 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 and had one of the strongest John Reed clubs in the United States. 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’’ (Wright 117), 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. As he revealed in Black Boy/American Hunger, it also provided him with an imaginatively potent vision of human unity, ‘‘a common vision 5

Introduction that bound us all together’’ (Wright 374), 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 and its terrible alienation with an expansive 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 remained with him throughout his life. Some of the literary principles that Wright developed as a communist would also help to shape some of his greatest 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 defined by the party. It is not only a manifesto of a committed communist writer but also contains some beliefs about writing that Wright would embrace long after he had formally broken with communism. Wright stressed that modern African-American writing should be politically engaged and rooted in the experience of ordinary black people. He also emphasized that black folk art, particularly the blues, spirituals, work songs and folk stories, was the wellspring of black writing. Wright left Chicago in May 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 politicallyengaged 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 champion 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 America 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. While still at work on the stories that would comprise Uncle Tom’s Children, Wright was beginning to imagine his masterwork, Native Son, a book that would transform American

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Introduction and African-American literatures. As Irving Howe has stressed, ‘‘The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever,’’ since the novel revealed long repressed truths about racial relations in the United States and ‘‘made impossible a repetition of the old lies’’ (Howe 99). The book opens with a clock sounding its abrasive alarm that wakes the Thomas family out of their sound sleep and makes them frighteningly aware of a serious problem; a huge rat has entered their crowded one-room kitchenette. In a similar way, the entire novel is calculated by Wright as a loud wake-up call to Americans, jolting them out of their long ‘‘sleep,’’ their lack of consciousness of the serious racial problems that had afflicted the nation from the beginning of its history and that threatened to plunge it into widespread chaos and violence during the Great Depression. Like Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and other seminal works in American literary tradition, Native Son emphatically brought something new into American consciousness. First, it presented a new black protagonist who was radically different from any of his predecessors in formal literature because he articulated the profound racial fears and anger that no previous American writers were bold enough to express. It also told the character’s story from an insider’s point of view, enabling Wright to dramatize the hard facts of ghetto life in fresh, powerful ways. Wright’s revolutionary novel also explored the connection between racial violence and sex in ways that were much more direct and revealing than any other previous American book was able to do. When Native Son appeared on March 1, 1940, it was an immediate popular success, selling 215,000 copies in three weeks and establishing Wright as an important new voice in American literature. In the years that followed this success, Wright published very little fiction but 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 was later significantly revised under the directorship of Orson Welles and opened in New York on March 24, 1941. He collaborated with photographer Edwin Rosskam on a photo-documentary book on the history of black people in America, which appeared as 12 Million Black Voices in October, 1941. Wright also worked on a novel about police brutality in New York but was unable to publish it in book form and a section of it appeared in Accent in 1942 as ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ It was at this time that Wright quietly but officially left the Communist Party, bringing to a culmination his many years of dissatisfaction with the party’s ideological rigidities and blind spots, which he saw as threats to his integrity as an African-American writer. With the appearance of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ Wright’s work became increasingly colored by philosophical concepts developed by European existentialists who offered Wright the intellectual and imaginative freedom he could not find in Marxist determinism or communist programs. From the early forties onward, Wright immersed himself in a serious study of existentialist philosophers, particularly Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. Existentialist concepts, such as the ‘‘absurdity’’ of the universe and the freedom of human will, would strongly influence Wright’s work for the remainder of his career. His autobiography, Black Boy, published in 1945, is thoroughly grounded in an existential vision of life and drew sharp criticism from the leftist critics who had earlier praised Wright’s early work such as Uncle Tom’s Children and the poetry he published in Marxist journals such as Left Front, New Masses, and Anvil. The social environment envisioned in the book is a vivid example of what the existentialists understood as an ‘‘absurd’’ world since it is a massive and 7

Introduction elaborately detailed irrational system premised upon a theory of racial superiority at odds with the central beliefs of American democracy. Wright, however, 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’’ (Wright 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’’ (Wright 118). From the beginning of Black Boy he is endowed with a rich and active inward life that 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’’ (Wright 45), and he regards such writing as a ‘‘gateway to a forbidden and enchanting land’’ (Wright 47). When he later begins to read pulp fiction as a teenager, he likewise sees these books as a ‘‘gateway to the world’’ (Wright 151). This process of liberation through reading culminates at the end of Black Boy when he discovers modern writers such as Mencken, Dreiser, Lewis, and Zola who finally satisfy his inward ‘‘hunger’’ and give him ‘‘new avenues of seeing and feeling’’ (Wright 296), thus helping him ‘‘to build a new life’’ (Wright 296). Black Boy was a popular and critical success, strengthening Wright’s position as an important American writer. Indeed, a whole group of African-American novelists such as Anne Petry, Willard Motley, William Attaway, and Chester Himes were so strongly influenced by Wright’s work that they became known as ‘‘the Wright School’’ of black American fiction. Wright’s outward success, however, was undercut by a number of serious personal anxieties and problems, and by 1946, he began thinking of leaving America 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 rest room 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 Anais 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 cannot even work. I need to live free if I am to expand. (Rowley 352)

Wright visited France for six months in 1946 when he was invited by the French government to observe postwar Paris. He returned to New York in January 1947 and shortly afterward decided to move permanently to France with his wife and daughter. Except for one trip to 8

Introduction New York and Chicago in 1949 to work on the film version of Native Son, he spent the rest of his life in exile from his native land. 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 existentialist philosophy, 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 De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire, an organization of people on the non-communist left which was 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 which was truly global in nature. His exile, however, invited charges from some of his critics that his power as a writer was in decline. They suggested that the fiction Wright produced in France did not match the compelling 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 so that there is an eight-year hiatus between the publication of Black Boy (1945) and his existential novel, a gap that contrasts sharply with the unusually productive seven-year period which 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 such journals as Les Temps Modernes, Pre´sence Africaine, Twice a Year, and Ebony. He also served as the unofficial leader of a group of black American expatriate writers gathering around the Cafe´ Tournon and he traveled widely in England, Italy, and Africa. Charges about the weakening of Wright’s literary output in exile can be explained in terms of his separating himself from the ‘‘particular hell’’ which ‘‘fashioned’’ him, his deeply felt experiences in the American South and northern cities. From the vantage of those who had stereotyped ideas about what a black American writer should produce, it seemed ironic that Wright exiled himself from America precisely at a time when its turbulent post–World War II history might have provided him with fresh material which could have re-energized his writing. On the other hand, ‘‘weakening’’ seems to be a misnomer for ‘‘difference,’’ i.e., Wright’s decision to devote more intellectual energy to global issues and nonfiction formats. The three novels that Wright published during his thirteen years of exile are remarkably different from the earlier work completed in the United States. The Outsider, a novel centered in philosophical ideas rather than overtly racial issues, suffered from weak characterization and a melodramatic plot driven by abstraction. It received generally negative reviews even from critics such as Arna Bontemps and J. Saunders Redding, who were strong supporters of Native Son and Black Boy. Younger critics such as Lorraine Hansberry saw the book as dated, originating from a protest tradition at odds with current reality in America. Wright’s objective in the novel, however, was not to reflect the evolution of race relations in the United States, but rather to explore the timeless themes of crime and punishment, acting in bad faith, and the futility of seeking to be ‘‘absolutely’’ independent of responsibility and community. Savage Holiday, published in 1954 was rejected by both Harper and World publishers and came out as an Avon paperback that received no reviews. A ‘‘raceless’’ novel with no black 9

Introduction characters, it was thinly imagined and arose more from Wright’s fascination with Freudian theory than his own lived experiences. Nevertheless, this flawed novel challenged readers to consider that white Americans might be demonized by psychosexual aberrations about which they were virtually silent. The Long Dream, envisioned as part of a trilogy set in Mississippi, appeared in 1958 and was Wright’s attempt to recapture the vitality and social relevance of his previous books but it too drew predominantly negative critical reviews and was seen by many as another sign that Wright’s exile had weakened his fiction by placing him out of contact with American reality. Although centered in the racial conflicts that characterized Wright’s most successful fiction, critics were convinced that the novel lacked the narrative drive, fully imagined settings, and powerful characterizations of books such as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ However, Wright was not out of contact in the novel with the exploration of racialized relations between fathers and sons and some of the reasons that drove a few black Americans to become expatriates. After finishing Savage Holiday in 1954, Wright accomplished the remarkable feat of publishing four books of non-fiction in three years. These works reflect his attempts to broaden and perhaps transcend his American background by focusing on his growing interest in cultures other than his own and matters of international importance, especially the struggles of Third World nations to free themselves of colonial control. Black Power (1954) grew out of his trip to the Gold Coast in 1953 when it was on the verge of establishing itself as the independent republic of Ghana. The Color Curtain (1956) consisted of Wright’s reflections on the Bandung Conference held in Indonesia to discuss ways in which colonized nations and newly emergent independent nations should develop. Pagan Spain (1957) describes Wright’s 1954 visit to Spain and his criticisms of the symbiotic relationship between Franco’s fascism and the Catholic Church. White Man, Listen! (1957), with the exception of ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States,’’ is a series of essays devoted mainly to the problems faced by nations emerging from colonial domination. In his final years, Wright was engaged with several important literary projects. He was working on a collection of stories he had written over a period of more than twenty years that appeared posthumously as Eight Men. He also attempted to complete Island of Hallucinations, a novel about black expatriate life in Paris but was unable to bring the book to a conclusion and it remains an unpublished manuscript in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. In 1959, he became fascinated with Japanese haiku, reading widely in this area, and writing approximately four thousand of these delicate three-line poems. A substantial collection of Wright’s haiku was edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Tener and published in 1998. Four other of Wright’s books were also published after his death, Lawd Today! (1963), Rite of Passage (1994), This Other World: Haiku (1998), and A Father’s Law (2008). Wright died in Paris at the age of fifty-two on November 28, 1960 of a heart attack brought on by physical ailments that could be traced to long years of undernourishment as a child and a young adult as well as a case of amoebic dysentery he contracted while visiting the Gold Coast in 1953. In a literary career spanning over twenty-five years and cut short by his unexpected death, he 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 new 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

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Introduction of the bravest earlier black writers seem almost timid’’ (Rampersad 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,’’ Black Boy/American Hunger, and Black Power 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 Mosely. Moreover, his novels, stories, and essays have been translated into many languages and are read all over the world today. 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 Chicago, but that of the world, the human heart’’ (Baldwin 149). REFERENCES Baldwin, James. ‘‘Alas, Poor Richard’’ in Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dial Press, 1961, 181–89. Howe, Irving. ‘‘Black Boys and Native Sons’’ in A World More Attractive. New York: Horizon, 1963, 98–110. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Too Honest for His Own Time.’’ New York Times Book Review (December 29, 1991) 3. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2007. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ in Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ in The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Harper, 1950, 115–63. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

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A ABRAHAMS, PETER (19 March 1919– ) A South African novelist who was born in 1919 in South Africa and left the country at age 20, settling in Britain, where he wrote Dark Testament (1942); Mine Boy (1946); Path of Thunder (1948); Wild Conquest (1950); Tell Freedom (1954); and Wreath for Udomo (1956). When he came from London to France in September 1946, Abrahams met Wright there for the first time. Wright read Abrahams’s autobiography Mine Boy while in Paris and his positive reaction and comments on it encouraged Abrahams greatly. On the way back to the United States, Wright dropped by in London and was invited to a dinner by the Colored Writers’ Association, where he saw Abrahams again, along with other important black writers and thinkers. Back in New York, Wright found Abrahams more talented and promising after reading his Quiet Valley (later Path of Thunder) in manuscript form, so he recommended it to his editor Edward Aswell of Harper & Brothers around midJanuary 1947. Wright delivered the manuscript to Aswell, who, much to Abrahams’s joy, agreed to publish his Path of Thunder, which later came out with Wright’s blurb in February 1948. In late August 1947, when Wright came back to France, Abrahams welcomed Wright at the Gare St. Lazzare train station in Paris and both the Wrights

and the Abrahams associated very closely until the Abrahams left Paris for London in September. In turn, Wright was welcomed by Abrahams at the station in London in February 1948 to stay in the city to see the dramatization of Native Son at Bolton Theatre in Kensington. Abrahams later came to Paris in June, only to tell Wright that he had divorced his wife Dorothy. Since the relationship between Wright and Abrahams were on the family-to-family basis, their companionship suffered after this incident. In November 1948, however, Wright opened the exhibition ‘‘Evidence de l’Art Ne`gre’’ with Abrahams and other African friends at the Palmes Bookstore in Paris. Abrahams left for Jamaica in 1957 to live there and never returned. He wrote Night of Their Own (1965) in Jamaica, became editor of the West Indian Economist, and took charge of the daily radio news network until 1964. His recent work is Black Experience in the 20th Century: An Autobiography and Meditation (2000). Toru Kiuchi Selected Bibliography: Abrahams, Peter. ‘‘The Blacks.’’ Race Awareness: The Nightmare and the Vision. Ed. Ruth Miller and Paul J. Dolan. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. 13

Africa

AFRICA When he was engaged in the writing of Black Power, the book which describes his trip to the Gold Coast in 1953, Richard Wright considered using as the book’s title ‘‘What Is Africa to Me?’’ This allusion to Countee Cullen’s ‘‘Heritage’’ distilled a question which pursued Wright for most of his adult life. As Michel Fabre has stressed, ‘‘Wright was interested in everything concerning Africa’’ (Fabre 319) but he was unable to develop a single, unambiguous response to Africa and throughout his life maintained what Margaret Walker has described as ‘‘a terrible ambivalence’’ (Walker 241) about the homeland of American black people. As an American and a Westerner, Wright had difficulty identifying with African culture, but as a black man he often had a powerful yearning to make connection with the land of his ancestors. But he was consistently clear on one point throughout his writing career: He was resolutely opposed to European colonization and strongly supported African independence from white control. As he revealed in a Town Meeting radio debate in 1945, ‘‘I am all for the redemption of Africa from the imperialist powers’’ (Kinnamon 78). As a member of the Communist Party, he was committed to eliminating imperialism in all of its forms and later as a person interested in the Pan African movement he supported the work of black African revolutionaries such as Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta. Wright’s difficulty was rooted in his attempts to personally relate himself as a man raised in the West to the profoundly different world of African culture. As a young man who listened to the followers of Marcus Garvey giving speeches in Chicago’s Washington Park on black nationalism, he could reach a point where he only ‘‘partly shared’’ (Wright 336) their views. As much as he admired their black pride and their outspoken criticism of the white power structure, he had difficulty accepting their view of Africa as a homeland to which blacks could actually return. Late in his life,

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Wright admitted that he respected Garvey’s extraordinary organizing of American blacks into a mass movement but considered his ‘‘Back to Africa’’ project to be ‘‘romantic and impractical’’ (Kinnamon 177). Wright experienced a similar ambivalence toward Africa when he lived in Paris and visited London during his long exile from America. He admired black revolutionaries like Le´opold Senghor and Aime´ Ce´saire whom he worked with in Paris but could not endorse their belief in Ne´gritude, a movement which tied black identity to an idealized vision of African culture. In a similar way, Wright was drawn to Pan-Africanists such as George Padmore and Eric Williams whom he met in London but could not endorse their views fully. As much as he supported their efforts to decolonize Africa, he never shared their belief that the identity of American blacks was rooted in Africa. Wright’s ambivalence toward Africa became especially clear when he visited the Gold Coast in 1953. He prepared elaborately for the trip, doing extensive research on African history and culture, and he expected to stay in the Gold Coast for six months but left after a disappointing visit which lasted only two and one-half months. He was greatly disturbed by the political divisiveness, diseases, and primitive living conditions he observed in traveling nearly 3,000 miles throughout the country. As Margaret Walker emphasized, Wright experienced a ‘‘great cultural shock’’ during his brief stay and reacted to Africa with ‘‘genuine disappointment and downright disgust’’ (Walker 240). Worse, he felt rejected by the inhabitants of the Gold Coast who regarded him suspiciously as an outsider. In a 1954 interview with Johannes Martens, Wright confessed that he as not ‘‘very well received’’ in Africa and was treated as a ‘‘stranger’’ (Kinnamon 161). At the First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers sponsored by Pre´ sence Africaine in 1956, Wright presented a paper ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization,’’ which he later expanded and included in White Man, Listen! Wright’s ideas

Ailly, France vividly reflect his difficulty coming to terms with African life. Defining himself as ‘‘a man of the West’’ (Wright 47), he admitted to a ‘‘psychological distance’’ (Wright 47) from African reality and felt uncomfortable with the ‘‘irrationalism of Asia and Africa’’ (Wright 58). As a Western modernist and rationalist, he believed that Africa’s only real hope was to reject its traditional religious and tribal customs and embrace Western technology, industrialism, and urbanization. He argued that Africa could throw off the yoke of the West only by using the tools of the West to achieve economic and political independence. Wright’s speech was not well received by African delegates to the congress and many African intellectuals were highly critical of his ideas when they appeared in White Man, Listen! For all of his disappointments with his personal experience in Africa and despite the psychic splits which Africa created within him, Wright never lost interest in Africa and was deeply disappointed when Nkrumah did not honor his request to become a teacher in Ghana. At the time of his death, Wright was planning an extended trip to French colonial Africa so that he could gather materials for a book on that subject. So Fabre is certainly correct when he claimed that ‘‘to the end Wright showed an interest in African culture’’ (Fabre 209). But Wright never was able in the unfinished quest of his life to find a clear answer to the question posed by Countee Cullen, ‘‘What Is Africa to Me?’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

‘‘AH FEELS IT IN MAH BONES’’ Along with ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan,’’ this poem appeared in the April 1935 issue of International

Literature, a Communist magazine published in Moscow which had a worldwide circulation. This important journal, which would later print Uncle Tom’s Children in Russian, gave Wright recognition among party officials who would soon see him as one of their most important young writers. ‘‘Ah Feel It in Mah Bones’’ stands out in sharp contrast to most of Wright’s early poems for two reasons: 1) It foreswears free verse for rhyme and meter which give the feel of a blues song, and 2) It is written in the dialect of an unlettered black man. The first two stanzas describe a working-class black person’s instinctive sense of an oncoming revolution which will make radical changes in the world. He feels deep down in his ‘‘bones’’ that ‘‘something’s going to break’’ and that ‘‘The whole world’s done changed.’’ The final two stanzas reveal this man’s desperate situation in a capitalistic society as he is hungry, unemployed, and ‘‘can’t even beg a dime.’’ But he remains upbeat, confident that ‘‘there’s something a-comin’’’ which will improve his situation. Indeed, he brags in the final lines that his ‘‘sail’s set for whatever wind’s in the sky.’’ Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

AILLY, FRANCE A farming village in eastern Normandy where Wright bought a small farmhouse which he converted into a summer home. He bought the property in 1955 and wrote most of The Long Dream and ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ there. Margaret Walker has described Wright’s house and ‘‘run-down farm’’ (Walker 272) at Ailly as a retreat from the hectic pace of his life in Paris where he could focus his attention on his writing and enjoy vacations with his family. The ‘‘peace and quiet’’ (Walker 272) of Ailly reminded him of his early boyhood in the rural South and was a place where he could get away from the 15

Alger, Horatio distractions of urban life and the constant travel required by his political activity. The residence at Ailly also enabled the Wrights to be close to their friends, Michel and He´le`ne Bokanowski, who also had a summer home nearby. Wright enjoyed growing vegetables and raising chickens at Ailly and would bring surplus produce to his friends at the Cafe´ Tournon. He converted one room of the farmhouse into a ‘‘comfortable and spacious study’’ (Walker 273) where he could write for long stretches without interruption. In mid-January 1957, he went to Ailly to write a novel entitled ‘‘Mississippi’’ which was eventually published as The Long Dream. In Hazel Rowley’s words, he ‘‘wrote like a man obsessed’’ (Rowley 485) and completed the book by April 1957. Wright sold his property at Ailly in 1959 for a number of reasons. His declining health made it difficult for him to manage the upkeep on his home and farm. Worsening financial problems caused by declining sales of his books made it impossible for him to maintain both an expensive apartment in Paris and a summer home in Normandy. And his wife and daughters had left France and were living in London where Julia was a student at Cambridge University and Ellen was working as a literary agent. In an attempt to revive his troubled marriage and also because he had grown disenchanted with French life, Wright wanted to join his family in England but was not able to obtain a visa from British authorities, largely because of his political views and associations. So in October 1959 Wright sold both his apartment on rue Monsieur le Prince in Paris and his summer home at Ailly and moved into a very modest one-bedroom apartment on 4 rue Regis to live alone. See also Wright, Ellen; Wright, Julia. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Black American Writers in France, 1840-1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

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ALGER, HORATIO (13 January 1832– 18 July 1899) Nineteenth-century American novelist who wrote a series of books describing the rise from ‘‘rags to riches’’ of a young boy hero. The hero’s rise is premised upon good character, hard work, and the help of a rich gentleman who serves as a patron opening the way to financial success and social status, both of which are often achieved when the aspiring hero marries his patron’s daughter. Such novels define what has come to be known as the ‘‘Alger myth,’’ a romantic vision of American democratic possibilities which claims that anyone can achieve success in America if he is willing to work hard and possesses good character and natural intelligence. Alger wrote eighteen such novels, including Ragged Dick, Mark, The Match Boy, Adrift in New York, and Struggling Upward. They were enormously popular in America from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to the end of the 1920s, and it is estimated that only the Bible was more widely read by Americans during this time. As Michel Fabre has pointed out, Wright as a young man was ‘‘an avid reader of Horatio Alger’’ and was fascinated by ‘‘the myth of the self-made man in the great American dream whereby everybody had an equal chance’’ (Fabre 51). But as an adult he came to see how the Alger myth was a cruel joke for black people since the doors of American opportunity were systematically closed to black people because of their skin color. He makes extensive use of the Alger myth in some of his most important fiction by aggressively inverting it. ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ for example, describes the central character’s downward movement into a bizarre underworld rather than the upward movement to respectable society which Alger’s novels portray. And Native Son can be seen as an extended parody on books such as Ragged Dick and Struggling Upward. Wright’s central character, unlike Alger’s heroes, is trapped in a closed society which offers him no real rewards for either hard work or good character. Instead of being helped by a rich

‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ gentleman, he is exploited by Mr. Dalton who turns out to be a slumlord extracting excessive rents for inadequate housing. Far from marrying the patron’s daughter, Mary, he kills her, decapitates her, and burns her body in a furnace. Native Son, therefore, calls into sharp question all of the assumptions about American life which are central to the Alger stories, presenting a sobering vision of the collapse of the American Dream after it has been nullified by racism and capitalistic greed. Like Theodore Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and James T. Farrell, Wright made artful use of the rags to riches myth to express in a strikingly original way a deeply troubled vision of modern American life. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. ‘‘American Capitalism’s Greatest Propagandist: Horatio Alger, Jr.’’ in Richard Wright: Books and Writers by Michel Fabre. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

ALGREN, NELSON (28 March 1909– 9 May 1981) American novelist in the realist/naturalist tradition whose books champion social outsiders and misfits. His best fiction is set in Chicago from the Great Depression to the early sixties and includes Somebody in Boots (1935), The Neon Wilderness (1947), The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and A Walk on the Wild Side (1956). The Man with the Golden Arm, a novel of Chicago’s drug culture, won the first National Book Award and was made into a prize winning film directed by Otto Preminger. Wright met Algren in the early thirties in Chicago when both were members of the John Reed Club. They worked together in the Federal Writers Project and became close friends. As writers they had much in common, sharing a deep suspicion of organized society and a strong identification with marginalized people, alienated

‘‘outsiders.’’ Both developed similar writing styles, shocking their readers with harshly naturalistic prose laced with street language. And both writers were fascinated by American violence, seeing it as a revelation of a culture at the very brink of disintegration. Their friendship cooled in its later years when Algren grew critical of Wright’s exile in France, something he felt diminished Wright’s fiction by separating it from its roots in the American South and the northern city. But it was Algren who wrote one of the most powerful eulogies to Wright shortly after his death. In ‘‘Remembering Richard Wright’’ he concluded: Richard Wright came to Chicago . . . as a stranger, lived as a stranger, and he left without looking back . . . Yet his impact upon Chicago has been more enduring than that of any merchant prince, mayor, or newspaper owner. For his impact was not upon City Hall but on the city’s conscience; and therefore upon the conscience of humanity. (Algren 85) Selected Bibliography: Algren, Nelson. ‘‘Remembering Richard Wright.’’ Nation, 192 (January 28, 1961) p. 85.

‘‘ALMOS’ A MAN’’ One of Wright’s most skillfully written and powerful evocations of plantation culture in the South during the Great Depression, this story has an interesting publication history. It first appeared as the ending of ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn,’’ an unpublished bildungsroman about a young black man who wants to be a championship boxer like Jack Johnson but who is unable to rise above a segregated society which reduces him at best to the level of a ‘‘boy’’ and, at worst, to the level of a ‘‘nigger.’’ Wright began the novel in 1935 and sent it to a number of publishers in 1936. When the novel was emphatically rejected by each publisher, Wright took its final two chapters and crafted them into ‘‘Almos’ a Man.’’ It was then rejected by Story magazine in November, 1936, less than a year before that same 17

American Hunger magazine would bring national attention to Wright by awarding his story ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ first prize in its fiction contest for WPA writers. But a revised version of ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ was accepted by Harper’s Bazaar and appeared in its January 1940 issue. It also was featured in O Henry Award Prize Stories of 1940. Toward the end of his life, Wright tinkered with the story again, renaming it ‘‘The Man Who Was Almos’ a Man’’ and included it as the lead story in Eight Men which was published posthumously in 1961. The story explores a theme which is central to most of Wright’s fiction, the search for power and manhood in a racist society which denies both to blacks. The central character Dave, whose uncompleted identity is indicated by his lack of a last name, is an adolescent on the verge of adulthood who works long hours for low pay as a field hand for the white landowner, Jim Hawkins. He fantasizes about owning a gun, visualizing it as a ‘‘living thing’’ (Wright 12) which will provide him with the ‘‘sense of power’’ and ‘‘respect’’ (Wright 10) he needs to regard himself as a man. But his father, mother, and all of the white people he encounters tell him he’s ‘‘nothing but a boy’’ (Wright 8). After purchasing the gun for $2.00, which he borrows from his mother, he brings it to work and accidentally kills Hawkins’ mule when he clumsily fires the gun. Hawkins, upon discovering this, tells him that he will have to pay $50.00 for the dead mule, a sum which will require him to work without pay for two years. He regards Hawkins and his parents, who go along with the deal, as treating him ‘‘like a mule’’ (Wright 17) and decides to do what so many characters in Wright’s subsequent work choose to do—depart for the North in search of a new life. The story ends with him waiting for a speeding train which will take him ‘‘somewhere, somewhere where he could be a man’’ (Wright 18). Such images of liberating open motion resonate throughout Wright’s work from ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ published in 1936, to The Long Dream which he wrote at the end of his life. This

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deep restlessness in Wright’s fiction is reflected in Wright’s own life which was a series of moves in his quest for a place which would enable him to develop as a man and an artist. ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ also contains another important motif which is threaded through Wright’s stories and novels since its plot pivots on a single moment of violence which drastically changes the central character’s life. Bigger Thomas, for example, is forever changed when his accidental killing of Mary Dalton is triggered by the frenzy he feels when Mrs. Dalton enters her daughter’s bedroom and he fears that he will be caught in the act of having sex with a white woman. Cross Damon’s existence is likewise transformed when a train crash allows him to simulate death and assume a new identity. And in Savage Holiday, Erskine Fowler’s apparently solid middle class life collapses when in a moment of hysterical anger he murders a woman. Johnny Gibbs, the protagonist of Rite of Passage, which was posthumously published in 1994, also finds that his outwardly secure life suddenly dissolves when he is informed by New York City social workers that the people whom he thinks are his biological parents are in fact foster parents and he will soon be sent into the care of new foster parents. In all of those cases, Wright stresses the existential fragility of life, something which his black characters experience with special intensity. ‘‘Almos’ a Man,’’ therefore, is an important work in the Wright canon, not only because of its high literary quality, but also because it contains in embryonic form central themes and important motifs which Wright would explore throughout his career. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Eight Men. New York: Harper Perennial, 1996.

AMERICAN HUNGER American Hunger was the original title of Wright’s autobiography which he began in the spring of

American Hunger 1943 and submitted in manuscript form to Harper and Brothers in December 1943. In its original form, it had two parts, ‘‘Southern Night’’ which focused on Wright’s life growing up in the Deep South, and ‘‘The Horror and the Glory’’ which centered on his life in Chicago and paid particular attention to his experiences as a member of the Communist Party. His agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. reacted favorably to the manuscript but his editor at Harper, Edward Aswell, was uncomfortable with certain aspects of the book and suggested changes. Aswell objected to the second part of the book dealing with Wright’s northern experiences, feeling that the ending was too pessimistic and the passages describing Wright’s involvements with communism were too long. At this point, Wright was unwilling to make these major changes, and Aswell backed off from his demands, settling for a few minor stylistic revisions. The galley proofs of American Hunger were made ready by May 1944 for summer publication. Things changed considerably, however, when Aswell sent the galleys to the Book-of-theMonth Club for inclusion in their highly prestigious and lucrative program. Dorothy Canfield Fisher and other editors at Book-of-the-Month Club were keenly interested in publishing Wright’s autobiography, but they shared Aswell’s earlier reservations about the book. They too wanted ‘‘The Horror and the Glory’’ deleted and desired that Wright compose a more affirmative ending which would support, in Canfield Fisher’s words, ‘‘American ideals’’ (Rowley 288). They also were unhappy with Wright’s title and suggested that he rename the book First Chapter. Wright at first resisted at making these changes but, after being assured by Aswell that Harper would publish ‘‘The Horror and the Glory’’ as a separate volume, he dropped it from the book, ending his autobiography with his heading North to Chicago in search of a new life. He struggled mightily with Canfield Fisher’s suggestion that the book end on a positive note, fearing that such an affirmative conclusion would falsify his own experiences. He decided finally to write a

bittersweet ending, adding a section on how certain writers such as H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Theodore Dreiser had inspired him to become a writer but stressing also that these writers were rebels who were at odds with ‘‘American ideals’’ as they were conventionally understood. He finally rejected the rather tepid title of First Chapter and named the book Black Boy which emphasized some of its bitter ironies. Parts of ‘‘The Horror and the Glory’’soon found their way in print in a separate essay, ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ which Wright placed in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1944 and was reprinted five years later in The God That Failed, a series of essays edited by Richard Crossman which focused on the disaffection with communism felt by writers such as Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, and Stephen Spender. In 1977, Harper and Row delivered on Aswell’s promise to Wright, publishing ‘‘The Horror and the Glory’’ as a separate volume entitled American Hunger. The Library of America in 1991 fully restored Wright’s autobiography as he had originally intended it, joining his southern and northern experiences in Black Boy (American Hunger). American Hunger, as published as an independent book in 1977, is a powerful autobiographical text which describes Wright at a critical point in his development as a man and an artist. Leaving the South which has deeply scarred him with its injustice, violence, and racism, his hopes for a better life in the North are dashed as he steps off the train and perceives Chicago as an Eliotic ‘‘unreal city’’ covered in ‘‘palls of gray smoke’’ and clanging with a continuous ‘‘din’’ (Wright 1). Wondering if he could ‘‘survive’’ in such a ‘‘machine city’’ (Wright 2), he realizes that he has ‘‘fled one insecurity and embraced another’’ (Wright 3). The menial jobs he is forced to take as a dishwasher, a porter, a postal worker, and a hospital orderly lock him into numbing routines, and he begins to wonder if the promised land he sought in the North is in fact another version of the hell he had known in the South. He gets some relief from this overwhelming environment with his political and literary 19

The American Mercury activities. Joining the John Reed Club. and becoming a member of the Communist Party, he feels connected for the first time in his life to a ‘‘new faith’’ (44) which offers the hope of personal transformation and social revolution. He also becomes involved with a group of like-minded black writers in the South Side Writers Group and begins writing short stories and free verse poems. These political and literary activities enable Wright to develop a new self by empowering him with fresh ways of understanding the modern world and giving him a means of reshaping it. American Hunger ends with Wright becoming disillusioned with communism, sensing it as another system which refuses to perceive him as a man and an individual. But the book also concludes with him even more strongly convinced that he is an artist and that his art can be a potent means of self creation and a weapon for social change. In the book’s final two paragraphs, he picks up a pencil and begins triumphantly to write, using words to ‘‘build a bridge . . . between me and the world outside’’ and hurling ‘‘words into the darkness’’ as a way of keeping ‘‘alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human’’ (Wright 135). Selected Bibliography: Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Too Honest for His Own Time.’’ New York Times Book Review, (December 29, 1991), 3. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Ward, Jerry ‘‘Introduction to the Harper Perennial Edition.’’ Black Boy (American Hunger). New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

THE AMERICAN MERCURY This important journal of American culture was created in 1924 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan and became particularly well known as a flamboyant expression of Jazz Age iconoclasm. From its inception to the mid-1920s, it featured the work of Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Dreiser, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis. It was also an important outlet for the work of Harlem

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Renaissance writers, publishing pieces by Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, Countee Cullen, and Walter White. Mencken’s strong interest in African-American life during the 1920s also produced several articles on black life in America. The magazine declined in the 1930s for two reasons, Mencken’s resigning as editor in 1933 and the change in taste during the Great Depression when most American’s found its flippant debunking less palatable. It underwent several revivals but never regained the energy and brilliance it had under Mencken and Nathan. During the late 1950s it became a parody of the liberal magazine it was intended as, becoming an organ for the religious right and political reactionaries. This version of the journal opposed integration, supported Senator Joseph McCarthy, and was sued on several occasions for its anti-Semitism. It ceased operations in 1980. Wright was an avid reader of The American Mercury during its heyday of the late 1920s and early 1930s, delighting in its high quality fiction and pungent criticism of conventional American society. (In Black Boy he reveals how he was chided by his boss when he was caught reading the journal while doing his job as dishwasher and would subsequently be careful to wrap such reading in newspaper while at work.) His reading of The American Mercury led to his developing a strong interest in Mencken who became a critically important influence on him. It was Mencken’s Book of Prefaces and Prejudices which Wright withdrew from the Memphis Public Library in 1927. Reading these books, in Michel Fabre’s words, help to ‘‘transform’’ Wright’s life by demonstrating to him ‘‘the power of words’’ (Fabre 65). Wright, like Mencken, would use words as ‘‘weapons’’ (Wright 293) in his fight against social injustice and his desire to reform society. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Angelo Herndon Case

ANDERSON, LEWIS One of Wright’s friends at Jim Hill School in Jackson, Mississippi which Wright attended in 1921 and 1922. Along with Dick Jordan, Joe Brown, Perry Booker, D. C. Blackburn, Sarah McNeamer, and Essie Lee Ward, Anderson was part of a group of friends Wright associated with. The strong friendships that Wright established with Minnie Farish, Jordan, Brown, and Anderson when he was an elementary school student were extremely important in his development. They broke the painful isolation that he had experienced as a younger child due to his family’s constant moving. These friends were serious students and regarded education as a vital means of personal development and social advancement. As he reveals in Black Boy/American Hunger, his days at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson Junior High School enabled him to make friendships with ‘‘boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking’’ and this ‘‘revitalized [my] being,’’ thus empowering him to envision a hopeful ‘‘future’’ (Wright 147) for himself. Selected Bibliography: Wright Richard. Black Boy/ American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

ANDERSON, SHERWOOD (13 September 1876–8 March 1941) Best known for his accomplished short stories in Winesburg, Ohio (1919) and less well known for such novels as Windy McPherson’s Son (1916), Marching Men (1919), Poor White (1920), Many Marriages (1923) and Dark Laughter (1925), Sherwood Anderson was an early twentiethcentury American realist whose vernacular fictions had some influence on William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck. As Wright reports in Black Boy, he discovered Anderson’s name from reading H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces in Memphis; he probably read Anderson both there and after he moved to Chicago. During his apprentice years, Wright seems to have studied Anderson’s techniques carefully. It is likely that Anderson’s fictions helped him to

discern characters as American types and quickened his interest in depicting the psychological quirks of modern men, for in the essay ‘‘Personalism,’’ Wright asserted that ‘‘Anderson pictured the lonely soul of the crushed petit bourgeois’’ (Fabre 6). In ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ Wright listed Anderson among the writers who ‘‘should form the heritage of the Negro writer’’ (Wright and Fabre 45). According to Michel Fabre’s inventory, Wright’s library in Paris contained Beyond Desire (1932), Winesburg, Ohio, Dark Laughter, and Many Marriages (6). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Wright, Ellen and Michel Fabre, eds. Richard Wright Reader. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1945.

ANGELO HERNDON CASE Along with the more famous Scottsboro Trial, the Angelo Herndon case dramatized in a very clear way the injustices of southern law in the 1930s and how the southern legal system enforced segregated life in the Deep South. Angelo Herndon was a black communist organizer who, at age 19, was arrested in an Atlanta demonstration in June 1932 for inciting ‘‘insurrection’’ against the state of Georgia, a capital offense. In his first trial he was defended by two black communist lawyers, Benjamin Davis and John Geer, who challenged Georgia’s excluding blacks from juries and defended Herndon’s right to organize and carry out peaceful demonstrations. An all-white jury, after a brief deliberation, found Herndon guilty and sentenced him to 18 to 20 years in prison. Like the Scottsboro case, this case lingered in appeals courts for several years and became a national cause ce´ le` bre. Herndon’s appeal was handled by the International Labor Defense, a communist legal defense organization. A team of prominent lawyers which included Whitney North Seymour twice appealed to the U.S. 21

Anvil Supreme Court and in 1937 Herndon v. Lowry resulted in the Georgia ‘‘insurrection law’’ being ruled unconstitutional. After being released from prison, Herndon moved to New York City where he resumed his work as a communist organizer and co-edited Negro Quarterly with Ralph Ellison. He left the Communist Party toward the end of World War II and moved to Chicago where he had a career in business. As a black man who had grown up in the Deep South and as a member of the Communist Party who was deeply committed to protesting racial injustices in America, Wright took a strong interest in the Herndon case. One of the factors which drew him to communism was its firm support of blacks like Herndon and the Scottsboro boys who were victimized by southern law. Wright knew Herndon personally and worked with him in Harlem on a number of leftist projects. The two participated in the 1939 League of American Writers Congress in New York. Wright owned a personal copy of Herndon’s book, Let Me Live. Selected Bibliography: Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live. New York: Random House, 1937. Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998.

ANVIL A journal of proletarian fiction and essays for workers which was founded in 1933 by Jack Conroy and Ben Hagglund. It was edited in Conroy’s hometown of Moberly, Missouri and printed by Hagglund, an itinerant printer, in whatever city he happened to be working in. It was distributed in factories and leftist bookstores. It replaced an earlier leftist magazine the Rebel Poet which folded in October 1932 when Phillip Rahv and other members of the editorial board tried to make the magazine a vehicle for communist propaganda. Conroy, who edited the Rebel Poet from January 1931 to October 1932, created Anvil to provide a forum for proletarian literature without being narrowed by Communist Party dogma. Using the slogan ‘‘stories for the workers,’’

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Anvil published a wide range of young writers such as Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Langston Hughes, and Erskine Caldwell who would later play important roles in the development of American literature in the 1930s and 1940s. In late 1935, the Communist Party coerced Conroy to merge Anvil with Partisan Review, edited by Rahv and William Phillips, threatening to withdraw Anvil from party bookstores if Conroy did not comply. The new journal was called Partisan Review and Anvil which was based in New York. Because Conroy had family commitments which would not allow him to leave his home in Missouri, he was not able to deal effectively with Rahv’s political maneuverings with the editorial board of the magazine and gradually lost input into its operation. When Rahv broke with the Communist Party in 1936, the publication of Partisan Review and Anvil was suspended, and when it resumed in 1937 as a leftist journal independent of communist control, it reverted to its earlier title of Partisan Review. Anvil became defunct. Nelson Algren then invited Conroy to Chicago to start another magazine, New Anvil. It was published in Chicago from March 1939 to August 1940 but went out of business as World War II redirected American leftists from promoting a workers’ revolution to joining in the fight against fascism in Europe. Conroy gave up his duties as editor of New Anvil to work for the WPA and also collaborate with Algren in writing pamphlets which supported the war effort. Anvil played an important role in Wright’s early career since it was one of the first journals to publish his work. Upon the recommendation of Abe Aaron, one of Wright’s co-workers in the Chicago Post Office who had published a story in Anvil, Wright sent two poems and a story to Anvil and they were quickly accepted and published. His poems ‘‘Strength’’ and ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ were published in the March–April 1934 issue and his story ‘‘Post Office Nights’’ appeared in Anvil’s July–August 1934 issue.

Argentina Placing this early work in a respected leftist journal strongly encouraged Wright to pursue his writing seriously. And Anvil’s aggressively proletarian focus appealed to Wright’s own increasingly radical outlook on life. Moreover, his experience with Anvil put him in contact with Jack Conroy, initiating a long-term friendship that proved beneficial for both writers. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in America, 1900– 1954. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956. Suggs, John Christian. ‘‘Jack Conroy’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1981. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982.

ARAGON, LOUIS (3 October 1897– 24 December 1982) A French poet, novelist, and essayist, he epitomized the ‘‘engaged’’ artist who was deeply involved in social and political issues. His major work reflects many of the important events and trends of the twentieth century such as the two world wars, the rise of fascism and communism, the Great Depression, and the revolutions of 1968. His career can be divided into three phases: 1. Surrealism, in which he wrote experimental novels such as Telemachus’ Adventures (1922) and Paris Peasant (1926) 2. Socialist Realism, in which he wrote novels such as The Real World (1934) and Les Communistes (1949–51) which express Marxist themes 3. Experimentalism, in which he produced Henri Matisse, Roman (1971), a novel which made extensive use of techniques borrowed from abstract art.

Aragon converted to communism in the early 1930s and was a prominent figure in the French Communist Party for over thirty years. He visited the Soviet Union in 1930 to attend the Second Annual Congress of Revolutionary Writers, and when he returned to France, he wrote ‘‘Red Front,’’ a long Marxist poem in experimental free verse which advocated open violence against French authorities. He was tried for inciting

soldiers to mutiny and given a five-year suspended sentence. The French Community Party rose to his defense and his trial was a cause ce´le`bre which made Aragon a public figure who was much admired in leftist circles throughout the world. In 1934, Wright was given a copy of e. e. cummings’ translation of Red Front by Abe Aaron, a close friend and fellow member of Chicago’s John Reed Club. Wright was fascinated by the poem’s experimental techniques and Marxist themes. When he wrote his long poem ‘‘Transcontinental’’ a year later, he dedicated it to Aragon ‘‘in praise of Red Front’’ and used many of the themes and techniques employed in Aragon’s poem. Wright’s poem, like Aragon’s, takes the form of a collage set in radically free verse which combines snippets from popular cultures such as news headlines and songs with surrealistic images describing the collapse of capitalist society. Just as Aragon uses a red locomotive as a symbol of an oncoming people’s revolution, Wright imagines proletarian revolt sweeping the United Stated in terms of a powerful automobile making a transcontinental journey. Wright heard Aragon speak at the Third American Writers’ Congress in New York in June 1939. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Fabre, Michel. ‘‘From Revolutionary Poetry to Haiku’’ in The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Reck, Rima. ‘‘Louis Aragon’’ in Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 72. French Novelists, 1930–1960, edited by Catherine Savage Brosman. Detroit: Gale, 1988.

ARGENTINA In 1948 Wright was adjusting to his new life in Paris and was also in the initial phases of writing the novel which would ultimately become The Outsider. He was having real difficulty writing the book in part because it was a new direction in his writing since it explored broadly philosophical rather than specifically racial themes. 23

Argentina So he was intrigued when Pierre Chenal, a French film director working in Argentina since the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, contacted him about doing a film version of Native Son in Argentina. Chenal had seen a theatrical version of the novel in Buenos Aires a few years earlier and was convinced that an outstanding film of Native Son could be made in Argentina which would be free of the artistic constraints which would be imposed by Hollywood. Wright had a long-term interest in film and had even considered forming a film company in 1945. Moreover, he made elaborate use of cinematic techniques in Native Son and had claimed in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ that the novel was structured ‘‘like a play on the stage or a film on the screen’’ (Wright 537). So he had no problem leaving the novel which was giving him substantial difficulty and devoting himself fully to a project he had been wanting to do for several years. The picture was shot in Argentina for several reasons. To begin with, Chenal had worked there for nearly a decade and had many professional contacts there. Production costs were much cheaper in Argentina than in either France or the United States, and they could count on some government support since the Argentine regime of dictator Juan Peron was interested in creating a large-scale movie industry. And, despite Peron’s repressive policies in other areas, both Wright and Chenal were convinced that an honest film about American racial problems, if toned down politically, would be easier to produce in multicultural Argentina than in France or America, which were experiencing embarrassing racial dilemmas in the late 1940s and early 1950s. So on August 20, 1949 Wright left his wife and young children for an indefinite period of time to produce a film of Native Son in Argentina. He sailed from Paris to New York where he discussed contractual matters with his agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. and then went to Chicago where he and Chenal shot the external scenes of the film. He returned briefly to New York and set sail for

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Argentina on September 22, 1949, arriving in Buenos Aires on October 11, 1949. Wright worked on the film in Buenos Aires until it was finally completed, with much difficulty, in June 1950. Although biographical information on Wright’s life in Argentina is indeed scarce, his remarks in interviews shed some light on his experience there. In an October 28, 1949 interview given in the Argentinean journal El Hogar, he described Buenos Aires as ‘‘a city without prejudice,’’ a place where nobody could ‘‘feel like a stranger’’ (Kinnamon 135). He declared that in Buenos Aires he did not miss Paris and felt that the city was ‘‘an ideal place to produce free from pressure the film I dream of ’’ (Kinnamon 135). In a later interview published shortly before his death in the Paris journal France-U.S.A., however, he gave a very different view of Argentina as a country which has been ‘‘oppressed’’ (Kinnamon 210) by a dictator. In Pagan Spain Wright compared the oppression under France to the tyranny imposed upon Argentineans by Peron. Wright’s protracted stay in Argentina had negative consequences in his personal life as it weakened his ten-year marriage. It also had serious, long-term economic repercussions. Although Wright had anticipated substantial profits from the film, poor distribution, negative reviews, and censorship made it a box office failure. In the end, he netted only a few thousand dollars from this ill-advised venture, hardly enough to repay him for two years of work as a script writer and actor. As the royalties from Black Boy thinned out and books such as The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and The Long Dream failed to produce significant profits, Wright’s financial problems continued to mount for the rest of his life, draining him of energy and weakening his health. Selected Bibliography: Cripps, Thomas. ‘‘Native Son in the Movies’’ in Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Edited by David Ray and Robert Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Kinnamon, Keneth. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Wright,

Arkansas Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ in Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

ARKANSAS As a child Wright lived for short periods in two Arkansas towns along the Mississippi River, West Helena and Elaine. These two small towns, located 25 miles apart from each other in Phillips County, were settings for some of the most traumatic experiences of Wright’s early life. After Wright’s father abandoned his family in Memphis and his mother was unable to work because of illness, he went with his mother and brother Leon in the fall of 1916 to live with his Aunt Maggie and her husband, Silas Hoskins, in Elaine. Wright, who saw his uncle as a kind of father surrogate and regarded his aunt as ‘‘another mother’’ (Wright 77), was initially happy in Elaine but this quickly changed when Silas was murdered by whites and the Wrights had to flee in terror during the middle of the night to West Helena where they stayed in hiding in a rented room for nearly a month. They then returned to Jackson, Mississippi where they lived with Wright’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson. Unable to adjust to Grandmother Wilson’s strict Seventh Day Adventist lifestyle, they returned to West Helena where his mother and aunt found jobs as domestics. Maggie soon took up with a lover, ‘‘Professor’’ Matthews, who was in West Helena escaping the law. When Maggie and Matthews left for Detroit, Wright, his mother, and brother were again stranded and faced severe hunger and economic hardship. Wright’s mother eventually found a job working in a doctor’s office and Wright and his brother started school in the fall of 1918. Wright was living in West Helena when World War I ended on November 11, 1918, a day when he witnessed for the first time in his life the flight of an airplane. Not long after this, Wright’s mother suffered a paralyzing stroke, and he was forced to leave school and work a series of menial jobs to help support the family. The family was then split

up with Wright’s brother being sent to Detroit to live with Aunt Maggie and Wright being sent to Greenwood, Mississippi to live with his aunt and uncle, Clark and Jody Wilson. Wright’s traumatic experiences in Elaine and West Helena left him with deeply embedded emotional and psychological scars. As Margaret Walker has stressed, his painful experiences as a child in the Deep South gave him a ‘‘psychic wound’’ (Walker 43) which shaped his personality, a wound he tried to heal with his writing. The murder of his uncle and the hunger and poverty his family was forced to endure in Arkansas engraved in Wright’s psyche the fear and anxiety which made him ‘‘limp’’ through his days in West Helena ‘‘under the threat of violence’’ (Wright 87). This in turn caused him to see himself as ‘‘the victim of a thousand lynchings’’ (Wright 87). He developed two strategies for coping with this hostile environment. First of all, he developed an inward life which could make things ‘‘happen within’’ (Wright 85) as a way of compensating for his feelings of impotence when dealing with his outer environment. His fantasies thus became a ‘‘moral bulwark’’ which enabled him to keep his ‘‘emotional integrity whole’’ (Wright 87). This eventually would lead him to become a writer who could use words to fight back at a world which crippled his mother and murdered his uncle. Secondly, Wright began from his days in West Helena to develop a longing to leave the South altogether and seek a new life elsewhere. This would result in his going to Chicago in December 1927. Interestingly, one of the rumors he heard as a young boy in West Helena became raw material for a story which he would compose in the North. He was told that a black woman avenged the murder of her husband by a white mob when she attended her husband’s burial with a shotgun wrapped in a sheet. Just as she had finished praying for her husband, she unwrapped the gun and used it to kill four white men. Although Wright never could ascertain whether the story he heard in West Helena was ‘‘factually true,’’ his harsh experiences there convinced him that it was 25

Aswell, Edward ‘‘emotionally true’’ (Wright 86), and he used it as the basis for one of the concluding events in ‘‘Bright and Morning Star,’’ the final story in the 1940 version of Uncle Tom’s Children. In that story, a black mother name Sue avenges the death of her son by whites by using a shotgun concealed in a sheet to kill the man responsible for her son’s death. See also Wilson, Maggie; Wright, Ella. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

ASWELL, EDWARD (6 April 1900– November 1958) Editor at Harper and Brothers and Doubleday who became Wright’s friend and one of his longtime literary confidantes. A white southerner who knew the racial problems of the south firsthand and who left the South, first to attend college at Harvard and later to work in Chicago and New York, he worked closely with Wright on most of his major works and was influential in getting Native Son and Black Boy accepted as Book-of-the-Month Club selections. His relationship with Wright began when he was one of the ‘‘unofficial judges’’ (Rowley 139) in the Story magazine contest which awarded Wright’s ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ first prize in 1937. After the prize was given, he encouraged Wright to submit Uncle Tom’s Children to Harper, thus initiating Wright’s long association with that publisher. He also was a strong advocate at Harper for the publication of Native Son, battling other editors who backed off from the novel’s disturbing content and frank naturalistic style. Wright did not always agree with Aswell’s literary judgments and sometimes rejected his suggestions, knowing that this might endanger his chances for publication. But, in the main he respected Aswell’s advice and trusted him as a close friend. He dedicated

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The Long Dream to Aswell and Paul Reynolds, Jr., and in a 1957 letter to Aswell he declared ‘‘I would rather die than let you down’’ (Rowley 141). Aswell, in turn, greatly admired Wright both as a ‘‘thoughtful’’ and ‘‘courageous’’ person and also as an important writer who changed the direction of American literature. In a 1941 letter, he described Wright as ‘‘The best read man I have ever met’’ and ‘‘one of the most powerful and most widely acclaimed novelists of our time’’ (Rowley 141). When Aswell died suddenly from a heart attack in 1958, Wright was struck by a deep sense of personal loss. In a letter to Reynolds, he revealed that Aswell was ‘‘a rare man, the like of which, as an editor and friend, I don’t think I shall ever find again’’ (Fabre 470). Recent scholarship, however, has found that Aswell’s influence on Wright’s work, though largely positive, created some problems. Wright resisted Aswell’s advice to change the title of Native Son in favor of a more ‘‘colorful’’ title and he also refused to implement Aswell’s suggestions that he substantially cut Max’s courtroom speeches. He did, however, agree to delete the scene where Bigger and his friends masturbate in a Chicago movie theater, thereby depriving that book of an important metaphor. And in the rush to press required to meet Book-of-the-Month deadlines, Aswell had Dorothy Canfield Fisher’s introduction typeset without Wright reading it. Aswell’s role in the publication of Black Boy was also somewhat problematic. Although he campaigned hard for Harper to publish the book and later worked diligently to have it included as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, he did encourage Wright to make important changes which some have argued have compromised the book’s vision. Although Wright’s autobiography, originally titled American Hunger, encompassed both his growing up in the South and his coming to maturity in Chicago, Aswell sided with Harper’s editors who wanted the volume to end with Wright leaving the South for a new life in the North. (He convinced Wright that the Chicago

Atlantic Monthly, The section of the book would be published in a second volume, something which in fact did not happen until long after Wright’s death in 1977.) This changed the tone of the book considerably —while Wright’s original text ended pessimistically with his being disillusioned by his northern experiences, the book published by Harper ends with a strong note of optimistic expectation. Wright’s original text was not made available until the Library of America published the restored text of Black Boy/American Hunger in 1991. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Too Honest for His Own Time,’’ The New York Times Book Review (December 29, 1991), 3. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Ward, Jerry W. ‘‘Introduction to the Harper/Perennial Edition of Black Boy (American Hunger).’’ New York, 1993, xi–xxi.

ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE A distinguished American magazine founded in Boston in 1857 by a group of writers that included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell, it focused on politics, science, and the arts. From its inception it emphasized American culture and its unique qualities. It editors included James Russell Lowell (1857–61), James Thomas Fields (1861–1871) William Dean Howells (1871–1881), Thomas Bailey Aldrich (1881–1890), Horace Elisha Scudder (1890–1898), Walter Hines Page (1898– 1899), Bliss Perry (1899–1909), Ellery Sedgwick (1909–1938), Edward A. Weeks (1938–1966), Robert Manning (1966–1980), William Whitworth (1980–1999), Michael Kelly (1999– 2002), Cullen Murphy (interim editor, never named editor-in-chief, 2002–2006), and James Bennet (2006– ). Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway published some of their early work in The Atlantic Monthly and Julia Ward Howe also published ‘‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’’ in this magazine. Over the years The Atlantic Monthly has been an important vehicle for discussing political

and social issues in America. Felix Frankfurter’s essay in defense of Sacco and Vanzetti appeared in a 1927 issue and Martin Luther King’s ‘‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’’ was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1963. This journal was also one of the first nationally prominent magazines to draw attention to the work of African-American writers. Under the editorship of William Dean Howells, Charles Waddell Chestnutt’s fiction and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry were reviewed. W. E. B. Du Bois later published work in The Atlantic. Wright first became familiar with the magazine when he lived in Memphis and bought used copies of it along with The American Mercury and Harper’s. As Michel Fabre has noted, all three were ‘‘enlightened and liberal’’ magazines which were ‘‘publishing the best writers of the period’’ (Fabre 64). Such reading drew Wright’s attention to some of the main social and political issues of the times while also introducing him to the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Crane, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Emile Zola. This reading gave him much-needed access to a liberatingly modern world well beyond the Deep South which he had come to regard as a mental prison and emotional hell. As Wright revealed in Black Boy/American Hunger, he was able to discover through books and magazines like The Atlantic Monthly ‘‘new avenues of seeing and feeling’’ as well as ‘‘new knowledge’’ which helped him to construct a ‘‘new life’’ (Wright 296–97). Wright published two important pieces in The Atlantic Monthly. In reply to David Cohn’s negative review of Native Son which labeled the book a corrosive study in hate, Wright wrote a short essay, ‘‘I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me’’ which appeared in the June 1940 issue. Wright stressed that his novel simply reported on rather than created racial animosity and violence. He added that when he visited foreign countries such as Mexico he witnessed racial harmony and encountered problems only when meeting American tourists and businessmen. Wright’s ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ came out in the August 1944 Atlantic Monthly, explaining his reasons for leaving the 27

Attaway, William Communist Party. Although Wright had rather quietly left the party in 1942, this essay was his public renunciation of communism and generated a great deal of hostility toward him by party members. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

ATTAWAY, WILLIAM (19 November 1911–17 June 1986) African American novelist who was born of middle class parents in Greenville, Mississippi. His father, a physician, and his mother, a teacher, moved the family to Chicago in 1921 to escape the restrictions and violence of southern segregation. Attaway rebelled against his parents’ desire that he attain a conventional education, attending vocational school rather than an academic high school. He entered the University of Illinois but dropped out to spend two years on the road, leading a vagabond life and supporting himself with a variety of jobs as a seaman, salesman, and labor organizer. He became acquainted with Richard Wright when the two worked in Chicago in 1935 for the Federal Writers Project. He published his first story, ‘‘Tale of a Blackamoor,’’ in Challenge in 1936. Moving to New York in 1937, he worked on his first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder and also worked for the Federal Theatre Project as an actor and script writer. Like Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, Attaway stopped writing fiction and lapsed into a literary near-silence after publishing early work which drew praise from critics. His first novel, Let Me Breathe Thunder (1939) focused on two white hoboes whose travels end in disaster when the forces of environment crushed them. Stanley Young, writing for the New York Times Book Review singled out Attaway as a promising young writer and praised the novel for its forthright realism. His second novel, Blood on the Forge (1941), written while Attaway had a two-year grant from The Julius Rosenwald Fund, drew strong praise 28

from a number of important critics, including Ralph Ellison. Telling the story of a black family moving from the rural South to the urban, industrialized North, it was characterized by Robert Bone as ‘‘by far the most perceptive novel of The Great Migration’’ (Bone 133). After this critical success of his first two novels, Attaway, curiously, published no more fiction. He wrote two books on African-American music, Calypso Song Book (1957) and Hear America Singing (1967). He made his living mainly by writing scripts for film, radio, and television. He also composed and arranged songs, several for his friend Harry Belafonte. In the 1960s he became involved in The Civil Rights Movement and participated in a number of demonstrations and marches, including the 1965 March in Selma, Alabama. In later years, he moved away from New York, living for eleven years in the Barbados, fulfilling his desire to live in a country which had a predominately black population and whose government was run by black people. His final years were spent in California where he died in 1986. Attaway’s fiction is strongly influenced by Wright’s work and he is often included as part of the ‘‘Wright School’’ of writers. Blood on the Forge has particularly strong ties to Native Son since both novels center on characters who are victimized by the harsh forces of the modern urban environment. There are also revealing parallels between Wright and Attaway as black men coming to maturity during the first half of the twentieth century. Both men knew the hardships of spending their youth in segregated Mississippi and each also experienced the bitter disappointments of the migration to northern cities. It is also significant that Wright and Attaway lived for extended periods of time outside the United States, relieved to be free of the racism and injustice of post–World War II America. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Ellison, Ralph. ‘‘Transition,’’ Negro Quarterly (Spring

‘‘Attributes of Life’’ 1942) 87–92. Gayle, Addison. The Way of the New World. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Margolies, Edward. Native Sons. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1968. Rogers, Lawrence. Canaan Bound: The AfricanAmerican Great Migration Novel. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1997. Young, James. Black Writers of the Thirties. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973.

‘‘ATTRIBUTES OF LIFE’’ When Wright graduated first in his class at Smith Robertson Junior High School on May 29, 1925, his valedictorian speech was entitled ‘‘Attributes of Life.’’ In its original form it was a criticism of the South’s segregated system of education, arguing that it deprived black people of ‘‘an intellectual life and human qualities’’ (Fabre 54). Wright worked hard on this speech for several weeks prior to graduation and eventually committed it to memory. Because white people would be attending the graduation ceremonies and the school’s principal, W. H. Lanier, feared that the subversive content of Wright’s speech might endanger his plans to establish a black high school in Jackson, Wright was forbidden to deliver his speech. Lanier instructed him instead to read a speech which he had written and would be acceptable to a white audience. When Wright refused to go along with this, a compromise was eventually formulated. Lanier allowed Wright to deliver his own speech but only after certain passages were eliminated which might offend the white authorities. As Wright’s friend Joe Brown, who graduated with Wright from Smith Robertson, would observe, ‘‘We Negroes had to be on our very best behavior and not insult the good whites’’ (Rowley 36). In Black Boy, Wright describes his disappointment and anger with the way he was treated at his graduation. He realized that Mr. Lanier’s pressuring him to give a speech that would be pleasing to whites was yet another strategy ‘‘that snared young black minds into supporting the southern way of life’’ (Wright 208). He also realized that the school principal’s offer to help him to go to

college and eventually become a teacher was motivated by a desire to control him and make him ‘‘fit’’ (Wright 207) into a social system which would never recognize him as a person. After considering the possibility of not attending the graduation ceremonies as a protest against the principal’s treatment of him, Wright decided to deliver the censored speech. But this painful episode confirmed his decision to leave Mississippi in search of a better life elsewhere. Although he did attend the new black high school (named in honor of W. H. Lanier) when it opened in the fall of 1925, he dropped out after a few weeks so that he could get a job and save the money he needed to establish a freer life for himself in Memphis and later Chicago. Wright’s formal education, therefore, ended with his delivery of ‘‘Attributes of Life’’ at his junior high graduation. This painful episode was part of a pattern of silencing which can be traced back to Wright’s early years and persisted throughout his life. Black Boy opens with his mother scolding him, warning him to ‘‘keep still’’ and make ‘‘no noise’’ (Wright 3). When he later raises questions about the ways in which whites treat blacks in the segregated South, he is told not to talk about such matters and he is ‘‘frightened speechless’’ (Wright 28) when he begins school at Howard Institute in Memphis. As a young man Wright would also find his voice muffled by communist authorities who wanted him to mouth the party line rather than express his own views as an individual black man. And editors, most notably those from the Book-of-the-Month Club, would pressure Wright throughout his writing career to adjust his voice to make it more acceptable to white audiences. It was not until 1991 that books such as Native Son, Black Boy/American Hunger, and Lawd Today! were ‘‘restored’’ by the Library of America editions to say what Wright wanted them to say. Indeed, one can see Wright’s entire life and writing career as his refusal to ‘‘keep still’’ and a resolve to use words as ‘‘weapons’’ (Wright 293) against a world which was intent on either silencing him or controlling his voice. 29

‘‘Avant Garde Writing’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/ American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

‘‘AVANT GARDE WRITING’’ (1900– 1960) In April 1935, Wright won second prize with this essay in a contest sponsored by two magazines, Silouettes and New Talent. In the essay Wright stressed the following points: 1. Art represents social conditions and therefore must constantly change to reflect adequately an everchanging society. 2. Avant garde writers must possess a ‘‘new consciousness’’ which must be expressed in new forms. 3. Avant garde literature needs to be directed at the masses of working-class and poor people, and not addressed to an elite intelligentsia.

The essay was never published and is part of the Wright Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

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When Wright wrote this essay he was a new member of the John Reed Club and the Communist Party. Friends such as Abe Aaron, Joyce Gourfain, and Jane Newton, each of whom were communists and John Reed Club members, introduced Wright to much avant garde literature. He eagerly read books by Gertrude Stein, e. e. cummings, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Louis Aragon. The experimental techniques used by these writers greatly influenced Wright’s early poetry and fiction. Lawd Today!, for example, employs stream of consciousness narration which resembles that used in Joyce’s Ulysses and Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Poems such as ‘‘Transcontinental’’ and ‘‘We of the Streets’’ employ snippets from popular culture embedded in a collage in much the same way as Aragon uses the materials in his proletarian poem ‘‘Red Front.’’ And Wright’s poetry consistently employs the sort of radically free verse he admired in poets such as cummings, Eliot, and Carl Sandburg. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

B BALDWIN, JAMES (2 August 1924– 30 November 1987) An important African-American novelist, essayist, and cultural critic, he was born out of wedlock to Emma Berdis Jones who, three years later, married David Baldwin, an evangelical preacher from New Orleans who set up a store-front church in Harlem. Baldwin’s mother and stepfather had eight children, and he was often their main caregiver. Although adopted by his stepfather, Baldwin’s relationship with him was deeply conflicted. David Baldwin was a staunch religionist who ruled his household in a sternly authoritarian way, and Baldwin rebelled against him strongly as a child and adolescent. His main refuge from his troubled family life was reading. As a teenager Baldwin read widely in the holdings of Harlem’s public libraries and was particularly drawn to the novels of Charles Dickens. He also began writing at an early age, publishing a story on the Spanish Civil War when he was twelve in a church newspaper. He thrived academically at Frederick Douglass Junior High where he was taught and mentored by Countee Cullen. He went to high school at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he continued to excel in his studies and co-edited the school literary magazine. After graduation in 1942, he began writing reviews for the New

Leader and The Nation. His essay ‘‘The Harlem Ghetto,’’ which appeared in the New Leader, caught the attention of Robert Warshow, an editor for Commentary, and this led to Baldwin gaining recognition in the New York literary community. Baldwin met Wright in 1945 when a mutual friend, Henrietta Wiegal, asked Wright to examine the manuscript of a novel which would eventually become Go Tell It on the Mountain. The two met in Wright’s Brooklyn apartment, and Wright soon became a friend and a mentor. It was Wright who paved the way for Baldwin to win a $500 grant from the Eugene Saxton Foundation which enabled him to devote himself more fully to the writing of his novel. A year after Wright had moved with his family to Paris, Baldwin won a Rosenwald Foundation Fellowship which helped fund his own move to Paris. He immediately established contact with Wright who helped place his essay ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’’ in a 1949 issue of Zero magazine, along with Wright’s story ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow.’’ Baldwin’s essay, which was sharply critical of the protest tradition in AfricanAmerican literature and also took Wright to task for operating so closely within that tradition, put an end to his friendship with Wright. After Wright read the essay, he became enraged with Baldwin 31

Beale Street and in an angry exchange with him at a Paris cafe´ accused him of ingratitude and self promotion. Their relationship deteriorated even more when the essay also appeared in the June 1949 issue of Partisan Review, received a very wide audience, and began a negative re-assessment of Wright’s work throughout the fifties. Baldwin only rubbed salt in Wright’s wounds when he later published ‘‘Many Thousands Gone’’ which was even more critical of Wright’s fiction, particularly Native Son. In that essay, Baldwin argued that Wright unwittingly supported white stereotypes about black people by making his central character a sub-human monster rather than a complexlydrawn human being. After reading both essays, Wright ‘‘would have no more to do’’ (Fabre 362) with Baldwin and avoided him in Paris. Contact between the two men after 1950 consisted mainly of heated arguments. Fabre, however, argues that long after their breakup Baldwin remained ‘‘fascinated by his mentor’’ (Fabre 362) and sought to reconcile with him. After Wright’s death, Baldwin re-assessed Wright’s work, providing much more affirmative evaluations of particular novels and a more generous estimate of Wright’s place in AfricanAmerican literary tradition. He had high praise for Lawd Today! when it was published posthumously in 1963. In Nobody Knows My Name, published in 1961, he admitted that Wright’s work was ‘‘an immense liberation and revelation for me. He became my ally and my witness, and alas! my father’’ (Baldwin 153). In that same book, he praised Wright for transcending the tradition of protest literature when he pointed out that ‘‘Wright’s unrelentingly bleak landscape was not merely that of the Deep South, or of Chicago, but that of the world, the human heart’’ (Baldwin 149). In retrospect, it remains clear that, despite their differences, Baldwin and Wright were closely related writers. Wright cleared the way for Baldwin and his generation of novelists, providing them with a much-needed foundation. Wright’s brutally honest depiction of the relationship

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between sex, race, and violence helped to free Baldwin to ground much of his own work in those preoccupations. Novels such as Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Another Country (1962) were possible because of the pioneering work Wright had done with Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. And Baldwin’s biographical essays in Notes of a Native Son (1945) and The Fire Next Time (1963) are likewise rooted in Black Boy/American Hunger, a book which helped to catalyze Baldwin’s imagination when he read it with such rapt attention a few days before his first meeting with Wright in 1949. Selected Bibliography: Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dell, 1961. Bloom, Harold. James Baldwin: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Leeming, David. James Baldwin: A Biography. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1994. Harris, Trudier (ed.). New Essays on Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

BEALE STREET Sometimes called ‘‘the black Main Street of Memphis,’’ Beale Street begins at the Mississippi River waterline and extends east for about a mile and a half. Lined with commercial buildings, churches, private residences, as well as nightclubs, bars, and whorehouses, Beale Street is best known as one of the nation’s most influential centers of African-American music. From the 1880s onward, it has been known as a crucible of ragtime, blues, jazz, and rhythm and blues music. Wright spent two important periods of his life in Memphis, and Beale Street played a prominent role in both periods. When his family left Natchez, Mississippi in 1911 while Wright was three years old, his father worked as a night porter in a Beale Street drugstore. Memphis at that time was known as a freewheeling river town which was ‘‘the murder capital of the nation’’ (Kinnamon 9)

Beauvoir, Simone de and Beale Street was both a place of serious violence and an exciting center of night life. Wright’s father got into the habit of frequenting Beale Street bars and spending less time at home, eventually deserting the family for a woman he met on Beale Street. When his mother was forced to work longer hours as a cook to support her young family, Wright and his brother Leon were left more and more to themselves and soon became street urchins. In Black Boy, Wright describes himself as becoming ‘‘a drunkard in my sixth year,’’ begging for money and roaming the streets with ‘‘a gang of children’’ (Wright 25). After Mrs. Wright became too ill to work, Wright and his brother were sent to a Memphis orphanage where he experienced some of the most traumatic experiences of his young life. In spring 1916, his maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson, came to Memphis and brought Wright and his mother and brother to her home on Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi where they spent the summer before going to live with his Aunt Maggie and her husband in Elaine, Arkansas. When Wright left Mississippi and moved to Memphis in November, 1925, he quickly found Beale Street, ‘‘the street I had been told was filled with danger: pickpockets, prostitutes, cutthroats, and black confidence men’’ (Wright 245). But after a few blocks, he met a ‘‘big mulatto woman’’ (Wright 245) named Mrs. Moss who invited him to board with her family in her house on 570 Beale Street. Expecting that she was operating a whorehouse and was trying to victimize him, he was surprised to discover that she was a respectable church woman with a husband and daughter and was, indeed, ‘‘the warmest, friendliest person I had ever known’’ (Wright 247). Wright’s stay with the Moss family initially provided him with a ‘‘home’’ (247) where he could free himself for the first time in many years of ‘‘tension and fear’’ (Wright 248). But when Mrs. Moss began to pressure him to marry her daughter Bess and also pried into his ‘‘inner life’’ (Wright 250), he became uncomfortable and moved to a rented room on 875 Griffiths Place. As usual, Wright was nervous about people invading his privacy

and protected his independence and freedom by moving. He did not want either Mrs. Moss or her daughter to get a ‘‘hold’’ (Wright 254) on him. He remained puzzled, however, by his experiences with the Moss family on Beale Street which seemed to reverse his earlier experience as a child in Memphis. Whereas his father’s desertion left his family on the brink of ruin and caused Wright to withdraw deeply within himself, Mrs. Moss’s offer of a ‘‘home’’ also induced deep anxieties within him which caused him to isolate himself. The trusting natures of the Moss family and their desire for love and domestic stability in a place Wright associated with crime and corruption caused Wright to ask the question: ‘‘In Memphis, on Beale Street, how could there be such hope, belief, and faith in others?’’ (Wright 258). His life on Beale Street was Wright’s first contact with genuinely urban life since both Natchez, with a population of 12,000, and Jackson, whose population was around 20,000, were large country towns rather than real cities. It would take him some time before he would become fully aware of the complexities of urban life, understanding both its perils and opportunities. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

BEAUVOIR, SIMONE DE (9 January 1908–14 April 1986) Like her life-long partner Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir worked over a long period of time in a wide variety of areas, including literature, politics, philosophy, and journalism. Like so many French artists and intellectuals emerging from the horrors of World War II, she was a ‘‘committed writer’’ devoted to changing society by translating artistic activity into political action. One of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century, she was also a pioneering feminist whose book, The Second Sex (1953) remains a seminal text in feminist literature. 33

Beauvoir, Simone de She was born into an upper-middle class Parisian family which became impoverished when the family-owned bank collapsed in 1909. A precocious student, she was educated at elite French schools such as Catholic Cours De´sir, The Sorbonne, and Ecole Normale Superieur where she met Sartre in 1929. From an early age, she rebelled strongly against her bourgeois background and especially against her mother’s strict Catholicism. She and Sartre led a bohemian life during the 1930s, living together but resolving never to marry or have children, indulging in what they characterized as ‘‘contingent loves’’ which enabled them to have many lovers while still maintaining a close personal relationship which lasted until Sartre’s death in 1980. Vaguely political during the thirties, de Beauvoir and Sartre became leftist activists after the German occupation of France in 1940 and they remained faithful members of the non-Communist left for the remainder of their lives. She and Sartre collaborated in many common causes, becoming Cold War opponents of both American capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. They were staunch opponents of the French in the Algerian War and demonstrated vigorously against American involvement in Viet Nam. Like Sartre also, she was deeply committed to the philosophy of existentialism which centered on two fundamental beliefs: 1) the universe is ‘‘absurd,’’ lacking in rational order or transcendent purpose, and 2) man is ‘‘free’’ and could therefore create meaning through lucid consciousness and committed action. To intellectuals and writers like de Beauvoir who had survived the traumas of modern war and depression, and who also were repelled by the totalitarian states emerging in the twentieth century, existentialism had a powerful attraction since it posited human meaning in an otherwise meaningless world because it stressed the freedom of the individual to shape history and reshape society. De Beauvoir’s philosophical works are strongly existential and include Existentialism and Ordinary Wisdom (1948), The Ethics

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of Ambiguity (1948), and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). As a literary figure, de Beauvoir wrote a series of autobiographical works such as Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1962), and All Said and Done (1974). She also wrote several important novels which are deeply rooted in her own experiences and are therefore illuminated by her autobiographical writings. For the most part, they are ‘‘novels of ideas’’ which provide a fascinating portrait of France’s intellectual and artistic milieu from the late 1930s to the late 1960s. Each novel centers on an existential dilemma in which the main character has to make an agonizing choice which dramatically affects their own lives and the lives of others. Each novel also confronts its protagonist with the problem of how to define oneself vis-a`-vis what de Beauvoir called ‘‘The Other’’—a person or social force which puts limits on one’s personal freedom. In her early novel, She Came to Stay (1943), this problem is solved narcissistically when a woman murders her rival in a sexual triangle. But in her next novel, The Blood of Others (1948), which deals with the moral dilemmas faced by members of the French Resistance during the German occupation of France, this theme is given more complex treatment as the characters in that novel must harmonize their own freedom with a moral responsibility to affirm and protest the freedom of others. The Mandarins (1954) carries this complex vision of social responsibility and personal freedom into a Cold War context. A roman a` clef whose characters resemble Nelson Algren, Albert Camus, and Arthur Koestler, it tries to affirm a balance between the rights of the individual and responsibilities to a just society. De Beauvoir’s later novel Les Belles Imagistes (1968) examines her notion of ‘‘The Other’’ from a feminist perspective, focusing on the French advertising industry which objectifies and stereotypes women by making them conform to the ‘‘beautiful images’’ constructed by a consumer society.

Belgium Wright met de Beauvoir in 1947 when she visited New York as part of her five-month tour of the United States, which culminated in her book, America Day by Day. Already an admirer of Wright’s work, especially Black Boy, which she praised for its celebration of existential liberty, she immediately became close friends of Wright and his family. She visited Wright’s often in their Charles Street apartment and Wright introduced her to the music of Harlem as well as putting her in contact with many of his fellow writers such as Nelson Algren. A measure of the closeness between de Beauvoir and the Wrights is the fact that she dedicated her book about America to Ellen and Richard Wright. When the Wrights moved to Paris in 1947, their friendship with de Beauvoir and her partner Sartre deepened. Sartre and de Beauvoir introduced Wright to important French writers and helped Wright to publish his works in French journals such as Les Temps Modernes as well as arranging for French translations of Native Son and Black Boy. The three also collaborated on several political projects such as Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire, an organization of intellectuals on the non-Communist left and the Franco American Fellowship, a group of expatriate black writers and French intellectuals devoted to discussing racial problems in America and throughout the world. De Beauvoir became particularly close to Ellen Wright, especially after serious marital problems between the Wrights developed. She became Ellen’s confidante for a number of years, and Ellen Wright became de Beauvoir’s literary agent in 1951. De Beauvoir’s work was influential on Wright in two important ways. First of all, he saw her as a model of the ‘‘committed writer’’ who could use her art as a means of effecting social and political change. Secondly, he regarded her existential themes as similar to his own concerns for achieving personal freedom in an absurd world where an oppressive society imposed dehumanizing roles on its citizens, especially its minority people. de Beauvoir’s concept of ‘‘The Other,’’

any personal or social force which negated human freedom and dignity, would certainly have been a lens for Wright to view his own experience as an American black person dominated by a racist white society. And Wright was also strongly influenced by de Beauvoir’s feminism, regarding The Second Sex as an important book which viewed the plight of modern women as comparable to the problems encountered by people of color in a white-dominated society. Lastly, Wright would view his own political stance after he had abandoned communism as quite similar to the position worked out by de Beauvoir and Sartre. Although all three were ultimately suspicious of what had become of Marxist revolution in Russia, and finally rejected Stalinism in all its forms, each remained maverick socialists who hoped for an ethical revival of Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Ascher, Carol. Simone de Beauvoir: A Life of Freedom. Boston: Beacon Press, 1981. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Madsen, Alex. Hearts and Minds: The Common Journey of Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre. New York: William Morrow, 1977. Marks, Elaine. Critical Essays on Simone de Beauvoir. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1987. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. Henry Holt, 2001.

BELGIUM Belgium had an important political and economical role in the formation of Europe. It was a part of the very first steps of the European Union in the 1950s, with Germany, France, and Italy, as well as The Netherlands and Luxemburg, with which it formed the Benelux in 1948. It was also one of the founding members of NATO in 1949. Wright’s interest in Belgium mostly had to do with its colonial approach. At the time he briefly visited Belgium, in 1948, it still ruled the Congo, which it had occupied since the 1880s. Belgium’s official attitude toward its African colony was paternalistic. Private European and American corporations had invested heavily in the Belgian Congo after World War I to exploit its natural resources (cotton, oil palms, coffee, cacao, rubber, 35

Berry, Abner livestock, gold, diamonds, copper, tin, cobalt, and zinc). In particular, the Congo became an important source of uranium for the United States during World War II. After decades of struggle, Belgium suddenly capitulated in 1960 and arranged for the Congo to become an independent republic on June 30. Wright made two visits to Belgium: the first in 1948, and the second in 1954. In February 1948, after visiting Italy for five days, Wright traveled to England by way of Belgium, eager to compare political situations in different European countries. In Brussels, he saw a performance of Native Son. He also met with George Padmore, who shaped his interest in colonialism in Africa. At the time, the United States made great use of Belgian ports and bought uranium from its colony, which made Belgium the wealthiest country in Europe. Wright was repelled by Belgium’s materialism and commented on the nation’s wealth in a letter to Dorothy Norman: ‘‘The most innocent looking produce has MADE IN USA stamped on it. The Belgians are fat, dull, and their minds are as narrow and devious as their winding streets.’’ After that stop in Belgium, Wright wanted to go back to Africa and visit the Belgian Congo, intrigued by its particular parent-child relation with Belgium and its strict racial policies. Although he never got to visit the Belgian Congo, Wright made a second and final short trip to Belgium in the fall of 1954 when he lectured in Belgium, Switzerland, and Holland. Caroline Garnier Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam’s, 1968.

BERRY, ABNER (1902–27 June 1987) Berry was a communist organizer and journalist brought to Harlem in 1934 by James W. Ford to replace Harry Haywood as the head of the League of Negro Rights. Although he lacked

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college training, he possessed considerable skills as journalist and organizer and was steadfastly devoted to communist ideology and tactics. He helped to build the United Front in Harlem, a federation of black organizations which opposed racial discrimination in jobs and housing. He also was a regular contributor for many years to the Daily Worker and other leftist journals. Wright knew Berry from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s when both wrote for the Daily Worker and were involved in several communist projects. Berry was initially supportive of Wright’s work such as Uncle Tom’s Children which he saw as consistent with Marxist ideology. But he was ambivalent about Native Son, admiring it for its powerful depiction of proletarian life but criticizing it for its ideological inconsistencies and failure to provide a more positive image of communists such as Max and Jan. Like many of Wright’s coworkers in the party, Berry found Wright to be excessively individualistic and unable to submit himself to party discipline. Berry wrote several reviews of Wright’s work, most of which were extremely negative assessments. His May 10, 1953 review of The Outsider in the Daily Worker, entitled ‘‘Freedom to Murder,’’ attacked the novel for its gratuitous violence and unfair representation of communists. Berry described Wright as a self-indulgent loner who ‘‘has squandered his talent, prostituted his art, and thereby deserted humanity’’ (Kinnamon 337). In a September 1953 issue of Masses and Mainstream, he resumed his attack on the novel, portraying its central character, Cross Damon, as a ‘‘fascistic killer’’ and accusing Wright of ‘‘arty degeneracy’’ (Kinnamon 337). In 1956, Berry wrote two more reviews of Wright’s books. His July 1 piece in the Daily Worker surveyed Wright’s career from a Marxist perspective, praising the early works for their raw power and political vision but denouncing everything from Native Son onward as corrosively nihilistic, mired in ‘‘cynicism and doubt’’ (Kinnamon 372–73). His May 15 review of The Color Curtain, while taking Wright to task for

‘‘Between Laughter and Tears’’ endorsing western rationalism, admired the book for its accurate reporting. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933–1982. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1988. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983.

‘‘BETWEEN LAUGHTER AND TEARS’’ Wright published this review of Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God in the October 1937 issue of New Masses. He was sharply critical of both novels, claiming that neither book had ‘‘a basic idea or theme that lends itself to significant interpretation’’ (Wright 22). Although Wright gives Turpin credit for writing a novel which is ‘‘the first attempt of a Negro writer to encompass in fiction the rise of the Negro from slavery to the present’’ (Wright 22), he sharply criticizes Turpin for doing such a poor job of dramatizing his rich materials. He finds These Low Grounds to be filled with ‘‘social types’’ rather than ‘‘human beings’’ (Wright 22), because the characters are abstractly conceived rather than fleshed out in vivid, three-dimensional ways. Wright is particularly unhappy with the second half of the novel set in a modern American city, arguing that it does not ‘‘ring true’’ (Wright 25) because of Turpin’s lack of personal experience with the city. He concludes his treatment of These Low Grounds by advising Turpin to avoid ‘‘the bane of sheer competency’’ (Wright 25) and infuse his subject matter with more passion and a more significant theme. Wright is even harsher in his assessment of Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. He argued that she was writing for a white audience, pandering to their stereotyped notions of blacks as non-thinking, sensual creatures living simple lives in pastoral southern settings. Although he admitted that Hurston was a better craftsman and stylist than Turpin, he added that ‘‘her prose

is cloaked in that facile sensuality that has dogged Negro expression since the days of Phyllis Wheatley’’ (Wright 25). He identified Hurston’s writing with the minstrel tradition which he felt had helped to cripple black art: Miss Hurston voluntarily continues in her novel the tradition which was forced upon the Negro in theatre, that is, the minstrel technique that makes ‘‘white folks’’ laugh. Her characters eat and laugh and cry and work and kill; they swing like a pendulum in that safe and narrow orbit in which America likes to see the Negro live: between laughter and tears. (Wright 25)

In short, Wright found Hurston to be precisely the opposite of the kind of black writer he valorized in ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing.’’ While he advocated that African-American writers be politically engaged and employ words as weapons as a way of transforming society, he saw Hurston as a stylistically-gifted writer who nullified the importance of her art by centering her novel in a useless lyricism. Hurston was certainly not pleased with Wright’s review and answered it with an equally negative review of Uncle Tom’s Children in the April 2, 1938 issue of The Saturday Review of Literature. She accused Wright of grounding his book in hatred rather than understanding and claimed that he failed to see ‘‘the broader and more fundamental phases of Negro life’’ (Hurston 32). She also took Wright to task for proposing simplistic solutions to the complex problems he dramatized in Uncle Tom’s Children. For Hurston, a fiercely individualistic person who had a deep suspicion of leftist politics which imagined life in abstractly collectivist terms, Wright’s faith in communism was naı¨ve and wrong-headed: Mr. Wright’s author’s solution is the solution of the PARTY—state responsibility for everyone and individual responsibility for nothing . . . And march! (Hurston 32)

She concluded her review by deploring what she felt was excessive violence in Wright’s stories and accusing him of being ‘‘tone deaf ’’ (Hurston 32), 37

‘‘Between the World and Me’’ unable to re-create black speech in any convincing way. These very strongly worded reviews by Wright and Hurston reflect how radically different they were as interpreters of African-American experience. Contemporary scholars have often seen them as seminal writers who represent the opposite poles of African-American literature. They usually depict Wright as a paradigm of the socially engaged, politically active writer whose work centered on telling the truth about modern society’s inhuman treatment of blacks and other marginalized people. Hurston’s work, as her review of Uncle Tom’s Children suggests, has a very different orientation, focusing on a very different truth which emphasizes the powerful individualism and racial pride which her characters exhibit. While Wright was inclined to dramatize the damage done to black culture by the dominant white society, Hurston wanted to stress how that culture survived the stresses put upon it and became a redemptive source of beauty and value. Selected Bibliography: Hurston, Zora Neale. ‘‘Stories of Conflict.’’ The Saturday Review of Literature, 17 (April 2), 32. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears.’’ New Masses, 5 (October 1937), 22, 25.

‘‘BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME’’ The poem, which reenacts in excruciating detail a lynching of a black man by southern whites, was written at the outset of Wright’s career in 1934 and was published in the July/August 1935 issue of Partisan Review. As a young man growing up in one of the most rigidly segregated and explosively violent parts of the Deep South, Wright regarded lynching as the ultimate form of social intimidation which could be used to enforce Mississippi’s massive system of white dominance over black people. He knew of many instances in which black men were tortured and murdered when they were perceived to have stepped out of the ‘‘place’’ assigned to them by southern whites. His Uncle Silas Hoskins was killed in Elaine, Arkansas when he offended

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white people who were threatened by his successful business. He also knew Ray Robinson, the brother of one of his classmates at Smith Robertson Junior High School, who was castrated after he was discovered having sex with a white woman in a Jackson hotel where Wright worked. Margaret Walker has argued that ‘‘The psychic wound of white racism was the deepest mark which the white South left imprinted on Richard Wright’’ and that he ‘‘would spend all of his life seeking the true meaning of that psychic wound’’ (Walker 42). Lynching clearly was for Wright the ultimate form that wound could take. Early stories such as ‘‘Long Black Song’’ and ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ contain graphic descriptions of lynching and 12 Million Black Voices has a horrifying photograph of a lynched man. Black Boy/American Hunger portrays the murder of Silas Hoskins and the castration of Ray Robinson as traumatic events which left deep scars on Wright’s psyche. The Long Dream, published two years before Wright died, describes its central character expatriating himself in France after one of his friends meets Ray Robinson’s fate. ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ therefore, is a critically important work in the Wright canon because it depicts the young Wright directly confronting his deepest racial fears and attempting to understand and perhaps begin to heal the psychic wound inflicted upon him and other blacks by the ghastly ritual of lynching. In writing so forthrightly about lynching, Wright discovered in art a potent means of coming to terms with the ‘‘world’’ by exorcising his racial fears which had built a wall of fear separating him from that world. The poem begins with Wright coming upon the charred body of a lynching victim while taking a walk through the woods. As he perceives the ‘‘sooty’’ remains of the man, he identifies with him and imaginatively relives his agony. He is then plunged into a Dantean hell in which his heart is ‘‘circled by icy walls of fear’’ and his mind is ‘‘frozen with cold pity.’’ He absorbs the physical and psychological agony of the experience as the

‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ man’s skin is turned into ‘‘grey ashes’’ and his face is reduced to a ‘‘stony skull.’’ He also absorbs the full hatred of the crowd as they turn the grim ritual into a bacchanalian orgy where gin flasks are passed through the audience and whores apply their lipstick in anticipation of increased business from the aroused men. The ultimate sign of human despair and defeat for Wright was what he described in Black Boy/American Hunger as his mother’s ‘‘meaningless suffering’’ (Wright 118) and the ‘‘silent suffering’’ (Wright 359) suffered by the de-vocalized dogs he observed when he worked as a hospital orderly in Chicago. Lynching for Wright is a powerful symbol of such suffering since its victims are immobilized and passively endure their agonies. But ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ is not finally about meaningless or silent suffering since it is one of Wright’s early works which endowed him with his artistic voice and a consciousness which could understand and transcend the personal and cultural traumas which threatened to reduce him to the status of a ‘‘thing,’’ the term he uses at the outset of the poem to describe the lynched man. Although midway through the poem Wright imagines the man’s voice as ‘‘drowned in the roar’’ of his persecutors, Wright paradoxically discovers his own voice and powerfully articulates it in early poems like ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ and ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands.’’ And just as the ‘‘charred stump of a sapling’’ points its ‘‘blunt fingers accusingly at the sky,’’ after the lynching is concluded, Wright’s poem ends with him gazing at the ‘‘sun’’ as he points his finger in accusation of the culture which employs lynching as a perverse means of social control. In writing the poem he is no longer trapped by walls of fear ‘‘between’’ him and ‘‘the world.’’ His art has purged him of that fear, replacing it with a lucid, determined consciousness which can use words as weapons which enable him to fight back against a brutally racist society. The poem concludes, therefore, with the narrator gazing ‘‘child like’’ at the sun as he rises phoenix-like from the ashes and is reborn as a writer.

Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ in Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr., New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

‘‘BIG BOY LEAVES HOME’’ ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ was published in 1938, part of the original edition of Wright’s first major literary work, Uncle Tom’s Children. This collection of novellas was reissued in 1940 with two additional pieces, ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ and ‘‘Bright and Morning Star.’’ ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ appeared on its own two years earlier in the 1936 anthology The New Caravan. As the first story of Uncle Tom’s Children, it incorporates many of the themes that would dominate Wright’s meditations on race in twentiethcentury America: the importance of vernacular culture, the pervasive effects of social terror on the black psyche, the threat of lynching by white mobs, the omnipresence of death, and the imperative resourcefulness of the survivor figure. Behind the rather innocuous title lies a violent plot. Two climaxes center upon murder and racial retaliation in a southern setting, one presumably based upon the rural locales of Wright’s childhood, especially Mississippi. Fast-paced and chronological, the plot takes less than a full day to unravel. Four adolescent black boys—Big Boy, Lester, Bobo, and Buck— decide to skip school and loiter on land belonging to a white farmer, Ol Man Harvey. While singing, chatting, playing the dozens, and jostling in the area, they also frolic in his swimming hole. Wet and naked, they encounter the young fiance´e of Harvey’s son. In the boys’ embarrassed scuffle to recover their clothes, the frightened woman alerts her partner with her shrieks. Two of the four boys are slain by Jim Harvey, a soldier and also Harvey’s son. Not knowing the identity of his attacker, Big Boy acts in self-defense, killing the white man with the very rifle that felled both of his friends. He and Bobo flee the scene, agreeing to meet later in hiding. Aware of the inevitable 39

‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ approach of the lynch mob, Big Boy seeks the advice of his family and the community’s church elders. A plan is laid out involving his escape to the North, but not before morning. Cowering in a kiln dug into the countryside, the protagonist witnesses Bobo’s fiery demise at the hands of the mob. He also overhears the news that they burned his family’s home to the ground. Struggling to avoid detection, he stays concealed until morning, eventually meeting his rescuer, Will, and heading to Chicago in the back of a truck. In the general context of the collection, interracial violence and the necessity of self-defense recur in ‘‘Down By the Riverside,’’ the story immediately following ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home.’’ The image of the burning house finds a parallel in ‘‘Long Black Song.’’ Readers who have encountered Wright’s Ur-text Native Son (1940) will recognize some germinal characteristics of Bigger Thomas in the protagonist, Big Boy. Big Boy ends up in Chicago, the northern city where Bigger’s troubles begin. Both characters are inadvertent felons who sin more out of fear than hate or premeditation. The names are similar and the motifs of fear and flight are also consistent with the rearticulation of the black ‘‘badman’’ stereotype. Big Boy is divested of family ties, spiritual grounding, possessions, and companions; his aloneness in a hostile environment mirrors the existential dilemma of Bigger and even the author himself. The same level of psychological depth is obviously not possible in the shorter work, but the instinctual readiness to defend one’s humanity emerges starkly in Big Boy’s fugitive experience. The northern trajectory of Big Boy’s travels reflects that of Wright who left for Chicago at nineteen. Although the urban center hovers on the horizon as a sanctuary, ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ is first and foremost a story of the rural South. Such critics as Edward Margolies have commented upon the quasi-Edenic and ‘‘nostalgic appeal’’ (131) of the initial setting, one that subsequently enacts a fall from innocence into brutal experience. The varied topography of the setting, from smooth, idyllic fields to pitted hillside,

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reflects the starkness of the change. Similarly, the young men are also in a transition state, neither adults nor children. According to the popular racial stereotypes of the day, their race and sex determine them wholly as potential rapists. The lynching, complete with tar-and-feathering, burning, and disarticulation of limbs for souvenirs, enacts what Blyden Jackson calls ‘‘the moment of truth’’ in the story. He asserts, ‘‘In the lynching of Bobo, thus, all lynchings are explained and all race prejudice. Both are truly in essence acts of castration’’ (189). Big Boy, as his name suggests, is not a passive, infantile victim. His leadership ability and charisma are pronounced, judging from the initial exchanges with his peers. His physical prowess, even in play fighting, establishes the potential power and danger of his type. For him, the act of leaving home is compelled by adverse circumstances, not a voluntary act or rite of young adulthood. Biographers like Constance Webb (in Richard Wright, 1968) have attempted to trace the genealogy of the character to actual individuals known by the author. Other critics suggest that the importance of the story lies in its depiction of racism’s pervasive effect on the young and old alike, a national pathology that implicates and transcends race. Thematically, arguments about the importance and the impotence of the black community to remedy Big Boy’s situation have elicited conflicting responses. Other discussions treat the urban/rural division, the trope of migration, the symbol of the train, and the role of animal confrontations in the story. Big Boy is widely seen as a prototype and exemplar of besieged black masculinity. Nancy Kang Selected Bibliography: Jackson, Blyden. ‘‘Richard Wright in a Moment of Truth,’’ in Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Richard Macksey and Frank E. Moorer. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984, pp. 182–93. Margolies, Edward. ‘‘The Short Stories: Uncle Tom’s Children; Eight Men’’ in Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982, pp. 128–50.

Bilbo, Theodore Gilman Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968.

BILBO, THEODORE GILMAN (13 October 1877–21 August 1947) A prominent twentieth-century Mississippi politician who was a staunch segregationist and an unabashed racist, Bilbo’s political career began in 1908, the year of Wright’s birth, when he was elected to the State Senate. He twice served as governor of Mississippi, from 1916–1920 and from 1928–1932. He was a United States senator from 1935–1947. Although he was short in stature, being just 5’ 2’’ in height, he tried to compensate for this by calling himself ‘‘The Man’’ and using a bombastic, demagogic style in his speech and writing. He grew up in rural poverty among poor whites who had deep resentments against black people and the rich planter class controlling Mississippi’s cotton economy. His political career was characterized by his rabid racism which got him elected to a variety of state and national offices and a moral corruption which often complicated his personal and political life after he obtained these offices. At several points in his career he was chastised for illicit sexual affairs. Serving in the Mississippi Senate from 1908 to 1912, he survived impeachment for bribery by one vote with the senate passing a resolution which characterized him as ‘‘unfit to sit with honest, upright men in a respectable legislative body.’’ In 1913 he and another state senator were indicted by a grand jury on charges of bribery when the two wanted to create a new county in the Mississippi delta which would weaken the political base of their opponents. He was once sentenced to thirty days in prison for contempt of court. And when he was elected for a third term in the U.S. Senate in 1946, the senate refused to seat him for two reasons. First of all, a senate investigating committee had prepared conflictof-interest charges against him and, secondly, black Mississippians filed a suit against him on the grounds that African Americans had been

denied the right to vote in the Democratic primary. Bilbo died of cancer before these issues could be resolved. As a U.S. senator, Bilbo was an indefatigable and flamboyant defender of segregation and vehemently opposed anti-lynching bills. He even introduced billion dollar legislation for the relocation of American black people to Africa. Keneth Kinnamon has argued that the Mississippi which Richard Wright grew up in was a world of ‘‘total discrimination’’ (Kinnamon 6) and was the most intensely racist state in America. Bilbo and other politicians like his mentor James Vardaman epitomized the brutally racist culture of Mississippi in the first half of the twentieth century. Some of Bilbo’s public statements certainly provide vivid illustrations of the systematic discrimination which black people in Mississippi faced during that time. In a primary campaign of 1903 when Bilbo was asked to explain his proposed reforms in education, he retorted, ‘‘When I speak of educating people I mean the white people . . . The Negro was designed for a burden bearer . . . Why squander money on his education when the only effect is to spoil a good field hand and make an insolent cook’’ (Kinnamon 6). Late in his career he was quoted in a Time magazine article as saying ‘‘The nigger is only 150 years from the jungles of Africa’’ and then added that he had ‘‘some fried nigger steak for breakfast’’ (Kinnamon 5). In that same year during his reelection campaign he argued ‘‘Do not let a single nigger vote. If you let a few register and vote this year, next year there will be twice as many, and the first thing you know the whole thing will be out of hand’’ (Rowley 567). When Wright’s Black Boy was published in 1945 as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and immediately became a financial and literary success, Bilbo saw fit to condemn the book on the floor of the U.S. Senate. He is quoted in the Congressional Record as saying that Wright’s autobiography was . . . a damnable lie from beginning to end . . . It is the dirtiest, filthiest, lousiest, most obscene piece 41

Black Boy of writing that I have ever seen in print . . . But it comes from a Negro and you cannot expect any better from a person of this type. (Fabre 282)

While some have argued that Bilbo and other demagogues represented only the ‘‘redneck’’ component of Mississippi’s political life and that more civilized and educated figures like Leroy Percy also played important roles in that state’s culture, it remains true that Bilbo repeatedly got elected to a wide variety of powerful offices, and in times of stress Mississippi’s liberals were afraid to challenge him and his backward thinking. It is little wonder, therefore, that Wright saw Mississippi as a kind of cultural hell and left that state as a young man. He returned to his home state on only one occasion when he visited his father and a few other relatives in 1940 on his return from Mexico. Memphis, Chicago, New York, and Paris were anything but ideal places for Wright, but they were far more fruitful environments for him as an artist and a person than the Mississippi controlled by racist demagogues like Theodore Bilbo. Selected Bibliography: Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1960. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Key, V. O. Southern Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1949. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

BLACK BOY Published in March 1945 by Harper & Brothers, Wright’s autobiography Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth attracted immediate critical interest and remained number one of the bestseller list for three months. As Dorothy Canfield Fisher predicted, Book-of-the-Month Club readers would be impressed with ‘‘how classically Mr. Wright’s gravely contained manner of writing keeps his intense emotion under his control.’’ The phrase ‘‘gravely contained’’ is ironic in the context of the autobiography’s publishing history. Negotiations between the publisher and the Book-of-

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the-Book Club ensured that only the ‘‘Southern Night’’ portion of Wright’s original manuscript, ‘‘American Hunger,’’ would be printed. The 1944 page proofs of the intense second portion of the manuscript, ‘‘The Horror and the Glory,’’ challenged the prevailing liberal notion that racism was rare in the northern United States. A young black man’s indictment of the North had to be suppressed. With some reluctance, Wright agreed to truncate his life story, to entitle the book Black Boy, and to write a new ending. The first edition of Black Boy thus confirmed the promise ‘‘that life could be lived with dignity.’’ Fisher’s ‘‘Introductory Note’’ attested that Wright was a ‘‘rarely gifted American author,’’ and the back flap of the 1945 dust jacket provided evidence that Wright was a loyal American. There Wright urged his fellow citizens to ‘‘put our money away in WAR BONDS until peace (Sunday) comes.’’ Although Harper and Row published the page proofs of ‘‘The Horror and the Glory’’ as American Hunger in 1977, the autobiography Wright composed would not be available to readers until the Library of America printed the original manuscript, edited by Arnold Rampersad, as Black Boy (American Hunger) in 1991. The literary and cultural significance of Black Boy is at least two-fold. In its unexpurgated manifestation, it is a classic example of American autobiography, a narrative that blends the meaning, the challenge, and the importance of being Southern, black, and male in the United States. It exposes the permanent ironies in the idea of race even as it charts the strategies used by an intelligent black boy to minimize the forces that could have made him one of the wretched of the earth and could not preclude his becoming a black man. Considered from the angles of publishing history, however, the autobiography is an example of fragmentation and reunion, one of the richest illustrations in African-American literature of a work as an act of creation and selffashioning. Black Boy also illuminates how literature is often a product of ideologically-driven commercialism, of the literary politics that

‘‘Black Hope’’ frustrate an author’s intentions. The enduring value of Black Boy is constituted in the transaction between the text(s) and the reader, a transaction that reaffirms the human necessity of art, history, and autobiographical memory. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. ‘‘Black Boy by Richard Wright.’’ Book-of-the-Month Club News (February 1945): n.p. [pamphlet reprint]. Thaddeus, Janice. ‘‘The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.’’ American Literature 57.2 (1985): 199–214. Ward, Jerry W. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Hunger.’’ The Virginia Quarterly Review 54.1 (1978): 148–153.

‘‘BLACK HOPE’’ An unpublished novel that Wright began shortly after completing Native Son but was unable to complete. It occupies an unusual place in the Wright canon because it is his only novel that has a woman as its central character. He envisioned the book as an attempt to broaden his vision, moving away from picturing American experience from the perspective of an uneducated outsider such as Bigger Thomas and portraying American life in wider, more objective terms. As he revealed in a letter to his agent Paul Reynolds, Jr., ‘‘In Native Son I gave the picture of the world from the point of view of Bigger alone and the unreality of the white characters was part of the movement of his story’’ (Fabre 189). In this new novel he wanted to range beyond this limited perspective and explore in a fuller way the experience of black women and white people. Wright began the novel in 1939 with the working title ‘‘Little Sister’’ in an attempt to probe what he called ‘‘the woman question.’’ He submitted a rough draft of the book to Reynolds on February 6, 1940. His agent, while enthusiastic about the project as a way of establishing Wright as a novelist who could transcend narrow themes, was nevertheless very critical of the rough condition of Wright’s 961-page manuscript and asked for substantial revisions before he would send it to Edward Aswell, Wright’s editor at Harpers.

Wright worked intermittently on the novel for the next six years, putting it aside while he wrote 12 Million Black Voices, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and Black Boy/American Hunger, books which flowed more easily from his imagination because they were more deeply grounded in his own experiences. He received a $7,500 advance for the novel from Harpers in 1945 and came close to completing it in 1947 but was never able to do so. The problem he was never able to resolve is rooted in the fact that Black Hope eventually became centered in two very different narratives which Wright was unable to connect in any believable or coherent way. The initial conception of the book placed it squarely in the tradition of ‘‘tragic mulatto’’ fiction. Maud Hampton, the central character, is a college-educated 27-yearold African-American woman who, in an attempt to gain social mobility and financial success, lightens her skin to pass for white. She befriends a white millionaire and inherits his fortune after he dies. But she is wracked with guilt over denying her racial past and abandoning her black boyfriend and finally commits suicide. But early on in the novel’s composition Wright changed his conception of the book, making it a kind of protest novel about the exploitation of female domestic workers in New York and Brooklyn. Wright did elaborate research on this topic, interviewing many maids and questioning officials at the Domestic Workers Union. Because he was having such difficulty integrating ‘‘two very different novels’’ (Rowley 228), Wright finally gave up on the project in 1947 after relocating himself and his family in France and later turning his attention to fiction he felt more secure with such as The Outsider and Savage Holiday. The manuscript of Black Hope is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. 43

Black Marxism

BLACK MARXISM Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, Black Marxism had only a small presence in American leftist circles. Although it was the early Jim Crow era, the Socialist Labour Party and its 1901 replacement, The Socialist Party of America, ignored racial problems in the belief that they would eventually be solved by the coming socialist revolution. Early American communism prioritized anti-colonial and anti-racist agendas, but made no overt attempt to recruit African Americans. Black Marxism emerged as a major force in the United States following the establishment of the Third International, or the Comintern, headed by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Lenin had a particular interest in minority groups and brought up the ‘‘Negro Question’’ at the second congress of the Comintern in 1920. He and M. N. Roy’s Theses on the National and Colonial Question specifically identified African Americans as a minority group that should receive direct communist support, effectively recognizing that ‘‘Black Nationalism’’ was a prerequisite to America achieving the desired revolution (Robinson 309; K. Baldwin 36). Lenin wrote to the Communist Party of The United States (CPUSA) in 1921 to express his surprise that the most oppressed group in American society, Negroes, had not been recognized as strategically important. Even more significant in Black Marxism’s development in America was the Comintern’s 1928 Resolution on the Negro Question. This formally recognized American blacks of the South as an ‘‘oppressed nation,’’ effectively equivalent to the socialist republics of the USSR that were ostensibly free to secede from the union if they so desired (Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 39–56; Robinson 421). In 1929, not long after the Comintern resolution, the American stock market crashed. Hereafter, Communist Party membership would be particularly strong among the black populations of New York and Chicago; the latter city was the northern destination of Richard Wright in 1927.

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In 1932, communist intellectuals expanded the leftist, literary/artistic John Reed Club in the hope of inspiring radical young people. Three such clubs were established in Chicago. In June of 1933 the club began publishing Left Front, a leftist literary journal catering to beginning writers. Left Front and other publications began publishing Richard Wright’s early proletarian poetry, and it was in the Left Front circle that Wright first encountered the Communist Party. Wright officially joined the Chicago branch of the party in 1934. He was to work for years as writer and officer in the John Reed Club and by 1937 was considered by some the most illustrious proletarian author in the party (Robinson 421). By 1942, membership in the CPUSA peaked at about 85,000. However, between 1942 and the 1956 Khrushchev revelations, membership gradually dropped. Several factors, including WPA job opportunities and the high number of competitive social/political organizations appealing to African-American interests contributed to the decline in party membership. The CPUSA had been forced to support the war effort against Nazism, but after the Allied victory in which half a million African Americans saw service overseas (versus—in the case of Nazism—an overtly racist enemy), it became more difficult for American radicals to influence black America. A strong national economy, combined with gradual advances in the legalities of racial injustice, made the Communist Party appear too radical for many, a situation furthered by the intimidation of 1950s McCarthyism. Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, for example, suffered the penalties of being branded ‘‘un-American’’ by having their passports confiscated (Harding, et al. 454). Richard Wright formally left the Communist Party in 1942, a difficult decision that arose for several reasons. In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright describes the transference of the paternalistic attitude from a racially oppressive environment in America to a racially ‘‘equal’’ environment afforded by the Communist Party. Wright eventually found that the Negro, in

Black Metropolis communism, was once again reduced to a political symbol. Indeed, he states boldly in American Hunger that within the party he ‘‘began to feel an emotional isolation that I had not known in the depths of the hate-ridden South’’ (399). Yet it is Wright’s personal philosophy of living that runs into the greatest conflict with communism’s values. Though he does not like to identify himself as an ‘‘intellectual’’ to his party comrades (see Chapter XIX—‘‘I sweep the streets for a living’’), it is precisely his desire for intellectual freedom that marks him as untrustworthy in communism. Black Boy (American Hunger) makes clear that his hard-fought individualism had preceded his struggle within communism. It was therefore not specifically racial or political complications, but rather a lack of intellectual freedom, that was the central cause of his severed membership: ‘‘I wanted to be a communist, but my kind of communist’’ (422). Nevertheless, although ‘‘the emotional cost of [communist] membership was too high’’ (413), Wright in the 1940s continued to believe in the need for an instrument to galvanize the working classes, in which he—unlike most of his Chicago comrades—had originated. Black Marxism, and specifically the Communist Party, was for many a god-like institution that replaced dread and angst with a sense of purpose and the security of inter-racial fraternity. What Wright’s relentless artistic search soon uncovered, however, was that communism was not capable of reaching the Bigger Thomases of the world and that it failed to allow such people their own expression and representation—hence the novel Native Son (1940), specifically Bigger’s inability to express his experience to Boris Max in the concluding ‘‘Fate’’ section. See also Marxism. Regan Tyndall Selected Bibliography: Baldwin, Kate. Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters between Blacks and Reds, 1922—1963. Durham, North Carolina/London: Duke University Press, 2002. Harding, Vincent, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Earl Lewis, eds. ‘‘We Changed the World: 1945–1970.’’ To Make our World Anew: A History of African-Americans. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1983. Trotter Jr., Joe William. ‘‘From a Raw Deal to a New Deal?: 1929– 1945.’’ To Make our World Anew: A History of AfricanAmericans. Eds. Robin D. G. Kelley and Earl Lewis. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger): A Record of Childhood and Youth (1945; 1977). New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

BLACK METROPOLIS A monumental study of black life in Chicago which was researched and written by sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton. Published in 1945 and updated in 1961, the book is a comprehensive study of black migration from the rural South to Chicago from the late nineteenth century to 1944, focusing sharply on the development of a massive ghetto on the South Side of Chicago. It documents the devastating effects of institutional racism on black family life and the economic injustices which Chicago’s blacks faced in a rigidly-segregated urban world. It also explored in careful detail the cultural life which African Americans developed in Chicago and the class structure which emerged as a result of the ghetto environment. Wright met Cayton in 1933 at the University of Chicago and the two developed a long-term friendship. They were stimulated by each other’s work and collaborated on several projects. Wright wrote a detailed introduction to the 1945 edition of Black Metropolis and regarded the book as ‘‘a landmark of research and scientific achievement’’ (xvii). He felt ‘‘personally identified with the material in the book’’ (xvii) since its research into black migration and its analysis of ghetto life illuminated his own experiences as a black man who had fled Mississippi to Chicago and in the process experienced the bitter disappointments of black urban life. Moreover, Wright drew a strong parallel between the sociological research conducted by Drake and Cayton and the way he represented 45

Black Power black experience in his own literary work. In his introduction to Black Metropolis Wright points out: If in reading my novel, Native Son, you doubted the reality of Bigger Thomas, then examine the delinquency rates in this book; if, in reading my autobiography, Black Boy, you doubted the picture of family life shown there, then study the figures on family disorganization given here. Black Metropolis describes the processes that mold Negro life as we know it today . . . After studying the social processes in this book, you can not expect Negro life to be other than what it is. (xx)

Wright’s introduction to Black Metropolis ranks that book with classic sociological studies such as Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto, Frederick Thrasher’s The Gang, and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States as groundbreaking analyses of African-American life in the twentieth century. These books, all written by sociologists and anthropologists from the University of Chicago, not only provided Wright with ‘‘huge mountains of fact’’ but, more importantly, gave him his ‘‘first concrete vision of the forces that molded the urban Negro’s body and soul’’ (xviii). Wright stresses in his introduction to Drake’s and Cayton’s book that the ‘‘Chicago School’’ of sociologists, like Chicago writers such as Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, were critically important influences on his development as a writer and thinker. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Works. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Introduction’’ in Black Metropolis by Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake. New York: Harper and Row, 1962.

BLACK POWER Based on Wright’s travels in the colonial Gold Coast in 1953 at the dawn of the independence of Ghana, the book was the first of the three books in his main period of nonfiction, Black

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Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1957). The motive for writing Black Power is given at the beginning of the book. Kwame Nkrumah as prime minister of Gold Coast had written a letter of recommendation for Wright’s travels, stating that the purpose for his visit was to ‘‘do some research into the social and historical aspects of the country.’’ The brief preface, ‘‘Apropos Prepossessions,’’ indicates that the audience for the book is the West and that Wright intended both to comment on politics in this emerging nation and to analyze the mysterious tribal culture. Even though his discussion of politics is based on a layman’s understanding of economics and history and his cultural criticism is largely intuitive rather than anthropological, his conclusions yield startling revelations about African culture and an African American’s visceral reactions to it. The conclusions drawn from the dialogues and episodes in the book are not only representative and objective but ultimately personal. ‘‘This volume,’’ the preface states, ‘‘is a first-person, subjective narrative on the life and conditions of the Colony and Ashanti areas of the Gold Coast, an area comprising perhaps the most highly socially evolved native life of present-day Africa’’ (xiv). In contrast to a conventional travelogue or autobiography, Wright’s nonfiction, Black Power in particular, begins its discourse with very personal, subjective assumptions about the subject matter, goes through a series of external visions, and yet returns to its original premise and rationalization. In Socratic dialectics, opposing values and beliefs genuinely counteract one another, but in Wright’s discourse, a priori, humanistic points of view prevail over materialistic, racially oppressive attitudes in a form of self-creation as seen in Black Boy. In Black Power, given an African-American writer’s experience in America and abroad, the narrator compellingly subverts, in the name of universal humanism, the representations of colonialism and imperialism, convention and hegemony. Wright attained such privileged dominance over the dialogues that had occurred in his African

Blackburn, D.C. journey that he had the audacity to advise as prominent a world statesman as Nkrumah. Wright’s Marxist interpretation of economic history focuses on the most painful and inhuman event in human history, the slave trade. He places as an epigraph to part 1, ‘‘Approaching Africa,’’ a passage from Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery: ‘‘Only in one particular did the freedom accorded in the slave trade differ from the freedom accorded in other trades—the commodity involved was man’’ (1). The epilogue is a poignant reminder for Wright, who was taken by a friend of Nkrumah’s to a large, modern store that exported timber where he was asked by the sales clerks about his ancestors. One of them nonchalantly asked, ‘‘What part of Africa did you come from, sar?’’ After a pause another persisted, ‘‘Haven’t you tried to find out where in Africa you came from, sar?’’ Embarrassed and offended, Wright responded with a note of irony: ‘‘Well . . . you know, you fellows who sold us and the white men who bought us didn’t keep any records’’ (35). Recording such a conversation reveals his belief that the culprit of the slave trade was not only colonialism but also capitalism and its corollary, greed. Greed, therefore, corrupted western buyers and African sellers alike. Wright came away with the notion that, whereas the profound myths, traditions, and customs constituting African culture were in the way of its modernization, they were still the essence and power that buttressed what he calls the ‘‘African survival.’’ He disagreed with the anthropologists and social historians who characterized African culture as primitive and irrational. But ‘‘the African will always seem a ‘savage,’ ’’ he says, just as the new developments in the nonAfrican world are ‘‘fantastic’’ to the African (117). The western definition of the inferiority of the African race, he explains, had derived from the hegemonic assumptions of academicians, assumptions that were only remotely related to the underlying assumptions of the African beliefs. In short, African culture looks irrational to westerners just as western culture does to Africans.

Wright’s argument was for Africans to preserve their primal attitudes in their hearts rather than manifest them in their rituals and customs. Above all, he urged African politicians and intellectuals to create pragmatic policies with firm discipline and self-determination. ‘‘The burden of suffering that must be borne,’’ he asserts, ‘‘impose it upon one generation! Do not, with the false kindness of the missionaries and businessmen, drag out this agony for another five hundred years while your villages rot and your people’s minds sink into the morass of a subjective darkness’’ (346). Although modern Africa is making her progress ‘‘at a snail’s pace’’ (345), Wright predicts that her values, which are spiritual and genuinely humanistic, will eventually prevail over western values, which, created by technology and industrialism, are materialistic and predominantly mechanistic. Yoshinobu Hakutani Selected Bibliography: Danquah, J. B. The Akan Doctrine of God: A Fragment of Gold Coast Ethics and Religion. London: Frank Cass, 1944. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. 155– 80. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954.

BLACKBURN, D.C. One of Wright’s friends at Jim Hill Primary School in Jackson, Mississippi which Wright attended in 1921 and 1922. Along with Lewis Anderson, Dick Jordan, Perry Booker, Sarah McNeamer, and Essie Lee Ward, Blackburn was part of a group of friends Wright associated with. Some of these friendships proved very durable, lasting well into adulthood. The strong friendships which Wright established with Minnie Farish, Jordan, Brown, and Blackburn when he was a student in Jackson for four years were extremely important in his development. They broke the painful isolation which he experienced as a child because of his family’s constant movements and also put him in contact with peers who were serious students and

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‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ regarded education as a vital means of personal development and social advancement. As he reveals in Black Boy/American Hunger, his days at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson Junior High School enabled him to make friendships with ‘‘boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking’’ and this ‘‘revitalized [my] being,’’ thus empowering him to envision a hopeful ‘‘future’’ (Wright 147) for himself. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

‘‘BLUEPRINT FOR NEGRO WRITING’’ A polemical essay which Wright wrote in 1937 and included in New Challenge, a leftist journal which he co-edited with Dorothy West and Marian Minus. As its title suggests, The New Challenge was intended to break away from earlier concepts of black art and to define a new black aesthetic which was consistent with the harsh realities of America during the Great Depression. It was particularly critical of the literature produced during the Harlem Renaissance, viewing such work as addressed to a mainly white audience and ignoring the lives of the black masses. After its first brilliant issue, which included writings by Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson, Frank Marshall Davis, and Margaret Walker, the journal folded, due largely to friction between Wright and his co-editors. ‘‘Blueprint,’’ the centerpiece of the collection, called for a new black literature which would boldly depart from all previous forms of AfricanAmerican writing. While earlier black literature was addressed primarily to a white audience, the new literature would be addressed mainly to black people. It would arise from and be centered in the folk culture of ordinary African Americans, using as ‘‘channels . . . of racial wisdom’’ (Gates 1382) black folk art as it expressed itself in blues, spirituals, and oral tales. It would replace the isolation of previous black writers with a deeply social consciousness embedded in the responsibility to 48

express ‘‘a collective sense of Negro life in America’’ (Gates 1382). Since Wright was a seriously committed communist in 1937, he also stressed the need for Negro literature to have a political function as an important weapon in the liberation of black people in America and elsewhere. Indeed, he encourages black writers to assume a Marxist perspective, as ‘‘ . . . it is through a Marxist conception of reality and society that the maximum degree of freedom in thought and feeling can be gained for the Negro writer’’ (Gates 1384). But he was also careful to reject propaganda based on abstraction in favor of genuine art grounded in lived experience, reminding the black writer that ‘‘Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life’’ (Gates 1384–85). He is also careful to reject narrow theories of social realism which more doctrinaire Marxists and communists espoused, stressing that there is ‘‘no limit to technical and stylistic freedom’’ and that ‘‘Negro life may be approached from a thousand different angles’’ (Gates 1386). ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ is an important critical document, not only because it provides clear insights into Wright’s critical principles as he was completing Uncle Tom’s Children and beginning to imagine Native Son, but also because it becomes a kind of credo for the ‘‘Wright School’’ of novelists which would flourish throughout the 1940s. However much he would later modify and even reject some of the ideas in ‘‘Blueprint,’’ the essay contains a core of ideas which helped to form a foundation for Wright’s work in all phases of his career. Selected Bibliography: Gates, Henry Louis and Nellie McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

BLUES (MUSIC) A form of secular black music emerging in New Orleans and other southern locations at the turn of the twentieth century. It was rooted in the

Bokanowski, He´le`ne traditions of the spirituals, relying on strong patterns of repetition and a call/response format, but it focused on earthly troubles and joys rather than rewards in an afterlife. Like the spirituals and work songs, it often employed a coded language which enabled performers to communicate dissent to a black audience while hiding that dissent from white listeners. Common themes in blues music include laments over romantic and economic difficulties, a frank celebration of adult sexuality, and an ongoing journey in which the blues singer pictures his life as restless motion in search of a better life. Although the content of a typical blues lyric is often melancholy, reflecting the difficulties black people faced in an unjust segregated society, the blues are almost never morbid or finally pessimistic because in musical performance the blues singer’s pain is transformed by the assertion of a vital self and the mastery of suffering by giving it artistic form. As Ralph Ellison has noted, The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. (Ellison 90)

For Wright, who wrote admiringly of the blues on several occasions, and who wrote several blues lyrics, one of which was recorded by Paul Robeson, the blues was also an essentially affirmative music. In the ‘‘Foreword to Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning’’ Wright observes: In the blues were to be found the major catastrophes, both personal and national, the triumphs and miseries that were shared by all, yet private to one. In the blues were reflected the family disputes, the upheavals caused by poverty and migration, the violence and bitterness, the tears and happiness of all. In the blues an unsettled, unwanted people during these periods of social unrest found the security, the unity, and the strength that it so desperately needed. (Oliver 32)

Like Ellison, James Baldwin, Albert Murray, and countless other African-American writers,

Wright found the blues a rich form of inspiration both in terms of the formal artistry of the music and its tough-minded vision of black life. In ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ he characterized the blues as an essential form of black folk art which commanded the attention of AfricanAmerican writers because it was one of the ‘‘channels through which racial wisdom flowed’’ (Gates 1382). Much of Wright’s fiction can therefore be seen as grounded, at least in part, in the vision of life expressed in the blues. Ralph Ellison has aptly described Black Boy as a kind of extended blues performance, an ‘‘autobiographical chronicle of personal disaster expressed lyrically’’ (Ellison 90). In the same way, Native Son and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ are suffused with the hard ironies which make the blues such a lucid critique of the injustices of American life. Bigger Thomas’s ‘‘wry, bitter smile’’ (Wright 430) at the conclusion of Native Son is strikingly similar to the sharp ironies which bristle in blues lyrics such as Jimmy Reed’s ‘‘Big Boss Man’’ or Hudie Ledbetter’s ‘‘Bourgeois Blues’’; indeed, the ‘‘toughness of spirit’’ (Ellison 104) which Ellison argues is a hallmark of the blues, lifting it from an enervating nihilism, resonates throughout all of Wright’s work, giving it a power, depth, and resonance missing in much naturalistic fiction. Selected Bibliography: Baker, Houston. Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: New American Library, 1966. Gates, Henry Louis and Nellie McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning. New York: Collier Books, 1960. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, 1993.

BOKANOWSKI, HE´LE`NE A Parisian friend of Wright’s and a wife of Michel Bokanowski, minister of Post and Telecommunications in de Gaulle’s government, He´le`ne met Wright at a meeting organized by the magazine Carrefour in November 1946 while he was in 49

Bontemps, Arna Paris for a temporary stay. After Wright returned to New York, He´le`ne and Marcel Duhamel made a radio broadcast about Wright on the morning of 13 March 1947. In April 1947, Wright sent He´le`ne from New York several parcels containing precious goods such as sugar and clothes which were not available in Paris because of a lack of food and a critical situation in France caused by the damage of World War II. When Wright came back to France and began to live in Paris in August 1947, the Bokanowskis helped them settle down there. The closer friendship between Wright and the Bokanowskis continued after Wright got accustomed to French life. For example, in October 1951, Ellen Wright was in the literary agency business with the collaboration of He´ le` ne. Wright bought a farm house in Normandy in 1955 because he came to know that the beautiful area was peaceful and quiet after he had spent several weekends at a country house in Normandy that He´ le` ne and Michel Bokanowski owned. While he was ill with amoebic dysentery and had to live alone in December 1959, Wright could depend on He´le`ne and Michel Bokanowski. Grateful to his protectors, Wright dedicated Eight Men to He´le`ne and her family, ‘‘whose kindness has made me feel at home in an alien land.’’ The two following anecdotes show how deeply Wright trusted He´le`ne: when his lecture at the University of Nancy was canceled in April 1960, Wright asked He´le`ne to investigate who might be behind the cancellation. In the course of the development of the Gibson affair, Wright wrote the name and address of He´le`ne Bokanowski on the envelope enclosing letters and documents concerning Richard Gibson and William Gardner Smith so that the envelope could be sent back to He´le`ne if something should happen to him. Just before his death, He´le`ne’s French translation of The Long Dream, was published as Fishbelly in April 1960. This greatly encouraged Wright while the stage adaptation as well as the novel were poorly received in the United States. Toru Kiuchi

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Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

BONTEMPS, ARNA (13 October 1902–4 June 1973) Bontemps was one of the most versatile AfricanAmerican figures of the twentieth century. He influenced the development of black American culture in a great variety of ways as a poet, critic, novelist, historian, biographer, librarian, and writer of children’s books. He was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, of Creole parents but moved to Los Angeles at age three after a racial incident in which his father was threatened by whites. He was educated at predominately white schools, attending high school at San Fernando Academy and graduating from Pacific Union College in 1923. He received an M.A. in Library Science from the University of Chicago in 1943. His writing career began in 1924 when he moved to New York and developed friendships with a number of important writers of the Harlem Renaissance, including Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Langston Hughes. His poem ‘‘Hope’’ was published in Crisis in 1924 and he won the poetry prize awarded by Opportunity in 1927. His frequently anthologized story ‘‘A Summer Tragedy’’ won Opportunity’s prize for fiction in 1932. He moved from New York to Hunstville, Alabama, in 1931 to teach at Oakwood Junior College, a Seventh Day Adventist school. He left after three years when the white principal interfered with his academic freedom and threatened to burn his books. He went to Chicago in 1934 where he taught in another Seventh Day Adventist school, Shiloh Academy, but resigned after three years to take a position in the Illinois Writers Project, a division of the Works Progress Administration. In 1936, he published his most widely acclaimed novel, Black Thunder, which examines the slave revolt of Gabriel Prosser. After

A Book of Prefaces (H. L. Mencken) receiving a Rosenwald Foundation grant in 1938, which enabled him to undertake a tour of the Caribbean, he published Drums at Dusk which focuses on the slave uprising in Haiti led by Toussaint L’Overture. He left Chicago in 1943 to assume the position of librarian at Fisk University, where he became colleagues with poet Robert Hayden and sociologist Charles S. Johnson. During his long tenure at Fisk, he made its library an important source for the study of African-American culture, developing important collections in black poetry, history, and art. His long friendship with Hughes enabled him to establish the Langston Hughes Collection and he also secured important papers of Jean Toomer, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Charles S. Johnson. Despite his heavy workload as librarian, Bontemps found time to edit important collections of poetry and folklore, including The Book of Negro Folklore (1958), The Poetry of the Negro (1949), both of which he coedited with Langston Hughes, and American Negro Poetry (1963), a standard text in AfricanAmerican literature courses for many years. He also wrote several books of children’s stories and biographies of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and George Washington Carver. Although they were quite different in social background, temperament, and politics, Bontemps and Wright formed a close friendship which lasted until Wright’s death in 1960. They became, in Margaret Walker’s words, ‘‘old and dear friends’’ (Walker 336–37). They met in Chicago in mid-1930s when Bontemps was impressed with Wright’s poem ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ and met Wright at a southside party. Wright introduced Bontemps to several of the literary clubs to which he belonged, and the two worked together at the Illinois Writers Project. Wright wrote an enthusiastic review of Black Thunder in Partisan Review, praising the book for its social realism and claiming that it filled a ‘‘yawning gap’’ (Rowley 111) in black American literature by honestly representing black militancy. Bontemps also praised Wright’s

work, sensing in his fiction a powerful new voice which was deeply rooted in black folk art. The friendship between the two men continued for the remainder of Wright’s life. A few months before Wright’s death, Bontemps and his wife visited Wright in Paris and, despite Wright’s declining health, it was a happy time for both men. The two were making plans for Wright’s daughter, Julia, to come to Fisk and they also were looking forward to collaborating on a new film about the Jubilee singers. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1958. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Weil, Dorothy. ‘‘Folklore Motifs in Arna Bontemps’ Black Thunder,’’ Southern Folklore Quarterly, 35 (March 1971): 1–14.

A BOOK OF PREFACES (H. L. MENCKEN) In the spring of 1927 Wright read an editorial in Memphis’s Commercial Appeal which attacked the prominent American journalist and cultural critic, H. L. Mencken, for his sharp criticism of the South’s backward customs. Wright, who in the previous year had begun reading Mencken’s journal, The American Mercury, became fascinated by a person who could criticize southern culture and get away with it, even while living in Baltimore. He grew determined to obtain copies of Mencken’s work from the Memphis Public Library, undeterred by its policy of not allowing blacks borrowing privileges. So he convinced a white co-worker at the Merry Optical Company to allow him to borrow his library card and then forged a note for the librarian which read ‘‘Dear Madam: Will you please let this nigger boy have some books by H. L. Mencken?’’ The two books by Mencken, which he withdrew from the library, would help to change

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A Book of Prefaces (H. L. Mencken) Wright’s life. Prejudices, which contained some of Mencken’s most caustic satire on southern ignorance and violence, and A Book of Prefaces, which consisted of his introductions to the work of important American and European writers, revealed to the young Wright that words could be potent ‘‘weapons’’ (Wright 293) in the fight to expose social injustice and reform society. Reading A Book of Prejudices later that night actually became a transforming experience for Wright: I opened A Book of Prejudices and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that? I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen, consumed with hate, denouncing everything American, extolling everything European or German, laughing at the weaknesses of people, mocking God, authority . . . Yes, this man was fighting, fighting with words. He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well yes, for here they were. Then maybe, perhaps, I could use them as a weapon? (Wright 293)

Emboldened by Mencken’s personal example and inspired by his ability to use writing as an instrument to expose the social evils of modern America, Wright took an important step in becoming a writer. The authors discussed by Mencken in A Book of Prefaces provided Wright with a veritable college education in modern literature. It was from this book that Wright discovered Theodore Dreiser, whom he came to regard as the greatest of all modern American novelists, and Fyodor Dostoevsky whom he would later describe as the writer having the most profound influence on his own work. Mencken’s book also introduced him to European masters such as Emile Zola, Henrik Ibsen, Gustav Flaubert, and Nicholai Gogol as well as American realists like Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, and Stephen Crane. Mencken’s book also led him to Edgar Allan Poe and Friedrich Nietzsche, two figures who

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would also help to shape Wright’s mind and imagination. Indeed, as Wright read the works of these men he developed a powerful lens through which he could view and interpret his own troubling experiences: I read Dreiser’s Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie and they revived in me a vivid sense of my mother’s suffering; I was overwhelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me. It would have been impossible for me to have told anyone what I derived from these novels, for it was nothing less than a sense of life itself. All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel and I could not get enough of them. (Wright 295)

Mencken’s A Book of Prejudices, therefore, induced in Wright a ‘‘hunger for books’’ (Wright 297) which empowered him with ’’new avenues of feeling and seeing’’ (Wright 297) that enabled him to construct a ‘‘new life’’ (Wright 291). No longer ‘‘condemned, ringed by walls’’ (Wright 296) of his hellish southern environment, he began to plan his escape to the North. Rejecting his status as ‘‘a genial slave’’ (Wright 298), Wright used his reading as a liberating process to free himself by becoming a writer. After the publication of Black Boy in 1945, Wright revealed in a Book-of-the-Month Club interview that A Book of Prejudices ‘‘served as a literary Bible for years. I read all the books he mentioned that I could lay my hands on’’ (Fabre 108). Reading Mencken’s book initiated a profound awakening experience which transformed Wright’s life of ‘‘silent suffering’’ (Wright 359) into a life of conscious rebellion and artistic creation, releasing a voice which would radically change African-American literature. See also American Mercury; Dreiser, Theodore; Mencken, H. L.; Prejudices. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright’s Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Scruggs, Charles. The Sage in Harlem. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984. Wright, Richard.

Booker, Perry Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB The Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in February 1926 by Harry Scherman and Robert K. Haas. The business model was based on the idea of distributing through the mail new books chosen by a panel of well-known literary figures. Native Son and Black Boy were Book-of-theMonth Club main selections in February and March 1945 respectively. The Book-of-theMonth Club not only promoted and distributed both works, but also influenced their content. Native Son was first novel by an African American to be selected as a book-of-the-month. It sold 200,000 copies in under three weeks and was number one on the New York Times bestseller list for several weeks. A significant number of its sales were attributable to its designation as a main selection. Book-of-the-Month Club members numbered over 500,000 in 1940, nearly half of whom regularly bought the book-of-the-month. Arnold Rampersad’s research into the publication history of Native Son shows that Wright expurgated passages from the novel to suit the Book-of-the-Month Club. Many of these cancellations dealt with Bigger Thomas’s sexuality. Book club officials feared this material would offend its largely white, middle-class membership. Under financial duress and wanting to disseminate his novel as widely as possible, Wright appeased the Book-of-the-Month Club by making changes. Rampersad restored the deleted passages to the Library of America text of Native Son, which he edited. The content of Black Boy, too, was shaped by the Book-of-the-Month Club. The autobiography was actually the first half of American Hunger, a longer work chronicling not only Wright’s years in the South, but also Chicago and New York. American Hunger had been accepted for publication at Harper’s by mid-1944, but the Book-ofthe-Month Club ‘‘Committee of Selection’’ asked Wright to cut the manuscript at the point where

he leaves the South. The committee also suggested that he compose an epilogue for his newlyshortened text. Wright did so, submitting additional pages in which he reflected upon his early years in the South and the reasons for his flight to the North. Sales of Black Boy benefited significantly from its status as a book-of-the-month. The autobiography was first on the bestseller list from April to June 1945 and finished the year among the top five bestsellers in non-fiction with over half a million copies sold, nearly two-thirds of which were distributed through the Book-of-the-Month Club. Mark Madigan Selected Bibliography: Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Ed. Mark J. Madigan. Columbia: U Missouri P, 1993. Joly, Clare. ‘‘Richard Wright and the Book-of-the-Month Club.’’ Richard Wright Newsletter 6 (Spring/Summer 1998): 8–11. Lee, Charles. The Hidden Public: The Story of the Book-of-the-Month Club. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Thaddeus, Janice. ‘‘The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.’’ American Literature 57 (May 1985): 199–214. Wright, Richard. Early Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Wright, Richard. Later Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991.

BOOKER, PERRY One of Wright’s friends at Jim Hill Primary School and Smith Robertson Junior High School, he was part of the ‘‘Dick Wright Clan,’’ a club humorously named after the Ku Klux Klan which met in the basement of Frank Sims’s home on Pearl Street in Jackson. The club also included Dick Jordan and Joe Brown, two of Wright’s closest boyhood friends. Like most clubs formed by boys in their early adolescence, it had a secret password, ritual games, and organized mischievous tricks on teachers, classmates, and neighbors. As an adult, Wright liked to tell amusing stories of the club’s horseplay. One of these stories which Wright was particularly fond of telling involved Booker when 53

Brewer, Clinton he, Wright, Jordan, Lewis Anderson, and Brown were kept in class during recess for misbehaving in class. The boys were forbidden to leave the classroom, but, when Anderson had an urgent call of nature, Booker coaxed him to urinate in the large bucket of water which was kept on the potbellied stove to humidify the room. The boys richly enjoyed the teacher’s dismay when the urine later began evaporating, filling the room with an overpowering stench. Booker, whose club nickname was ‘‘Conkey,’’ was part of two experiences which would later be represented in Wright’s fiction. The group once trespassed on the property of a white man named Barrett by swimming in the watering pond on his pasture near Rock Bottom Creek. He surprised them and threatened them with his shotgun, shouting that he would ‘‘shoot their black butts if they did not get out of his pasture, stinking up the water that his cattle had to drink’’ (Webb 55). Although Wright would later tell this story to exploit its humorous possibilities, he employed it in a deadly serious way in ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home.’’ In that grimly naturalistic story, three young black men trespass on a white man’s property to swim but the results are tragic. One is shot by the white owner who is then killed when the central character, Big Boy, wrests his shotgun from him. The third member of the group of young black men, Bobo, is hunted down and lynched as Big Boy watches in horror. Booker also worked with Wright one summer at Bullard’s brickyard, working ten hours a day for fifty cents while doing the backbreaking work of hauling bricks and water in the blistering Mississippi sun. One of their co-workers was an aggressive young black man named ‘‘Biggy’’ Thomas, a rebellious bully whom Wright both admired and feared and later used as one of the models for the central character of Native Son. Booker, like many of Wright’s other classmates such as Minnie Farish, Arthur Leaner, Joe Brown, and Dick Jordan, left the South in the late 1920s and early 1930s, migrating to Chicago where they sought new opportunities denied

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them in Mississippi. Wright maintained his friendship with them for most of his years in Chicago. These friends from home helped to ease his transition to the modern city. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1966.

BREWER, CLINTON A thirty-six-year-old black man who had served nineteen years in the New Jersey State Prison after stabbing a young woman to death, he contacted Wright in 1941 after having read Native Son and identified himself with Bigger Thomas. Wright, who had earlier helped a prisoner sentenced to jail for his communist activities and who also had a keen interest in freeing the Scottsboro boys from prison, took an interest in Clinton and visited him several times. When he learned that Brewer was musically talented and had composed an elaborate jazz piece entitled ‘‘Stampede in 6,’’ he contacted Count Basie who recorded it and offered Brewer a job as a musical arranger in his band when he was released from prison. Wright petitioned the governor of New Jersey on March 30, 1941, to parole Brewer and through Wright’s efforts, along with the recommendations of Basie and musical promoter John Hammond, Brewer was released from prison on July 8, 1941. A few months later, Brewer committed another capital crime which was a nearly exact repetition of his first murder, stabbing a teenage girl when she refused to marry him. Shocked by Brewer’s compulsive violence, Wright contacted noted psychiatrist Frederic Wertham and the two worked to save Brewer from the electric chair by testifying in court that he was criminally insane. These contacts with Brewer had two important repercussions in Wright’s life. His collaborating with Wertham to save Brewer from execution was the beginning of a long friendship and

‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ professional relationship. In 1946, Wright helped Wertham establish a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem for delinquent youth. Eventually Wertham became Wright’s psychotherapist and published in 1944 ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son’’ which explored the relationship between sexual violence in that novel and certain traumatic experiences in Wright’s early life. Brewer was also important to Wright in one other significant way since he was one of the real-life prototypes for Erskine Fowler, the protagonist of Savage Holiday who compulsively stabs a young woman to death when she refuses to marry him. Significantly, Wright dedicated this 1954 novel to Brewer, some thirteen years after Brewer had first piqued Wright’s imagination. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘BRIGHT AND MORNING STAR’’ Wright began writing this story while living in Chicago but completed it after he moved to New York in 1937. It was first published in the May 10, 1938 issue of New Masses and the story was included as the final piece in the 1940 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children. It appeared in two prestigious anthologies, Best Stories of 1939 and Fifty Best American Stories (1914–1939). In 1941 Wright gave publishing rights to the story to the Earl Browder Defense Fund and it was published separately by International Publishers. In the introduction to that text Wright observed: It is not my story, it belongs to the workers. I would never have written it unless I had felt that I had a workers’ audience to read it. Ever since it was published in the pages of New Masses, some two years ago, I’ve wanted to see it published alone and cheaply enough for the workers to buy and read. (Fabre 222)

The story is much more explicitly political and programmatic than Wright’s other short stories. By placing it at the conclusion of Uncle Tom’s

Children, he made the book much more strongly Marxist in vision than the 1938 edition of the book. The narrative centers on a conversion of a black woman named Aunt Sue from what Keneth Kinnamon has called a ‘‘consolatory Christianity’’ (Kinnamon 113) to an active, violent stance against social injustice and racial discrimination in the Deep South. Whereas she had earlier repressed her anger against southern racism by imagining the crucified and transfigured Christ as a ‘‘bright n mawnin star’’ which could provide her with a ‘‘wondrous vision’’ (Wright 164) of spiritual transcendence, by the end of the story, she has been jolted out of her religious faith and acquires a ‘‘new hope’’ (Wright 186) through communism, a revolutionary force which promises to destroy the ‘‘cold white mountain’’ (Wright 164) of white domination. Her previous life, which is described as ‘‘a life-long ritual of toil’’ (Wright 163) is transformed when she lashes out against the white system, sacrificing herself in order to protect communist organizers. What triggers her remarkable conversion is the brutal treatment which her sons, Johnny-Boy and Sug, receive from the white authorities. Both are communist activists organizing poor whites and blacks in rural Mississippi and have been tortured and imprisoned for their political activities. At the end of the story, Sue witnesses the grisly beating and probable killing of Johnny-Boy and kills Booker, the white man who has informed upon him. She is then shot to death by the sheriff who kicks her in the side and calls her a ‘‘black bitch’’ (Wright 191). But she dies as a heroic rebel rather than a pathetic victim. Her defiance of the authorities has caused her ‘‘to live again, intensely’’ as she focuses her attention on the ‘‘bright star’’ of communism which enables her to be ‘‘swallowed in peace and strength’’ (Wright 192). Her new faith in communism has displaced the conventional Christianity that has disempowered her. She infuses the old religious images with new political meanings, envisioning ‘‘another star, another hope’’ which will give her the strength to live and act’’ (Wright 184). 55

Brooklyn This story is clearly Wright’s strongest, least ambiguous, fictional treatment of communism and is consistent with the Marxist orthodoxy of his earlier poems such as ‘‘Child of the Dead and Forgotten Gods,’’ ‘‘Rise and Live,’’ and ‘‘Transcontinental.’’ It contains none of the painful reservations and doubts about radical leftist politics which will soon surface in Native Son and would eventually cause him to break with the Communist Party in 1942. Although praised by contemporary leftist critics and widely anthologized, it has often been criticized for being simplistically political in outlook. Margaret Walker, for example, complained about its ‘‘crude Marxism or Communist propaganda’’ (Walker 118). Keneth Kinnamon, while praising most of the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, argued that ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ was ‘‘not a good story’’ (Kinnamon 115) because of its confused symbolic patterns and inadequately dramatized political affirmations, suffering from a lack of ‘‘artistic and thematic integrity’’ (Kinnamon 116). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

BROOKLYN Wright lived at several Brooklyn addresses in his ten-year stay in New York City. The period between October 1938 and early 1939 when he stayed with Jane Newton and her family in two Brooklyn addresses were particularly important times in his life as a novelist because he did the bulk of his work on Native Son during that period. He moved in with the Newtons, whom he knew from his days of working with them as communists in Chicago, on October 1938 occupying a room in their Carleton Avenue apartment in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. When they moved to the 101 Lefferts Street address in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn in

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late November 1938, he continued to live with them. The two homes he shared with the Newtons on tree-lined streets in Brooklyn were a sharp contrast to the cramped quarters Wright had experienced while living for ten years on the South Side of Chicago. Although the three Newton children could occasionally create noise and disorder which bothered Wright, he found living with the Newtons and their mutual friends to be quite congenial for him as a writer and a person. In a 1964 letter to Michel Fabre, Jane Newton provided an interesting description of Wright’s writing habits when he was living with them in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. He would get up as early as six in the morning, go to nearby Fort Greene Park where he would sit on a hilltop overlooking the Brooklyn Navy Yard, and write for three to four hours. He would then return to the Newton apartment, have breakfast, and discuss what he had written with Jane, a close friend and a valued confidante. Afterwards, he would return to his room and type what he had rewritten, making careful revisions. In the afternoons he would read, go to the Brooklyn Public Library, or visit friends in Manhattan. In the evening, he would dine with the Newtons, and engage in long conversations with them and their frequent guests about the novel he was writing. He and Jane would often have heated arguments as she objected to what she felt was the excessive length of the trial scenes, the gratuitous violence inflicted upon Bessie, and lapses of verisimilitude in Book 3. Although Wright rarely took the advice he received in these conversations, they provided him with a sounding board and an occasion to express his own ideas which was very beneficial to his writing. He finished Native Son by June 1939 and sent it off to his editor at Harper and Brothers, Edward Aswell. Fabre has described the two locations which Wright shared with the Newtons as ‘‘ideal surroundings’’ (Fabre 117) for him to function as a writer. The Newton household was a gathering point for a number of friends such as Ted Ward, Abraham Chapman, and Willard Maas, each of

Brooks, Gwendolyn whom read parts of the manuscript of Native Son and offered Wright invaluable suggestions and encouragement. Wright benefited greatly from both the camaraderie and intellectual ferment which he experienced while living in Brooklyn with the Newtons. When he married Dhimah Meadman in 1939, Wright moved to Harlem for a while, staying at the Hamilton Terrace home of Dhimah’s mother. After divorcing Dhimah, Wright married Ellen Poplar on March 12, 1941. The Wrights lived for a short while with the Newtons in their apartment on 343 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn. Richard and Ellen Wright later had their own apartments in two Brooklyn locations, 7 Middagh Street where they shared a house with Carson McCullers, and 89 Lefferts Place, where he completed Black Boy. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times, New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

BROOKS, GWENDOLYN (7 June 1917– 3 December 2000) Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but left there with her family to go to Chicago when she was five years old and spent the majority of her life in Chicago. A shy, introverted child who published her first poem when she was thirteen in American Child magazine, she became a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender as a high school student. She graduated from high school in 1935 and received her Associates degree a year later from Wilson Junior College. In 1940 she became part of a writers’ workshop organized by Inez Boulton. Boulton introduced her to a wide range of modern poets and helped her to master traditional poetic forms such as the sonnet and the ballad, using these forms to express the everyday life of South Side Chicago. Brooks won the Midwestern Writers’ Conference Award for Poetry in 1943 and, two years later, published A Street in Bronzeville at Harper’s. This extraordinary collection of poems focused on

ordinary black people such as cleaning women, janitors, soldiers, and cooks who pursue their human dreams in meaningful ways in spite of being frustrated by the racism and economic hardships of ghetto life. After receiving two Guggenheim Fellowships and a grant from the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Brooks published Annie Allen in 1949, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950. Her novel Maud Martha appeared in 1953, followed by another collection of poems, The Bean Eaters in 1961. By this time, Brooks was recognized as an important American poet who had made significant contributions to African-American literary tradition. She also had established a successful teaching career at schools such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia College in Chicago, and Elmhurst College. Brooks’s life and writing took a radically new direction in 1967 when she attended the Second Black Writers’ Conference at Fisk University. Here she came in contact with a new generation of African-American writers such as Don L. Lee, Larry Neal, A. B. Spelman, and Amiri Baraka who were deeply influenced by the Black Power Movement and the Black Arts Movement. Their poetry was centered in a militant demand for radical political change and rejected traditional forms for freer open forms. Brooks began writing poetry which caught the spirit of the sixties, publishing In the Mecca in 1968 and Riot in 1969, collections of poetry which called for radical political change and employed free verse to make her protests more pointed and aggressive. She also became strongly involved in supporting Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in Detroit, a publisher which welcomed the work of young black writers who saw their poetry as an instrument of revolutionary social change. Brooks published five books at Broadside Press, including Family Pictures (1970), Report from Part One, and Beckonings (1975). Wright, who helped launch the writing careers of several important African-American writers such as Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, and 57

Browder, Earl James Baldwin, was asked by his editor at Harper’s, Edward Aswell, to assess the manuscript of A Street in Bronzeville, and he quickly replied with a very enthusiastic endorsement of Brooks’s work. He admired her treatment of everyday life in Chicago’s South Side and saw her as a very promising young writer. He told Aswell in a February 25, 1945 letter that ‘‘She is a real poet. . . . I’d say that she ought to be helped at all costs’’ (Rowley 317). When Brooks found out about Wright’s strong support of her work, she wrote him a letter of thanks, saying ‘‘Many folks have encouraged me but few of them have gone out of the way to help me as you have. I hope I won’t disappoint your faith in me’’ (Rowley 317). Wright later helped Brooks to place her poem ‘‘The Ballad of Pearl May Lee’’ in the first issue of Pre´sence Africaine in 1947. He also recommended that Harper’s publish Annie Allen two years later. Brooks wrote one of the few positive early reviews of Lawd Today! when it was published posthumously in 1963. Entitled ‘‘One of God’s Rawest Creatures,’’ it appeared in the Chicago Sunday Sun-Times and praised the book for its sharply realistic dialogue and powerful prose. Although she did not view the novel’s central character, Jake Jackson, as a representative figure and felt that Wright did not pay enough attention to the more positive features of black urban life, she pointed out that Wright accurately dramatized the problems faced by a significant percentage of African-American people. Selected Bibliography: Brooks, Gwendolyn, ‘‘One of God’s Rawest Creatures.’’ Chicago Sunday Sun-Times (2 April 1963), 2. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

BROWDER, EARL (20 May 1891– 27 June 1973) The American Communist Party’s leader in World War II, Browder was a life-long defender of the poor and oppressed. Born in Wichita,

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Kansas, he spent his early life in extreme poverty as his family of ten people had difficulty making ends meet after his father became disabled when Browder was a child. He dropped out of school at age ten to help support his family and developed a patchwork education with correspondence courses. Like Wright, he was largely self-educated. He became involved in politics at a very early age, joining the Socialist Party when he was 15 and also becoming active in the American Federation of Labor. Like many socialists, he opposed American involvement in World War I and was convicted of evading the draft and sentenced to 16 months in prison. Shortly after his release, he became editor of the Socialist Party’s Workers’ World and, along with Trotskyite James P. Cannon, became a leader in Kansas City’s Socialist Party. He joined the Communist Party of the United States in 1921 and helped to mobilize unions for the party. He traveled to China in 1922 to organize the Cominterm there. He then became managing editor of the communist newspaper, The Labor Herald and took over leadership of the party in 1932 when William Z. Foster suffered a heart attack and had to resign that position. Browder led the American Communist Party during a very difficult transitional period when it went from supporting anti-war efforts during the time of the Hitler-Stalin Nonaggression Pact in 1939 to the ‘‘Popular Front’’ period when the party supported American involvement in WWII in an effort to defeat German fascism. Browder’s enthusiastic support of Stalin’s Popular Front strategy made him a controversial figure among American communists since it required them to form broad coalitions with a wide variety of liberal organizations which they previously had fought. Many American communists saw the war as a fight between equally capitalist, imperialist forces and balked at forming alliances with them. Many African-American communists were deeply suspicious of the Popular Front since they regarded it as a means of deflecting attention from fighting racism in the United States in favor of

Brown, Joe addressing more general international issues defined by Moscow. With James W. Ford as his running mate, Browder ran for the U.S. presidency as the CPUSA’s candidate but was able to gain only 80,159 votes. He later became a victim of strong anticommunist feeling and was arrested in 1939 on trumped up charges of passport violations and was given a four-year prison sentence. He was the party’s presidential nomination in the 1940 election and ran his campaign from his prison cell, collecting only 46,251 votes. His sentence was commuted in 1942 by President Roosevelt who was eager to maintain good relations with the Soviet Union during the war. After 1945 when Cold War tensions made the Popular Front extremely unpopular with communists in America and Europe, Browder came under attack by those who opposed his notion that capitalism and communism were compatible, an idea which they contemptuously called ‘‘Browderism.’’ He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1946. Although he continued to view himself as a committed Marxist and published In Defense of Communism in 1949, he was never reinstated by the party. After publishing Marx and America in 1958, he withdrew from public view and died with very little notice in 1973. Wright first met Browder in 1934 when he was a member of the John Reed Club in Chicago and welcomed Browder when he visited that city to speak at the Second Congress Against War and Fascism. Wright also heard Browder speak at the First American Writers’ Congress in New York on April 26, 1935 and was greatly reassured by his strong support of young communist writers, stressing that they could best serve the party by coming skilled artists instead of ideologically driven propagandists. And when Native Son was negatively reviewed in 1940 by communist ideologues like James W. Ford, Browder praised the novel and supported Wright’s artistic freedom and integrity. However, Wright and Browder were clearly at odds with each other over the policy of the

Popular Front. Wright was strongly opposed in the late 1930s and early 1940s to America’s involvement in WWII and expressed his views on the matter in a 1941 New Masses article, ‘‘Not My People’s War.’’ He encouraged American blacks not to serve in the segregated armed forces and felt it was hypocritical for Americans to criticize German racism while allowing it to flourish at home. In a broader sense, Wright opposed Browder’s support for the Popular Front for two other important reasons. First of all, he saw this policy as withdrawing the party’s commitment to fighting racial discrimination in the United States by substituting international priorities defined by Moscow for urgently needed reform in America. Secondly, Wright was staunchly opposed to Browder’s belief that capitalism and communism could be made to harmonize with each other. As a serious socialist and Marxist, Wright deeply believed that the two systems were diametrically opposed to each other. Despite these differences with Browder, Wright deplored the party’s shabby treatment of him and regarded it as yet another indication of his own decision to break from communism in 1942. Selected Bibliography: Naison, Mark. Communists during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Part of the United States: From Depression to World War II. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

BROWN, JOE Hazel Rowley describes him as Wright’s ‘‘best friend from Jackson days’’ (Rowley 70). The two first met when Wright was a fifth-grade student at Jim Hill Primary School and they became part of a group of friends which included Dick Jordan, Perry Booker, D. C. Blackburn, Lewis Anderson, Sarah McNeamer, and Essie Lee Ward. They were also classmates at Smith Robertson Junior High School and many of them continued their friendships when they later migrated to Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s. 59

Brown, Joe In Black Boy/American Hunger Wright described his student years in Jackson as a pivotal time in his life because it was a period when he found an alternative to both his personal loneliness and the repressive environment of his grandmother’s harshly religious household. He saw classmates such as Joe Brown as lively young people who regarded school as a springboard for social advancement and personal development. The four years at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson provided him for the first time in his life with an extended period of continuous education and stable friendships with people who envisioned their future in hopeful, pragmatic ways: I was now with boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking; it revitalized my being, whipped my senses to a high, keen pitch of receptivity . . . Suddenly the future loomed tangibly for me, as tangible as a future can be for a black boy in Mississippi. (Wright 147)

He developed a particularly close and fruitful relationship with Joe Brown. They played together in grammar school, devising tricks on neighbors and sometimes doing forbidden things like swimming at a waterhole owned by a white man named Barrett who ‘‘sometimes threatened them with his gun’’ (Fabre 43). (This provided Wright with material for ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ a story in which a white man loses his life when he attempts to shoot young black men who are swimming naked on his property.) In the summer of 1923, Wright and Brown worked as water carriers at Bullard’s brick yard in Jackson where they labored with an older boy named Bigger Thomas, a ‘‘daredevil bully’’ (Rowley 29) who left a lasting impression on Wright’s imagination. In a later summer, Brown had a job at the Jackson rail yards, hanging mail bags on a pole alongside the tracks which speeding trains would pick up as they passed by. Wright often joined him and the two would practice hopping trains, stealing rides, and discussing their plans for leaving the South and pursuing new lives in Chicago. They also would salvage books and magazines which white people had discarded by picking 60

them out of garbage cans. In this way, Wright developed a taste for the detective fiction, Alger stories, and gothic thrillers which exert such a strong influence in his mature fiction. After Wright moved to Chicago in 1927, he kept in contact with Brown who relocated to that city four years later and lived with his aunt not far from where Wright lived with his family. They worked together in the mayoral race of 1931 as assistants to black precinct captain, ‘‘Doc’’ Huggins. They later worked in an African-American cemetery and collaborated on a number of fanciful get-rich-quick schemes which never got off the ground. Wright saw Brown as a valued confidante and sought his reactions to his early poems and stories. And the two often enjoyed going to Washington Park where they would listen to radical political speakers such as Garveyites and communists. Although Brown never joined organizations such as the John Reed Club or the Communist Party, he ‘‘shared’’ many of Wright’s ‘‘political enthusiasms’’ (Fabre 109). After Wright left Chicago in 1937 to pursue his career as a writer in New York, he kept up a lively correspondence with Brown from ‘‘early 1938 to 1945’’ (Walker 182). Wright sought Brown’s views about his books and depended upon Brown to keep him informed about news from Chicago and Mississippi, which Brown frequently visited. Brown was particularly enthusiastic about Black Boy when it appeared in 1945. He wrote Wright a letter of congratulations, delighting in the outrage the book had caused among white Mississippians and praising Wright for saying ‘‘a mouthful’’ (Rowley 319). Several of Brown’s letters are collected in the Kent State University Library and their use is restricted by the Wright estate. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

Burns, Ben Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

BURNS, BEN (25 August 1913– 29 January 2000) A white liberal editor whom Wright knew from their days as communists in Chicago during the 1930s, Burns crossed paths with Wright in several significant ways during the 1940s and 1950s. When Burns interviewed Gertrude Stein for the Chicago Defender in 1946, she characterized Wright as ‘‘the best American writer today’’ (Rowley 339) and this proved helpful to Wright as he found his way through French artistic and intellectual circles. And it was Burns who encouraged Wright to compose three articles for Ebony magazine in 1949 when Wright was in Chicago to film scenes for the movie version of Native Son. One piece focused on the filming itself and this appeared in Ebony’s January 1951 issue as ‘‘Richard Wright Explains Ideas about Movie Making.’’ The second article centered on Wright’s impressions of post–World War II Chicago after his 12-year absence from that city and it was published in the December 1951 issue of Ebony as ‘‘The Shame of Chicago.’’ The third article was ‘‘I Choose Exile,’’ a defense of Wright’s decision to remove himself from America and take up permanent residence in France. It was rejected by Ebony and has never been published. The difficulties Wright experienced placing his work with Ebony mark the end of his friendship with Burns and eventually led to what Michel Fabre has characterized as ‘‘a continuing feud’’ (Fabre 448) between the two men. Although Burns encouraged Wright to compose a hardhitting exposure of racism and poverty in ‘‘The Shame of Chicago’’ and gave Wright strong praise for the essay as something which would ‘‘give our local folk a good kick in the posterior’’ (Rowley 397), he dramatically reversed his thinking when he discovered his boss’s strong disapproval of the piece. John M. Johnson, the director of Ebony, a magazine whose editorial policy was to stress uplifting stories about African-American success,

was shocked by Wright’s bleak depiction of black life in Chicago and wanted to reject the article. When Burns reminded him that Ebony had a contract with Wright, Johnson relented and agreed to publish the essay but on one condition—Burns must write an anonymous editorial completely rebutting Wright’s view and stressing the positive achievements made by black Chicagoans since Wright left the city during the depths of the Depression. Burns’s editorial, which he never admitted to Wright that he wrote, was a sharp attack on Wright’s work and character. Burns accused him of willfully ignoring the progress which blacks had made in Chicago and giving undue emphasis on racial, social, and political problems. He argued that most Negroes in Chicago were ‘‘better off than most Frenchmen’’ and concluded the essay with a personal attack on Wright whom he characterized as a ‘‘race leader’’ who has ‘‘sacrificed truth on the altar of militancy’’ (Rowley 398). Wright was greatly distressed by Ebony’s unannounced attack on his essay and when they demurred at publishing ‘‘I Choose Exile,’’ his account of his life in France, he offered to return the $500 commission which the magazine had paid him so that he could regain the publication rights to the essay and place it elsewhere. Johnson refused either to publish the article or to sell its rights back to the author, so it remains unpublished to this day. Nine years after Wright died and after he had left Ebony, Burns illegally sold the rights to ‘‘I Choose Exile’’ to Kent State University without the consent of the magazine or the Wright estate. It remains at Kent State, but use of it is restricted by Wright’s heirs. Although Wright never became aware of Burns’s skullduggery at Ebony, the two had a serious falling-out when Burns attacked Wright in an article published in the March 8, 1956 issue of The Reporter. Burns criticized Wright and other African-American expatriates in Paris for unfairly belaboring racial problems in America and turning a blind eye to the social and economic progress made by blacks in post–World War II America (Burns 172–74). 61

Busia, Kofi Abrefa Realizing that such false accusations could result in the revocation of his French visa and send him back to the United States where he almost certainly would be persecuted, as Langston Hughes was by the House Un-American Activities Committee, Wright was careful to defend himself from Burns’s charges at the American Embassy. But for the remainder of his life Wright regarded Burns as an enemy and would have nothing to do with him personally or professionally. When Burns became editor of Duke magazine in the late fifties and contacted Wright’s agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., about publishing a chapter from The Outsider, Wright aborted the deal. He likewise refused to allow Male Magazine from publishing ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ sensing that Burns was connected with the magazine. As Michel Fabre and Addison Gayle have observed, clashes such as the one Wright experienced with Ben Burns in the mid-1950s led to him developing painful suspicions that there was ‘‘a concerted attempt to damage’’ (Fabre 449) his career by American and European authorities during the Cold War. This drained his energies and demoralized him at a time when his health was failing and when he was attempting to focus his attentions on his writing. Gayle’s research into the files kept on Wright by the FBI and CIA certainly confirm that Wright had good reason to harbor such suspicions. Selected Bibliography: Burns, Ben. Nitty Gritty: A White Editor in Black Journalism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1980. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times, New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

BUSIA, KOFI ABREFA (11 July 1913– 28 August 1978) A scholar and activist for African liberation from colonial rule, Busia was Prime Minister of Ghana

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from 1969–72 after winning the election as a member of the Progress Party. He was born in Wenchi in what as then the British colony of the Gold Coast. As a young man, he was educated at Methodist School in Wenchi and later at Wesley College in Kumasi. He earned his first degree with Honours in Medieval and Modern History from the University of London. He then did graduate work at Oxford University, gaining an M.A. in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics and a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology. From 1942 to 1949 he taught at the University of the Gold Coast, becoming the first African to hold a chair at that university. In 1951 he was elected by the Ashanti Confederacy to the Legislative Council of the Gold Coast. A year later, he became leader of the United Party which opposed Kwame Nkrumah’s rise to power. When Nkrumah became Prime Minister of the new state of Ghana, Busia fled the country, fearing for his life, and became a professor of Sociology at the University of Leiden in The Netherlands. After Nkrumah’s government was overthrown by the military in 1966, he returned to Ghana and assumed leadership of the Progress Party. He was named Prime Minister in 1969, continuing his party’s anti-Nkrumaist policies. His government was overthrown by a military coup on January 13, 1972 while he was in London undergoing a medical examination. He died six years later from a heart attack. Wright read two of Busia’s books, The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of the Ashanti (1951) and Report on a Social Survey of Sekondi-Takoradi (1950). He read the former book in preparation for his 1953 visit to the Gold Coast and purchased the latter book while living there (Fabre 21). During his stay in Africa, Wright visited Busia who was then a Sociology professor at the University of Achimeta. In their discussions Busia disagreed with Wright’s view that emerging African nations should use western technology

Busia, Kofi Abrefa and industrialism to develop themselves as modern states which were economically free of the West. Busia was a strong proponent of newly emerging African countries maintaining their traditional values, tribal customs, and religious practices.

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Reflection of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954.

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C CAFE´ TOURNON Located in Paris across the street from the Luxembourg Gardens, it was owned by Monsieur and Madame Alazar and was a popular meeting spot for African-American expatriates from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. Wright, who was doted on by the owners, was fond of the place and visited it regularly during his many years of living in Paris. Other black writers and intellectuals who were regulars at the Cafe´ Tournon included novelists James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith as well as cartoonist Ollie Harrington and journalist Richard Gibson. Chester Himes in his autobiography referred to the Cafe´ Tournon as ‘‘Dick’s domain’’ (Himes 144). Black expatriates met at the Cafe´ Tournon and other Paris cafe´s such as Les Deux Magots for a number of reasons. Cafe´ life provided them with an opportunity to discuss their work, receive news from the United States, and meet friends from home who were visiting Paris. These places were also settings for meeting white women who wanted to have affairs with black men. Wright, for example, met Cecilia Hornung and other mistresses in the Cafe´ Tournon. Although such cafe´ society provided black expatriates with a kind of home away from home as they adjusted to what Wright called an ‘‘alien’’ (Fabre 144) land, these

cafes were also centers of intense personal rivalry, political intrigue, and literary competitiveness. Wright, Baldwin, Himes, and Smith were highly individualistic people and were acutely aware that their position in French society was marginal at best, fragile at worst. (Wright, for example, was fearful throughout his years in France that his visa could be revoked if he incurred the displeasure of French officials, and this would mean that he would have to return to America where he would almost certainly have to face the hostilities of the House Committee on Un-American Activities.) French and American authorities sometimes played black expatriates against each other in an attempt to extract information about them. Cold War Paris was a nest of political intrigue and Wright had good cause to believe that he was not only being watched by the FBI and CIA but that people such as Smith and Gibson might try to discredit him as a way of elevating their own status among government bureaucrats and literary critics. Wright called such people ‘‘black spies’’ (Fabre 185) and often saw them, much to his dismay, at the Cafe´ Tournon. In ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ a novel which Wright wrote late in his life but was unable to publish, he gives a very unflattering view of the African-American men gathered at the Tournon and other cafe´ s. He pictures them as egoists 65

Camus, Albert engaged in intense competition with each other not only for the sexual favors of white women but also for a more privileged position among French officials and American critics. The novel features a fist fight in the Tournon between two characters loosely modeled after Wright’s friend Ollie Harrington and his bitter enemy Richard Gibson. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Himes, Chester. My Life of Absurdity. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976.

CAMUS, ALBERT (7 November 1913– 4 January 1960) Albert Camus, a recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957, was born in Algeria of French parentage and came to France at the age of twenty-five. Along with Jean-Paul Sartre (1905– 1980), he represented post–World War II French existentialism and had influences on his contemporary writers throughout the world. His works include a book of essays, Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus, 1942), L’E´tranger (The Stranger, 1942), La Peste (The Plague, 1947), La Chute (The Fall, 1956), L’Exile et le royaume (Exile and the Kingdom, 1957). Admiring Camus, Wright, who was living in France, read The Stranger with great interest before writing The Outsider (1953). Wright read The Stranger in the American edition at a very slow pace, ‘‘weighing each sentence, ‘admiring’ its damn good narrative prose,’’ and remarked: It is a neat job but devoid of passion. He makes his point with dispatch and his prose is solid and good. In America a book like this would not attract much attention for it would be said that he lacks feeling. He does, however, draw his character very well. What is of course really interesting in this book is the use of fiction to express a philosophical point of view. That he does with ease. I now want to read his other stuff. (Fabre 191)

Compared with The Stranger, The Outsider is similar in expressing existential philosophy but 66

different in characterization. Although Damon professes to be a nihilist, as does Meursault, he is never indifferent to human existence as is Meursault. Camus’ hero is called a stranger to society as well as to himself; he is indifferent to friendship, marriage, love, success, or freedom. Ironically, Damon, who seeks them in life, fails to obtain them. It is ironic, too, that Meursault, to whom they are at his disposal, is indifferent to them. Wright’s hero, an outsider racially as well as intellectually, struggles to get inside. Damon wants to be treated as an individual, not as a second-class citizen or a person whose intellectual ability is not recognized. By contrast, Camus’ hero, an insider but a stranger, strives to get outside. The Outsider represents a version of existentialism in which human action is viewed as the result of an individual’s choice and will. To Wright, the individual’s action must be assertive and, if need be, aggressive. This is perhaps why he was more attracted to Sartre and de Beauvoir than to Camus. In an unpublished journal Wright wrote: Sartre is quite of my opinion regarding the possibility of human action today, that it is up to the individual to do what he can to uphold the concept of what it means to be human. The great danger, I told him, in the world today is the very feeling and conception of what is a human might well be lost. He agreed. I feel very close to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. (Fabre 186)

The chief difference in philosophy between The Outsider and The Stranger derives from the differing philosophies of the two novelists. Although Damon and Meursault are both regarded as rebels against society, the motive behind the rebellion differs. Damon rebels against society because it oppresses him by depriving him of the values he and society share, such as freedom in association and opportunity for success. Meursault is aloof to society because he does not believe in such values. In fact, he does not believe in marriage or family loyalty. His obdurate attitude toward society is clearly stated in Camus’ preface to the American edition of The Stranger:

Canada I summarized The Stranger—a long time ago, with a remark that I admit was highly paradoxical: ‘In our society any man who does not weep at his mother’s funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to death.’ I only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the game . . . . This is what we all do, every day, to simplify life. He says what he is, he refuses to hide his feelings, and immediately society feels threatened. (Camus 335–37)

If Meursault is characterized by his refusal to play society’s game, Damon is a type of person who cannot resist playing such a game. If society is threatened by Meursault’s indifference to it, it is Damon, rather than society, who feels threatened. It is hardly coincidental that both novels are eloquent social criticisms in our times. The Outsider is an indictment against American society, for not only does Wright maintain Damon’s innocence, but he shows most convincingly that men in America ‘‘hate themselves and it makes them hate others’’ (Wright 439). The Stranger, on the other hand, is an indictment against French society, for Camus proves that while the criminal is innocent, his judges are guilty. More significantly, however, comparison of the two novels of differing characters and traditions reveals that both Wright and Camus are writing ultimately about a universal human condition in modern times. Yoshinobu Hakutani Selected Bibliography: Camus, Albert. Lyrical and Critical Essays. Ed. Philip Thody. Trans. Ellen C. Kennedy. New York: Knopf, 1968. Camus, Albert. The Stranger. 1942. Trans. Stuart Gilbert. New York: Vintage, 1946. Fabre, Michel. ‘‘Richard Wright, French Existentialism, and The Outsider.’’ In Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982, 182–98. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. CrossCultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006, 101–19. Wright, Richard. The Outsider. 1953, New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

CANADA Wright’s interest in Canada can be traced back to 1942 when he and his wife Ellen were considering

moving there. Their daughter Julia was born on April 15 and the Wrights were increasingly worried about the problems of being an interracial family in the United States. Canada had a reputation among American black people as being a country that was relatively free of racial tensions, and both Wright and his wife had grown tired of the racial insults they had experienced in New York. Wright also was attracted to Canada because of the possibility of working for a Canadian film company headed by John Grierson. This filmmaker was planning to do a documentary film on African-American communities in Canada that had been formed in the nineteenth century as end points for the Underground Railroad. Although very little came of Wright’s interest in making films in Canada, Wright went to Canada in August 1944 with his wife and daughter to purchase property. They examined a small farm outside of Montreal but did not buy it because it needed extensive repairs. They then spent several weeks vacationing outside of Ottawa on Lake Meech in the Gateau country. Wright enjoyed the beautiful scenery along the St. Lawrence River and admired the relaxed pace of French Canadian life. Tired by the hard work and frustrations of completing Black Boy and preparing it as a Book-of-the-Month selection, he was energized by his vacation in Canada and impressed by the lack of racial friction he observed there. The next summer the Wrights returned to Quebec, eager to escape a heat wave and wartime racial hostilities of New York. They rented a cottage in Isle d’Orleans on the St. Lawrence River not far from Quebec City. He began taking French lessons, now more than ever intent on leaving the United States to live either in French Canada or France. In a July, 1945 letter to Carl Van Vechten he remarked ‘‘Because of the war, this is the closest I can get to Paris’’ (Rowley 318). Wright again enjoyed the spectacular scenery of Quebec and was greatly relaxed by the slow pace and traditional lifestyle of French Canadian life. In a letter to Gertrude Stein, he sharply contrasted his life in New York with his existence in Canada, saying ‘‘Quebec is slow and ripe and organic and 67

Cayton, Horace R. serene . . . But when one returns to New York City one is struck by the hurried . . . the vague and the frantic’’ (Fabre 287). Refreshed by his vacation in Canada, Wright did a substantial amount of non-fiction writing, including the introduction to Black Metropolis, a lecture which later delivered at the Breadloaf Conference, and an article about juvenile delinquency. When Wright and his wife returned to New York in August, 1945, they were strengthened in their resolve to find an alternative to living in the United States by moving either to Quebec or Paris. As Fabre has observed, ‘‘French Canada, in fact, was a foretaste of Europe’’ (Fabre 287). In two years, the Wrights would move to France on a permanent basis. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

CAYTON, HORACE R. (12 April 1903– 22 January 1970) Anthropologist, sociologist, writer, and educator, Horace R. Cayton set standards for sociological studies on African-American life that influence scholars today. Born in Seattle, Washington, to activist publisher Horace R. Cayton, Sr. and Susie Revels Cayton (daughter of Hiram Revels, the first black senator from Mississippi in 1870), Cayton’s destiny at first did not seem directed towards academic life. He dropped out of high school to join the military during World War I and completed tours in California, Wyoming, Mexico, and Hawaii. In returning to Seattle in his twenties, Cayton enrolled at the University of Washington and earned a degree in sociology in 1931. His next educational pursuit took Cayton to the Midwest where he was enrolled in graduate studies in sociology from 1931–34 at the University of Chicago. Cayton’s reputation stems from his groundbreaking work on sociological studies of AfricanAmerican life. Moving from manual labor jobs

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as a messman on a steamer during military service and then member of a detective force in Seattle during college, Cayton began his practicum in sociological studies as a research assistant at the University of Chicago, first in political science and then in sociology. After graduate school, he taught economics at Fisk University from 1935– 36, and garnered honors when he earned a Rosenwald Fellowship to study abroad in 1939. In the 1940s, he became director of Parkway Community House in Chicago, and from 1959 to his death in 1970, Cayton served as a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley. While holding these academic posts, Cayton also actively published findings in co-authored works. In 1939, Cayton published Black Workers and the Unions with George S. Mitchell that examined the quality of life of African Americans working in industry. His most famous contribution of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, published in 1945 both by Cayton and his co-author St. Clair Drake, earned them international acclaim. A monumental, detailed study, the authors examined the effects of urbanization on African Americans living in Chicago’s famous ‘‘Black Belt.’’ Cayton also synchronized his academic work and publications to correspond with his work in government posts. For example, he served as special assistant to the Secretary of Interior from 1931–35 and then headed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in Chicago from 1936–39. The 1930s and 1940s were significant periods, for it was during those decades that Cayton had sporadic contacts with rising star author Richard Wright. It was Wright who arrived in Chicago in 1927 accompanied by his aunt and in flight from Mississippi. His early years in Chicago and living in the Black Belt on the south side of town were characterized by extreme poverty as Wright struggled to support his mother and brother newly arrived from Mississippi on his meager earnings as a dishwasher and janitor. Wright, however, had a desire to become a writer and began a program of self-teaching since he only

Ce´saire, Aime´ had an eighth grade education. Part of his initiative was to visit the office of sociologist Louis Wirth at the University of Chicago where Cayton was working as a research assistant. In 1936 after he published his first short story and began working professionally as a writer, Wright became employed by the WPA which Cayton was directing. This government work provided Wright with a steady but modest salary. However, the author’s world changed after Wright published his collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children in 1938 and then novel Native Son in 1940 that garnered him international fame. It was while Cayton was director of the Parkway Community House that Cayton’s and Wright’s paths converged again. Wright was working on a photographic text project with co-author Edwin Rosskam, and Wright asked Cayton to assist in the selection of pictures to be extracted from WPA files. The resulting text was 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (1941). Through pictures and words, the photographic text was Wright’s sociological study. It is thus easy to surmise why Cayton and Drake asked Wright to write the preface to Black Metropolis (1945) that made the two sociologists famous for their landmark study. Had Cayton lived to complete his biography on Wright, his work also would have been groundbreaking. In 1946, Wright decided to take his family and move to Paris, France, for good. In 1948, he returned briefly to Chicago and contacted Cayton during preparations for the filming of Native Son in South America. After this point, their contacts were minimal. Cayton, on the other hand, filled several divergent posts during the 1950s. He served as a research assistant for the American Jewish Committee of the National Council of Churches; he continued his 1940s relationship as a periodic correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier—this time at the United Nations. In addition, he also took a position as a faculty member at the University of California, Berkeley, which he held until his death in 1970. In the interim, Cayton continued to publish. With Setsuko Matsunaga Nishi, he co-authored

The Changing Scene, released by the National Council of Churches, about church and social issues. He penned his autobiography, Long Old Road, and published it in 1955 with Trident Press. And, at the time of his own death, Cayton was researching a biography on the author Richard Wright who died in Paris on Novermber 28, 1960. It is ironic that Cayton died shortly after his arrival in Paris on January 22, 1970 and in the same city as Richard Wright, his admired fellow intellectual. Cayton’s remains were brought back to the United States; he was survived by a brother and two sisters. Cayton’s work lives on, however. Scholars today immediately think of the names Horace R. Cayton and St. Clair Drake when discussions on sociological studies about AfricanAmerican life arise. Virginia Whatley Smith Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. ‘‘Horace R. Cayton, Sociologist, Dies.’’ New York Times. January 25, 1970. 68. Smith, Virginia Whatley. ‘‘They Sing the Song of Slavery.’’ The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2003. 56–129.

CE´SAIRE, AIME´ (20 June 1913–) A West Indian poet, dramatist, and activist, Ce´saire was a central figure in twentieth century liberation movements of black people. He was born on the island of Martinique which was at that time a French colony. Although his family was poor, he became a student at the Lyce´e Schoelcher in the capital city of Fort-de-France where he excelled in his studies. When he graduated in 1931, he won a scholarship to study in Paris, enrolling at the Ecole Normale Supe´riere where he became friends with Sengalese poet Le´ opold Senghor and Guyanese writer Le´on Gautian Dumas. The three men would become ‘‘fathers’’ of the Ne´gritude movement of French-speaking black intellectuals and writers who were committed to eliminating European colonialism in Africa and celebrating black culture, especially as it was 69

Ce´saire, Aime´ rooted in African traditions and beliefs. In Ce´saire’s words, Ne´gritude was ‘‘the affirmation that one is black and proud of it.’’ The term ‘‘Ne´gritude’’ first appeared in Ce´saire’s poem ‘‘Return to My Native Land’’ which he published in 1939. In that same year, he went back to Martinique, becoming deeply involved in leftist politics. He was elected mayor of Fortde-France and, running on the Communist ticket, was elected to the French National Assembly. He continued to work at the Lyce´e Schoelcher where he taught and became the mentor of Frantz Fanon who would later become an important figure in the struggle for Algerian independence and the author of Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. After World War II, Ce´ saire alternated between living in Martinique and Paris. As a member of the Communist Party, he was actively involved in black freedom movements in Africa and the Caribbean. In the spring of 1946 he cofounded with Senghor Pre´ sence Africaine, an important journal which embraced the tenets of Ne´gritude and provided a forum for Pan-African ideas as well as black literature and art. He also helped to establish Tropique, a journal devoted to black literature and culture. From 1939 to 1955 he focused on writing poetry, publishing several books, including Return to My Homeland (1939), Les armes miraculeuse (1945), Soleil con coupe´ (1948) and Corps perdu (1949). His analysis of the psychological damage and social costs of imperialism, Discours sur colonialisme appeared in 1955 and influenced a whole generation of younger black radicals such as Fanon and Eric Williams. Ce´saire’s book compared colonialism with Nazism as political systems which use fear, violence and ideology to oppress whole societies. From the late 1950s he turned to drama, writing a series of plays grounded in revolutionary themes. And the Dogs Kept Quiet (1956) describes the oppression of Caribbean blacks. In 1963 he began a trilogy with The Tragedy of King Christophe which focused on the early nineteenth-century Haitian ruler, Henri

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Christophe. It was followed by A Season in the Congo in 1966 which described the ‘‘rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba. The trilogy was completed in 1968 with Une Tempete, an ironic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, portraying Prospero as an oppressive colonizer and Caliban as a black victim of Prospero’s racist domination. Ariel is imagined as a man of science and technology who is used by Prospero to subjugate the natives on a Caribbean island. Wright was introduced to Ce´ saire in the summer of 1946 on his first trip to Paris. He helped the two men organize Pre´sence Africaine and remained an active member of that magazine’s editorial board for several years. In the summer of 1950 he worked with Ce´ saire in organizing ‘‘Revelation of Negro Art,’’ an exhibition of paintings by black painters at the Muse´e de l’Homme in Paris. In the same year, he and Ce´saire collaborated in putting together performances of traditional black songs and dances at the Cite´ Universitaire. Wright also worked very closely with Ce´saire and Senghor in bringing about the First International Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, which was sponsored by Pre´sence Africaine in 1956. At that conference Wright presented a paper, ‘‘Tradition and Industrialism’’ which was later included in White Man, Listen! while Ce´saire spoke on ‘‘Culture and Civilization,’’ a paper which described African Americans as a colonized people. According to Margaret Walker, Wright, Senghor, and Ce´saire ‘‘formed a nucleus of friends’’ (Walker 274) and their influence on Wright enabled him to see the problems faced by American blacks in a broader, international context. Although Wright as an ex-communist was wary of Ce´ saire’s commitment to the Communist Party, he admired him as a person and shared many of his ideas about black liberation. As Michel Fabre has stressed, Wright’s ‘‘spiritual evolution’’ was fostered as much by black revolutionaries like Ce´saire and Senghor as it was by white existentialists such as Sartre and de Beauvoir.

‘‘Cesspool’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. New York: Doubleday, 1980. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘CESSPOOL’’ This is Wright’s first novel which, according to Arnold Rampersad, he began writing ‘‘sometime around 1934’’ (Rampersad v) when he was twenty-six years old and had been living in Chicago for seven years. It was substantially revised over the next two years and was submitted to a series of publishers, including Vanguard Press, Norton, and Simon and Schuster. Each press rejected the manuscript, largely because of its heavy use of obscene words, its frank treatment of sex, and its thematic bleakness. Wright became discouraged by these repeated rejections, turned his hand to the writing of Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, and placed the manuscript of Cesspool in his files where it remained until his death. It was published posthumously as Lawd Today! by Walker and Company, largely through the persistent efforts of his widow, Ellen Wright, who was one of the few people who appreciated the book’s importance and literary merit. The book is heavily autobiographical, drawing upon Wright’s experiences working in the Chicago Post Office. The central character of the book is Jake Jackson, a postal worker caught in a life of dull routine, economic difficulty, and racial discrimination. His 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 which recreates his day of work in the Chicago Post Office, and a concluding section where he goes to a whorehouse, gets drunk, 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 up, as he tells his friends, right where he began. The novel opens with Jake resisting his wife’s attempts to wake him because he prefers the soft world of his dreams to

the pain of his waking life, and it concludes with him falling into a drunken sleep after he is knocked unconscious by his wife when she defends herself after his attack. Throughout this book, Jake is presented as incapable of handling the demands of his actual life and retreating into various forms of ‘‘sleep,’’ fantasies 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 which are interspersed throughout the novel. The news from the outer world always gives evidence of a society 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 co-workers at the post office about several women in Chicago who have performed macabre murders. They also discuss the ‘‘crime of the century,’’ the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Franks, a ‘‘thrill killing’’ which 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 which dehumanizes workers with mindless routine, low pay, and constant surveillance. The mechanical work of sorting mail produces a numbing weariness 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 71

Challenge job in the post office, he’s reached the top. 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 and he has difficulty talking above the din of the sorting machines which are described as rumbling like an underground volcano. The only releases which Jake and his friends find from their dreary work, ironically, make their lives even worse in the long run. The movies which entertain them with romantic fantasies provide them with 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 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 is 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. While writing ‘‘Cesspool’’ Wright was significantly influenced by a number of modernist writers whose texts supplied him with important themes and technical innovations. He was particularly influenced by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, writers he had seriously studied since coming to Chicago in 1927. ‘‘Cesspool,’’ like Joyce’s Ulysses, takes place over a single day in the life of an ordinary man and uses dream sequences and stream of consciousness to probe the innermost desires and drives of the central character. Like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Wright’s book is set in a city that epitomizes the decay of modern civilization and dramatizes this decay with a fragmented, impressionistic structure. (The book also makes several specific allusions to Eliot’s ‘‘unreal city’’ with its rat’s ally. Part Three opens with a brief quotation from The Waste Land.) Wright’s text also reflects strong influence from American naturalists, particularly James T.

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Farrell and John Dos Passos. Like Farrell’s Gas House McGinty and Studs Lonigan, ‘‘Cesspool’’ focuses on the dull routines of American working class life, meticulously detailing the humdrum quality of the workplace and using dream sequences to portray the equally mundane nature of his characters’ depleted inward lives. ‘‘Cesspool’’ also draws heavily from Dos Passos’s USA, using fragmented narrative, newspaper headlines, and snippets from radio shows to reveal the incoherent, trivialized nature of urban experience in twentieth-century America. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Foreword’’ in Lawd Today! Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1991.

CHALLENGE A journal organized in 1934 by Dorothy West, who underwrote it with her own personal finances and edited it until 1937. It was envisioned as a vehicle for keeping alive the literary values of the Harlem Renaissance while connecting these values with the new literature of racial and social protest emerging in the 1930s. The first three issues published work mainly from writers linked to the Harlem Renaissance such as Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and Wallace Thurman, but the final three issues laid heavy stress on the younger and more politically engaged writers gathering around Richard Wright. It collapsed because of financial difficulties and was replaced in 1937 by New Challenge, which was funded in part by the Communist Party and was edited by West, Marian Minus, and Wright. Although this journal put out only one issue, it made an important impact on African-American writing, defining a new direction for AfricanAmerican literature. It replaced the racial celebration of Harlem Renaissance literature with the social protest that characterized black literature of the Great Depression. New Challenge featured Wright’s seminal essay, ‘‘Blueprint for Negro

Chenal, Pierre Writing,’’ Ralph Ellison’s first published essay, and poems by Margaret Walker, Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson, and Frank Marshall Davis. Each of these writers, in various ways, saw themselves as part of a new phase of AfricanAmerican literature which was directed at a black audience and focused on a realistic depiction of the lives of the black masses. Moreover, these writers saw literature as a powerful instrument of racial protest and social change. Selected Bibliography: Daniel, Walter. ‘‘Challenge Magazine: An Experiment That Failed,’’ CLA Journal, 19 (June 1976) 494–503. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Johnson, Abby and Ronald Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of AfroAmerican Magazines in The Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

CHAPMAN, ABRAHAM A Jewish Communist friend of Wright’s since his Chicago days and an active member of Chicago’s John Reed Club and South Side Writers’ Group, Chapman was among Wright’s closest friends because of their common interest in literature and downtrodden people. Chapman attended with Wright the First American Writer’s Congress at Carnegie Hall in New York in April 1935 and saw with Wright the recent Broadway hit, Waiting for Lefty by Clifford Odets, after the conference. Back in Chicago, Chapman arranged for Wright’s reading of ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ still in manuscript form, at the Roosevelt Road Cultural Center under the aegis of the South Side Writers’ Group in April 1936. Even after Chapman moved from Chicago to New York as a cultural adviser for the Communist Party in June 1936, they still encouraged each other as literary friends and political associates. From New York, Chapman continued to encourage Wright in Chicago with the writing of ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ and congratulated Wright on the November 1936 publication of ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’

anthologized in The New Caravan. Wright suggested to Chapman an idea of a new magazine New Challenge which Wright desired to launch around May 1937, soliciting his editorial and financial support. When he arrived in New York City in May 1937 to attend the Second American Writers’ Congress, Wright temporarily lived with the Weigels and later moved in with Chapman at 208 West 67th Street, New York City, until he later moved out from Chapman’s apartment and rented a furnished hotel room in Harlem in mid-June. Later, when Wright won the Guggenheim Award in April 1939, Chapman invited him to spend an evening with the Chapmans so that Wright was able to read the manuscript of the working novel Native Son. As a proof of gratitude to Chapman for his friendship, Wright dedicated the booklet ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ (Harper & Brothers) to ‘‘Abe, Belle, Mannie and Lora’’ (Abe and Isabelle Chapman, Abe’s brother, Manny, and their baby daughter, Laura) and inscribed and sent a copy to Chapman in October 1940. Toru Kiuchi Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times.New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

CHENAL, PIERRE (1904–1990) Pierre Chenal was born Pierre Cohen. He began filmmaking with a documentary on the subject, Paris Cine´ma (1927). His early career showed dynamism that won him recognition for work like the documentary Les petits me´tiers de Paris (1930). These were followed by successful film versions of French and foreign fiction: Rue sans nom (1934), based on Marcel Ayme´, with whom Chenal worked also on other projects; Crime and Punishment (1935), one of several 1930s film versions of Dostoevsky; and l’Homme de nulle part, after Pirandello’s The Late Mattia Pascal (1937). The last of this pre-war novel-into-film series was Le dernier tournant (1939), inspired by a version of James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. 73

Chicago Chenal, a French Jew, survived World War II by fleeing to Argentina, where he would make films not shown in his homeland until decades later. He resumed work in France after the war, beginning notably with Scandals of Clochemerle (1948), again based on a novel. Chenal never recovered his pre-war audience or respect and the quality of his work dropped significantly. The balance of his career was invested in various unremarkable films made mostly in the 1950s in France, where a last short was filmed five years before his death. Chenal had returned to Argentina to direct Richard Wright in Sangre Negra in 1950, the first film version of Native Son. When politics blocked filming Native Son (1951) in Europe, Wright had made an agreement with Chenal to shoot the movie on location in Chicago and then in Buenos Aires. Starring Wright himself as Bigger, Sangre Negra was an immediate hit in Argentina and in South America generally. In the United States, where the film was massively edited and sometimes prohibited, it failed, falling flat largely because of amateurish acting and excessive cutting. Although well received at the Venice Film Festival and successful across Italy and elsewhere in Europe, it was never released in France, where Wright and later Chenal had returned after the shooting. Despite its uneven reception, Chenal himself repeatedly said he considered the uncut version to be his greatest film. Roy Rosenstein Selected Bibliography: Cripps, Thomas. ‘‘Native Son in the Movies.’’ New Letters 38, 2 (Winter 1971), 49– 63. Reprinted in David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1973, 101–15. Matalon, Pierrette, Claude Gigue, and Jacques Pinturault. Pierre Chenal: souvenirs du cineaste, filmographie, te´moignages, documents. Paris: Dujarric, 1987.

CHICAGO 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

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largest racial ghettoes. 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 character in 12 Million Black Voices who claimed ‘‘We’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than the president of Dixie’’ (Wright 88). Arriving in Chicago less than two years before the onset of the Great Depression and forced to live in a massive ghetto which 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 hunger and poverty not so very different from that which they had known in the South. For nearly ten years, Wright, 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’’ (Wright 106). Working at a series of low paying jobs as ditch digger, 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 development as a person and 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

Chicago 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 which 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’’ (Rowley 78) since it made available to him reading lists, books, study groups, and lectures as well as leftist journals which 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 which 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 sociologist Louis Wirth and 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 experience in the club encouraged Wright to become involved with other groups which 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 WPA. 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’’ (Walker 284) dating back to traumatic experiences which he had endured growing up in the South, experiences which threatened to blight his spirit and cripple his imagination. Chicago, therefore, provided Wright with a surprisingly rich cultural environment which nurtured his art and helped him to play a pivotal role in the ‘‘Second 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’’ (Walker 71) of the South Side Writers Group, was also the focal point of and the driving force behind the Second 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 75

Chicago Post Office what Robert Bone has called the ‘‘Wright school’’ of novelists such as Willard Motley, Chester Himes, Anne Petry, and William Demby, each of whom was deeply impressed by Wright’s powerful naturalistic techniques and radically new vision of black life in America. But perhaps the most important aspect of Wright’s life in Chicago was his involvements with the Communist Party of America, which was headquartered in Chicago and had one of the strongest John Reed clubs in the United States. Wright became interested in Marxism 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’’ (Crossman 117), 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’’ (Crossman 84), a common vision that bound us all together 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. 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. But his ten years in Chicago left an indelible

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imprint on him as a man and a writer. He carried to New York the stories that would comprise Uncle Tom’s Children and his initial notes for his masterpiece set in Chicago, Native Son. Moreover, he brought to New York an artistic and political consciousness that was formed in Chicago and would continue to shape his writing for many years. Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam, 1965. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder Mouth Press, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ in Native Son. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

CHICAGO POST OFFICE In Wright’s time, the Chicago Post Office was the largest post office in the world and occupied a huge fourteen story building at Clark Street and Jackson Boulevard. Because unions systematically excluded blacks from membership and factories preferred white immigrants from Eastern Europe, the Chicago Post Office offered one of the best employment opportunities for African-American males during the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, it provided one of the very few clerical jobs which black men could obtain, and it featured relatively clean work and steady hours which very few jobs available to black men could provide. And because permanent work could be obtained by passing a special entrance exam, it promised unusual job security. For this reason, the Chicago Post Office employed many college-trained men like James W. Ford, a graduate of Fisk University who would later be a high-ranking official in the Communist Party of the United States. In Chicago’s rigidly segregated work world, then, the post office offered relatively good possibilities for black men which would be difficult to find elsewhere. As a character in Lawd Today! ironically observes, ‘‘When a black man gets a job in the Post Office, he’s done reached the top’’ (Wright 118).

Chicago Renaissance This is not to say, however, that work for blacks in the Chicago Post Office was either easy, well paid or humanly satisfying. As Michel Fabre has pointed out, it was a kind of ‘‘penitentiary’’ with ‘‘the worst working conditions of all United States post offices’’ (Fabre 78). The lowly paid, unskilled jobs given to blacks involved grinding routine and constant surveillance from white supervisors who exercised arbitrary powers. Blacks rarely obtained even the smallest supervisory positions. Nevertheless, for Richard Wright as he entered Chicago in 1927, a job at the Chicago Post Office represented the best employment opportunity he could hope for. When he secured temporary work in the summer of 1928 at 65 cents per hour, he and his family were able to move to a better apartment and could at last depend upon a relatively steady source of income. In 1929, he was able to pass the physical required by the post office by taking a crash diet and was hired as a substitute clerk and mail sorter, a job he lost a few months later when the stock market crash triggered a world-wide depression. For the next several years he continued to work sporadically at the post office on a temporary basis and was tendered a permanent position in 1937 after ranking first in the postal examination held in Chicago. Although this provided him with a job security he had never experienced in his prior life, he turned down the offer so that he could go to New York and pursue his career as a writer and his interests as a political activist. As Margaret Walker has stressed, this was a major turning point in Wright’s life. The Chicago Post Office was extremely important for Wright in a number of ways. First of all, it provided him with clean, steady work which gave time in his off hours to read and write. The job also put him in daily contact with many new kinds of people. As Hazel Rowley observes, ‘‘For the first time in his life Wright made friends with white men’’ (Rowley 61). Some of these friends included Tim McAulife who introduced him to a broad spectrum of modern writers and Abe Aaron who put him in contact with Chicago’s John Reed Club and paved his way into the

Communist Party. Wright also met several college-educated black men at the post office who deepened his interest in black activism. Margaret Walker, for these reasons, characterized the Chicago Post Office as ‘‘Wright’s university’’ (Walker 63), a place where he could share his views with other like-minded young men and thus develop as a writer and activist. Wright clearly made important literary use of his post office experiences. ‘‘Cesspool’’ (later published posthumously as Lawd Today!) was begun in 1930 and focuses on the experiences of a Chicago postal worker. This first novel envisions the post office as an elaborate metaphor of life in a modern industrial society, describing the place as a gigantic ‘‘squirrel cage’’ trapping its employees in low pay, numbing routine, and constant surveillance. Wright also sees the post office in that novel as a powerful revelation of American race relations since black workers are given the lowest paying, least satisfying jobs and have little or no opportunity to rise to supervisory position. What the Liberty Paint Factory in Invisible Man was to Ralph Ellison, the Chicago Post Office was to Richard Wright. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Lawd Today! New York: The Library of America, 1991.

CHICAGO RENAISSANCE A movement of African-American writers based in Chicago during the 1930s which was committed to writing about black culture, folklore and religion, while also studying important developments in European and American modernism. Writers who were an important part of this movement included Wright, Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Fenton Johnson, and Theodore Ward. Margaret Walker described Wright as ‘‘the exciting hot center of the group’’ (Walker 71). 77

Chicago School of Sociology Vivian G. Harsh, the first black librarian in the Chicago Public Library system, also played an important role in the Chicago Renaissance, making her South Side branch an African-American cultural center complete with its own ‘‘Negro collection’’ and a biweekly lecture and discussion group. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

CHICAGO SCHOOL OF SOCIOLOGY A group of sociologists at the University of Chicago who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries laid the foundations of sociology as an academic discipline and a method for transforming society. The university’s Department of Sociology was founded in 1892 and it created The American Journal of Sociology in 1895. The Chicago School was particularly noted for their empirical studies of the urban environment and race relations within that environment. It pioneered the use of statistical analysis, ‘‘case studies,’’ and ‘‘life stories’’ as a way of understanding the experience of the modern American city. Robert E. Park is credited with being the main driving force in forming the Chicago School of Sociology, establishing the university’s Department of Sociology and recruiting its outstanding faculty which included John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and George Herbert Mead. The first black American sociologists, Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, trained under Park. Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, authors of Black Metropolis and many other important studies of African-American ghetto life, were also trained at the University of Chicago and applied its theories and procedures to a close examination of the South Side. Wright developed strong friendships with both men and was particularly influenced by their studies of juvenile delinquency and the tensions between the individual and the urban environment. He wrote the introduction to Black Metropolis when it appeared in 1945. 78

Wright also developed a significant friendship with another distinguished member of the Chicago School, Louis Wirth, author of The Ghetto and several other studies of modern American city life. Wirth met Wright in 1933 through his wife Mary who was the caseworker for the Wright family. Wirth shared his research with Wright and provided him with a reading list of seminal books in sociology. Wright’s assimilation of the ideas and methodologies of the Chicago School of Sociology was an important factor in shaping his vision of modern urban life, particularly as the environment conditioned the lives of black people. Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and 12 Million Black Voices, while much more than sociological studies or case histories, clearly reflect the influence of the Chicago School on Wright’s thinking. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Capetti, Carla. ‘‘Sociology of Existence: Richard Wright and the Chicago School.’’ MELUS 12 (Summer 1985), 25–43. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘CHILD OF DEAD AND FORGOTTEN GODS’’ This poem, along with ‘‘Strength,’’ was published in the March–April 1934 issue of The Anvil, a left-wing magazine edited by Jack Conroy, which was devoted to proletarian writing. While ‘‘Strength’’ focuses its criticism on individuals ineffectually lashing out against a capitalistic system too big and deeply rooted to be changed by lone rebels, ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ is an angry attack on liberal reformers. As a dedicated communist committed to radical political change through collective action, Wright finds liberals to be ‘‘innocent’’ and ‘‘naive’’ people who believe that capitalism may be reformed with ‘‘soft talk of peace and brotherhood.’’ Rejecting this nonviolent Christian approach to social change as obsolete because it is rooted in ‘‘the dead and forgotten gods’’ which

Civil Rights Movement are no longer operative in modern life, Wright argues that sterner, more militant measures must be taken if ‘‘the bitter and irreconcilable waters of the class struggle’’ are to be navigated. The poem’s final stanza pictures the narrator engaged in a demonstration of strikers who are being brutally beaten by police who use their clubs to smash the skulls of demonstrators. Amid this scene of ‘‘slaughter and rapine and greed,’’ the ‘‘soft talk’’ of liberal reformers is drowned out and reduced to absurdity. In order to understand and cope with ‘‘the blood and stench of history’’the narrator must attune himself to new voices and new gods which Wright at this point in his career thought he would find in communism. Apprentice poems such as ‘‘Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ are important because they are a clear index to Wright’s thinking as he emerged as a writer and also because they contain in embryonic form motifs which Wright would develop in his mature work. His sharp critique of liberal reformers would be amplified and made even more pointed in his portrayal of the Dalton family in Native Son. And even after he had left the Communist Party in 1942, Wright continued to believe deeply in Marx’s view that social evil was deeply rooted in complex, powerful forces of history which could not be changed by wellintentioned but naive liberal sentiments. As Margaret Walker has observed, ‘‘Wright left the Communist Party but he did not renounce Marxism’’ (Walker 205). Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT Although Wright’s exile in France prevented him from directly participating in the Civil Rights Movement, he was deeply interested in it and kept a close watch on it. He saw it as an important part of a worldwide struggle for freedom and justice which people of color participated in after World War II.

In 1945, two years before taking up permanent residence in France, Wright observed in a New York Post interview that ‘‘There’ll be trouble after the war. . . . I believe that the country is facing, for the next 25 years, the magnitude of the Negro problem as it never has before’’ (Kinnamon 58). Realizing that the war was likely to produce widespread social change in its aftermath, he went on to say, ‘‘What we need is a conscious process of acceleration in the progress of Negroes’’ (Kinnamon 58). For the next 15 years, Wright witnessed both ‘‘trouble’’ and ‘‘progress’’ in America as the Civil Rights Movement developed in the North and the South. He viewed the Brown v. Board of Education decision which the Supreme Court handed down on May 17, 1954, as a pivotal moment in American history. When he got news of the decision, Wright was greatly excited and told black journalist Ollie Stewart ‘‘ . . . no matter what happens, the kids will have the law on their side from now on’’ (Rowley 440). In a 1957 interview in the French journal LaNef, he called the Brown decision ‘‘an attempt to bring American practices in line with American preachments’’ (Kinnamon 174), and also observed ‘‘There has been no real honest national effort at the betterment of racial relations in the United States until The Supreme Court, in 1954, ordered educational integration’’ (Kinnamon 179). In the same interview, he stressed ‘‘The Negro, having been terrorized for a century into silence, is now pressing for the fulfillment of constitutional rights which have always been his’’ (Kinnamon 174). A year after the Brown decision, the world received dramatic evidence that southerners were still intent on silencing blacks with terror as it received news of the murder of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was brutally beaten and killed by white men in Money, Mississippi. Such violence triggered painful memories in Wright of the terrible racial violence he witnessed while growing up in Mississippi and he confided to a friend ‘‘Such wanton killings fill me with disgust, uneasiness, and a sense of dread’’ (Rowley 471). He made a statement to the French press that 79

Cold War the trial of Till’s killers was a ‘‘parody of justice’’ (Fabre 422) which cast a pall over race relations in the United States and throughout the world. But he was confident that, while southern racists had won a local ‘‘battle’’ in Mississippi, they were losing the ‘‘war’’ in the larger court of world opinion, stating in his essay in France-Soir that ‘‘The world will judge the judges of Mississippi’’ (Rowley 471). Wright saw a strong sign of hope when federal troops were sent to Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 to ensure the integration of Central High School by nine African-American students. He saw President Eisenhower’s decision to use federal troops as a means of enforcing the laws of the United States as a way ‘‘to reassert the authority of the theory of one nation, one law, one people, as the American Constitution so clearly provides’’ (Kinnamon 175). He regarded federal presence in Little Rock as an important reversal of the U.S. government’s abandonment of the South in 1877, ending Reconstruction and enabling white supremacists to re-enslave black people with the Jim Crow laws which brought racial segregation to the South. Wright was of two minds about the overall effectiveness of the Civil Rights Movement. In his more optimistic moments, he would remark ‘‘But I have to say the situation is slowly getting better in my native land’’ (Kinnamon 179). However, he knew the Deep South from long, hard experience and realized how deeply entrenched were its patterns of racism. He also had experienced a subtler but no less debilitating form of racism in the North and had no illusions about its harshness and persistence. In a 1957 interview, Wright asked the question ‘‘Will racism vanish from the American scene?’’ and quickly answered ‘‘Only the hearts of white Americans contain the answer to that question’’ (Kinnamon 179). Selected Bibliography: Dierenfield, Bruce. The Civil Rights Movement. New York: Longerman, 2004. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Rowley, 80

Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Whitfield, Stephen. A Death in the Delta: The Story of Emmett Till. New York: Free Press, 1988.

COLD WAR The cultural hostility between communist countries and the United States and its allies from the end of World War II to the collapse of communism in 1991. Taking a variety of military, political, and economic forms, it began with Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe after 1945 and accelerated when a communist state emerged in China in 1949. A central part of the U.S. political strategy during The Cold War was a policy of ‘‘containment’’ in which America and its allies sought to limit the spread of communism in Europe and Asia by using a variety of diplomatic, economic, and military measures resulting in the Berlin Airlift, the development of NATO, and wars in Korea and Vietnam. Both sides pursued a policy of ‘‘brinkmanship’’ which, on several occasions, nearly resulted in thermonuclear war. Wright lived out the Cold War in France, leaving the United States permanently in 1947, partly because he felt threatened both as a black man and a writer by right-wing attacks in America on people connected with communism and other leftist movements in the 1930s. He viewed with particular alarm the political witch hunt conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and theHouse Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) which damaged the careers of many fellow writers and intellectuals such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, and Frank Marshall Davis. In a 1960 interview, Wright observed ‘‘The Cold War has greatly distorted things with us in America’’ (Kinnamon, 237), arguing that an atmosphere of political repression had put an end to the free exchange of ideas and imposed substantial punishment for those with divergent views, especially if these views came from the left. While in France, Wright was indeed victimized by Cold War repression, being placed under surveillance for many years by the FBI and the CIA,

The Color Curtain

THE COLOR CURTAIN

is the first Afro-Asian Conference which took place in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955. In early January 1955, an announcement was made on an international conference to be held in mid-April in Bandung, Indonesia, by the free countries of the Third World. Wright immediately decided to attend it. After he went to Spain for the preparation of Pagan Spain from February to April, Wright directly flew on 10 April to Jakarta, Indonesia, where Mochtar Lubis, editor of the Indonesia Raya, met Wright and took him to the conference. On 18 April, Wright was officially invited to the opening session of the Bandung Conference and attended sessions until 24 April. He met his friend Ruth Fischer, the Unitarian minister Homer P. Jack, and Marguerite Cartwright. He also met the delegates, U Nu, Achmed Sukarno, Ali Sastroamidjojo, Norodom Sihanouk, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Kojo Botsio, Prince Wan of Thailand, Sir John Kotelawala, Sami Solh, Takasaki, Carlos Romulo, and El Jamali. He spoke in person with the Chinese Prime Minister Chou En-lai, the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mrs. Indira Gandhi. After he came back to Paris, Wright worked day and night on the report in late May and finished the 60,000 word manuscript and finally sent it to his literary agent Reynolds on 20 June. In July, Encounter bought the rights to ‘‘Indonesian Notebook,’’ which concentrated mostly on Wright’s impressions of Indonesia’s economic status as it emerged from Dutch domination and in August, ‘‘Indonesian Notebook,’’ an excerpt from The Color Curtain, was published in Encounter. ‘‘Le congre` s des hommes de couleur’’ (‘‘The Conference of Colored People’’) and ‘‘Le monde occidental a` Bandung’’ (‘‘The Western World at Bandung’’), excerpts from The Color Curtain, were published in the August and September issues respectively of Preuves. On the morning of 10 August, Wright finished the final work on the Bandung manuscript. Toru Kiuchi

A report on the Bandung Conference, as the subtitle shows. The official name for this conference

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow,

which viewed him with considerable suspicion and kept extensive files on him. He also had difficulties obtaining visas to visit his family in England because of his political convictions. But his physical separation from the United States and his close friendships with French intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus enabled him to view the Cold War objectively and stake out a position which mediated between Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism. He helped form two important organizations, Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire and the Franco-American Fellowship, which were devoted to opposing the agendas of the superpowers and developing programs and ideas on the non-communist left. Wright wrote the mission statement for the Franco-American Fellowship, which stated that group’s goals in the following way: The group exists to serve the mutual and personal needs of its members; to promote social and cultural relations; and to heighten the consciousness of its members in relation to the urgent pressures confronting the world today. It proposes to attain these ends by dedicating its energies to an elucidation of the problem of human freedom amidst modern industrialization . . . to reaffirm the common identity and destiny of mankind and the internationalism of the human spirit. (Fabre 355)

When Wright died in 1960, Cold War tensions had intensified to such a point where World War III loomed as a distinct possibility. The Cuban Missile Crisis and the war in Vietnam both brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster, nearly confirming Wright’s worst fears about The Cold War. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

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Conrad, Joseph 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

COMMUNISM See Marxism; Socialism

CONRAD, JOSEPH (3 December 1857– 3 August 1924) A major English novelist and short story writer, Conrad was born to aristocratic parents in the Polish Ukraine. His father, a poet, translator of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Hugo, was a nationally prominent political figure who was a militant Polish nationalist. In 1862, the family was exiled to northern Russia as a punishment for his father’s political activism. His mother died two years later, and, when Conrad was twelve, his father died. He was raised by his uncle. Conrad spent twenty years as a professional sailor, and his experiences at sea provided him with material for some of his finest books such as Typhoon, Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, and The Mirror of the Sea. His travels throughout the Belgian Congo and Central America gave him the experience he needed to write his two devastating critiques of European colonialism, Heart of Darkness and Nostromo. Like Henry James, Conrad is important for the high degree of conscious art which he brought to modern fiction. Several of his books contain important prefaces which discuss the artistic challenges he faced in a given work and how he met these challenges by using highly calculated fictional techniques. His skillful uses of point of view, fragmented narrative, diction, and setting transformed modern fiction and were extremely influential on subsequent writers. Wright began reading Conrad, as he points out in Black Boy, when he was a young man living in Memphis. Conrad, along with Joyce, Dreiser, Dostoevsky, and Crane, was one of the modern realists who helped to transform Wright’s consciousness, giving him ‘‘new knowledge’’ and ‘‘new avenues of feeling and seeing’’ which 82

enabled him ‘‘to build a new life’’ (Wright 295– 96). Michel Fabre listed seven books written by Conrad in Wright’s library, including Arrow of Gold, Chance, Nostromo, A Personal Record, Typhoon, Victory, and Youth and Two Other Stories. All of these books were purchased before 1940. In a 1940 interview Wright cited Conrad, along with Dreiser, Dostoevsky, Joyce, James, and Crane as important influences in his writing (Kinnamon 32). Like James, and Joyce, Conrad was one of the writers who inspired Wright and taught him to be a conscious artist who could use fictional techniques to create powerful psychological and emotional effects. At several points in his career, Wright credited Conrad with making him more aware of how well-crafted descriptive writing could help him to develop character, create atmosphere, and dramatize themes. As Fabre has noted in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, ‘‘From the lush descriptions of Conrad he tried to derive guidelines for the evocation of the landscape of the Deep South’’ (Fabre 79). Conrad’s infusing of his books with rich and complex philosophical themes also exerted strong influence on Wright, especially in the deterministic speculation of Native Son and the existential brooding of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ Black Boy/American Hunger, and The Outsider. Conrad’s long life as an exile from his native country must also have intrigued Wright, although he never was able to adopt France as Conrad was able to adopt England as a replacement homeland. Unlike Conrad, who was able to become an English citizen who could assimilate into British literary tradition and culture, Wright always remained an American living in a variety of ‘‘alien’’ lands. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Williams Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/ American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Conroy, Jack

CONROY, JACK (5 December 1899– 5 May 1991) A genuinely proletarian writer who came from a hardscrabble working class background, Conroy was born in Moberly, Missouri, the son of a miner who was barely able to eke out a marginal living for his family and who died in a mining accident when Conroy was a child. His mother later remarried an ex-priest who had converted to Methodism and was a staunch union man as well as a religious fundamentalist. A voracious reader, Conroy had very little formal education and was self-taught. As a young man he attended the University of Missouri for a semester but left college to work a number of demanding but low-paying jobs that included factory work, mining, bricklaying, haying, and construction. In 1929, he joined the Rebel Poets, a group of proletarian writers who were loosely connected with the Industrial Workers of the World and he became editor of their journal The Rebel Poets from January 1931 to October 1931. One of their issues caught the attention of H. L. Mencken who asked Conroy to write a series of sketches about working class life for The American Mercury magazine. These sketches eventually became The Disinherited (1933), an autobiographical novel about Conroy’s growing up in Missouri, traveling throughout the Midwest as an itinerant worker, and eventually having a kind of secular conversion experience when he becomes involved in union organizing and leftist politics. Like Larry Donovan, the protagonist of The Disinherited, Conroy never became a member of the Communist Party but was deeply sympathetic to radical left-wing causes. In 1932, he and his friend, Ben Hagglund, created a journal for Midwestern proletarian writers, The Rebel Poet which folded in less than two years because of infighting among its editorial board. Conroy then founded The Anvil which featured fiction and poetry ‘‘by and for the workers.’’ Fledgling writers such as Richard Wright and Erskine Caldwell, who would come to play important roles in shaping American

literature in the 1930s and 1940s, were among the contributors to The Anvil. In late 1935, the Communist Party asked Conroy to merge his journal with Partisan Review, edited by Phillip Rahv. The new magazine became Partisan Review and The Anvil, but by late 1935, Rahv had pushed Conroy out of editorial control and the magazine once more became known as Partisan Review. The Anvil ceased operations. After The Anvil folded, Algren invited Conroy to come to Chicago to work for the Work Progress Administration (WPA) and establish The New Anvil which was published in Chicago from March 1939 to August 1940. Conroy remained in Chicago after The New Anvil collapsed, co-authoring two books with his friend Arna Bontemps, children’s stories entitled The Fast Sooner Hound (1942) and a novel about black migration, They Seek a City (1945). Wright and Conroy shared a mutuallybeneficial friendship which was initiated when Abe Aaron, the man who originally got Wright involved with the John Reed Club, encouraged Wright to publish early poems in The Anvil and wrote to Conroy on Wright’s behalf. Two of Wright’s poems, ‘‘Strength’’ and ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ were published in 1934 issues of The Anvil. Soon after that, Wright and Conroy met in Chicago when Conroy presented a talk, ‘‘Revolution and the Novel’’ at Wright’s branch of the John Reed Club. The two became good friends and worked together in a number of important areas. In 1935, they were voted members of the national committee which sponsored the American Writers Congress in New York and they also became active members of the League of American Writers, a group committed to opposing racial discrimination and ‘‘imperialist war and fascism’’ (Rowley 86). They also collaborated on various WPA projects in Chicago. Wright and Conroy had much in common, both as writers and persons. Each man lost his father at an early age and was raised in a povertystricken family deeply devoted to fundamentalist religion. They rebelled strongly against their religious background and were drawn powerfully to 83

Crane, Stephen radical leftist politics as a replacement belief system. Moreover, Wright and Conroy were selftaught men whose poverty backgrounds prevented them from receiving much formal education. Their friendship was especially beneficial to Wright, coming at a time when he was emerging as a serious writer and needed the encouragement and camaraderie which Conroy provided. Conroy was among the first to respond enthusiastically to Wright’s poetry and to publish it at the very outset of Wright’s career. Moreover, Conroy strongly advised Wright to compose his autobiography and his book, The Disinherited, provided Wright with a compelling model for autobiographical treatment of proletarian experience. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. ‘‘Introduction’’ in The Disinherited. New York: Hill and Wang, 1963. Gilbert, James B. Writers and Partisans: A History of Literary Radicalism in America. New York: Wiley, 1968. Swados, Harvey. The American Writer and the Great Depression. Bobbs Merrill, 1966. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

CRANE, STEPHEN (1 November 1871– 5 June 1900) Crane was born in Newark, New Jersey, the fourteenth child of two intensely religious parents. His father, Dr. Jonathan Crane, was a Methodist minister and his mother, Mary Crane, descended from a long line of Methodist ministers. Both parents raised their children in a strict religious home which stressed the dangers of worldly pleasures and imposed rigidly puritanical values. Crane’s father died when he was seven, and he received his early education at schools which reinforced his mother’s religious values. He began his college education at Lafayette College, dropped out and attended Syracuse University for one semester. While at Syracuse, he completed a draft of Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, the first American novel to use naturalistic techniques to explore urban slum life. The novel’s close observations of the sordid aspects of New York’s Bowery and its

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use of profane diction made it difficult for Crane to secure an established publisher for the novel, and he was forced to have it privately printed in 1893. Two years later, Crane’s masterpiece appeared, The Red Badge of Courage, which is often considered the first truly modern war novel. Both Maggie and The Red Badge are also notable for Crane’s brilliant use of impressionistic description to portray the disordered thoughts and feelings of his central characters as they are pressured by the harshly naturalistic environments which determine their actions. Crane died of tuberculosis at age twenty-nine in Badenweiler, Germany. In his final years, he produced a number of important short stories such as ‘‘The Open Boat,’’ ‘‘An Experiment in Misery,’’ and ‘‘The Blue Hotel,’’ all of which are remarkable for their stylistic brilliance and unique voice. Wright began reading Crane’s fictions after he completed Mencken’s A Book of Prefaces when he lived in Memphis in 1927 and noted the high praise Mencken gave to ‘‘The Blue Hotel.’’ In Black Boy, he lists Crane as one of the modern realists and naturalists who awakened him to a new vision of life by providing him with ‘‘new ways of seeing and feeling’’ (Wright 294). According to Hazel Rowley, Wright read Maggie: A Girl of the Streets in 1929 and was struck by the novel’s forthright portrayal of slum life. Wright also mentions in American Hunger that his reading of The Red Badge of Courage during his first years in Chicago left a lasting imprint on his imagination and gave him ‘‘new realms of feeling’’ (Wright 327). Crane, then, was one of the modern writers who catalyzed Wright’s imagination and was a strong influence on his own style and vision. The effects of Crane’s writing can easily be seen on some of Wright’s most significant works. Crane’s description of a dead soldier in the ‘‘chapel’’ scene of The Red Badge certainly bears striking resemblance to the description of the lynched man in Wright’s poem, ‘‘Between the World and Me.’’ In both cases, extraordinary ironies are achieved

Cullen, Countee by the juxtaposition of meticulously described decaying corpses included in an otherwise peaceful pastoral setting. And in both cases, this harsh experience results in the perceiver being jarred into a new and disturbing vision of reality. The urban setting of Maggie, likewise, bears close resemblance to the cityscapes provided in Wright’s fiction, particularly in Native Son. Wright’s South Side of Chicago, like Crane’s Bowery, is presented through an artful blending of naturalistic description to dramatize the outward environment while subtle impressionistic descriptions are employed to depict the central character’s shocked and distorted mental reactions to such a nightmarish world. Selected Bibliography: Berryman, John. Stephen Crane. New York: Octagon, 1975. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Solomon, Eric. Stephen Crane: From Parody to Realism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

CROSSMAN, RICHARD (15 December 1907–20 September 1974) The son of a barrister, he was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he took first honors in classics and philosophy. He taught at Oxford for eight years, offering courses in Plato and political theory. He began his political career at Oxford as a socialist on the Oxford City Council. He became a member of Parliament as a Labor Party candidate in 1945. During World War II, he served in the Foreign Office and later on General Eisenhower’s staff as an expert on German propaganda. After World War II, he became a staunch anti-communist and was an assistant editor for both New Statesman and Nation. In the late 1940s, on the advice of his friend Arthur Koestler, Crossman edited a book of essays entitled The God That Failed which focused on the testimony of ex-communist writers and intellectuals who explained why they were ‘‘converted’’ to communism in the 1930s and why they

eventually broke with the party. The book included a reprint of Wright’s 1944 article ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ along with other articles by Arthur Koestler, Ignazio Silone, Andre´ Gide, Louis Fischer, and Stephen Spender. It became an important part of Cold War culture, often cited as proof that the left-wing ideals of the 1930s had failed to deliver on its promises and needed to be replaced by more pragmatic strategies. Ten years after the publication of the book, Crossman tried to involve Wright in another project, a book of interviews of the contributors to The God That Failed, exploring their current political views. In what Hazel Rowley describes as a ‘‘furious letter’’ (Rowley 520), Wright emphatically declined Crossman’s invitation, accusing him of using the earlier book as a way of fanning the flames of anti-communist and anti-socialist propaganda of the Cold War. By this time, Wright had discovered that the CIA had helped to distribute The God That Failed and The Congress for Cultural Freedom, of which Crossman was a member, was funded by the CIA. Moreover, he knew that the executive director of the organization, Michael Josselson, was a CIA agent. Wright therefore felt betrayed by Crossman and other non-communist liberals whom he had earlier trusted and wanted little to do with them or their projects. Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam Books, 1950. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

CULLEN, COUNTEE (30 May 1903– 9 January 1946) Countee Cullen was considered the ‘‘poet laureate’’ of the Harlem Renaissance and the embodiment of the ‘‘New Negro’’ as envisaged by Alain Locke. Having won numerous national poetry contests while attending New York University and having published Color (1925), his first 85

Cullen, Countee poetry collection, the same year he graduated from college, Cullen was thrust onto the literary scene at an early age. He was keenly aware of the expectations of the reading public and of his role as the exemplary New Negro artist. On June 17, 1923, he wrote in a letter to Alain Locke: ‘‘I was sort of a colored hope to you and others, wasn’t I?’’ (Schwarz, 48). Cullen did not disappoint his audience when he published the prize-winning poem ‘‘The Ballad of the Brown Girl: An Old Ballad Retold’’ and Copper Sun, his second collection of poetry, in 1927. Cullen also edited the groundbreaking anthology Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets that year. In the foreword to the anthology, Cullen stressed his indebtedness to the literary tradition when he stated: ‘‘As heretical as it may sound, there is the probability that Negro poets, dependent as they are on the English Language, may have more to gain from the rich background of English and American poetry than from any nebulous atavistic yearnings towards an African inheritance.’’ Cullen also stressed to Langston Hughes, his main literary rival who was dubbed ‘‘poet lowrate’’ because of his depiction of working-class blacks, that he wanted to be recognized as ‘‘a poet, not a Negro poet.’’ Cullen’s reputation has suffered because of his admitted indebtedness to such outdated models as John Keats and A. E. Housman and his perceived color-blindness. Alan Shucard, for example, criticized Cullen in volume 51 of the Dictionary of Literary Biography because ‘‘he tended to write derivative poetry, to produce a kind of Keatsian poetry that had already been done a hundred years before—and by poets who could do it better’’ (45). However, Cullen’s poetic achievement is currently undergoing a major reassessment and the racial as well as (homo)sexual dimensions of his works are properly acknowledged. While Richard Wright did not have a close relationship with Cullen, even though they lived in New York between 1937 and 1946, on May 6, 1939, both participated in the Harlem Cultural Congress. And while Wright’s artistic and

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political views differed considerably from Cullen’s, he praised Cullen’s poetry on several occasions. He included Cullen in ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States,’’ an historical survey of black American authors which was reprinted in Wright’s essay collection White Man, Listen! (1957). When asked by a French interviewer in 1946 who the ‘‘other good black writers are,’’ Wright responded: ‘‘There are quite a few—Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, and still others who have unquestionable merit’’ (Conversations with Richard Wright, 116). Wright used a stanza from Cullen’s best known and most acclaimed poem ‘‘What is Africa to Me?’’ (Color) as the first epigraph of Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), a description of his 1953 trip to the British West African colony of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) which was on the verge of becoming independent under the guidance of Kwame Nkrumah. For a while Wright even toyed with the idea of using the first line as the title of his travelogue. Both Cullen and Wright were fascinated by Africa and by the idea of tracing their African roots and both writers felt like outsiders in their own country because of race, politics (Wright was a communist), and sexuality (Cullen was a homosexual). Like many artists before and after them, they sought freedom from racial discrimination in Paris, the city to which all roads lead, as Gertrude Stein remarked in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). Countee Cullen received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1928 to study in Paris, and, after his wedding to Nina Yolande Du Bois, daughter of the famous W. E. B. Du Bois, on April 9, 1928, he set sail for the fabled city, accompanied by his male lover, Harold Jackman. Cullen spent two years in France, working on his poetry and enjoying the tolerant atmosphere. In his poem ‘‘To France,’’ published in The Medea and Some Poems (1935), Cullen wrote that ‘‘he found . . . / What was denied [his] hungry heart at home.’’ Even after his return to New York in 1930 he visited Paris as often as he could.

Cullen, Countee Richard Wright, in turn, was invited in 1946 by the French government at the instigation of Gertrude Stein to visit Paris, and he and his family spent eight months in the magical city. On 9 January 1946, less than four months before Wright’s departure, Countee Cullen died of complications from high blood pressure, and Richard Wright paid his last respects by being one of the pallbearers at the poet’s funeral in Harlem on January 12. As Michel Fabre has noted, ‘‘In spite of their political differences, the two writers always felt a great deal of respect for each other, and Wright was affected by this death’’ (Fabre 291). Unlike Cullen, Wright eventually chose to

leave his homeland for good, and he and his family settled in France in 1947, where he spent the remaining thirteen years of his life. Selected Bibliography: Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.) Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson, University of Mississippi Press. Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. A. B. Christa Schwarz, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2003. Alan R. Shucard, Countee Cullen. Boston: Twayne, 1984.

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D ‘‘DADDY GOODNESS’’ Late in his life Wright wrote an adaptation of Louis Sapin’s folk comedy, Papa Bon Dieu for American audiences by setting it in the Deep South he experienced as a young boy growing up in Mississippi. He knew Sapin well from an earlier collaboration when the two translated and adapted Wright’s story ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ for French radio. In the summer of 1956, Sapin had brought the manuscript of the play to Wright, seeking support for producing it in France. Wright took an immediate interest in the project, admiring Sapin’s satire on religion and sensing strong connections between its portrayal of religious excesses and his own experience of fundamentalist Christianity in the American South. Wright was especially intrigued by Sapin’s central character, Papa Bon Dieu, and African-American cult figures such as Daddy Grace and Father Divine who rose to power by exploiting the religious superstitions and emotional weakness of their supporters. As Hazel Rowley has noted, the play appealed to Wright because of its ‘‘playful satire on cult religion and superstition’’ (Rowley 497). Fabre stresses that the play also attracted Wright’s attention because it piqued his long-term ‘‘interest in the roots of religious feeling’’ (Fabre 445).

The play opens when Papa Bon Dieu, a junk dealer from the outskirts of Paris, engages in a drinking contest with his friend Samuel who is trying to drown the sorrows of his failed romance with a prostitute named Lea. When Papa eventually passes out, his friends think he is dead and stage an elaborate funeral for him. But as he is brought to the cemetery, he falls out of the cart, awakens from his drunken stupor, and is believed by everyone to have risen from the dead. Inspired by this ‘‘miracle,’’ people proclaim him a god and make him the focal point of a religious cult. He readily takes to this new role as savior and preaches the gospel of enjoying the pleasures of the world which he presents as an earthly paradise. He attracts many followers, but his church finally disintegrates when he dies and his cohorts are discovered embezzling church funds. Wright had earlier seen an all-black production of Sapin’s play and was very receptive to adapting the play for American audiences, translating it into black American vernacular speech and setting it in the rural South. He contacted his agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. to find a director in London or New York but Reynolds was unable to drum up any support. Wright was successful in generating

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Daily Worker interest in having the play performed in an offBroadway theatre in New York but lost interest when the director, Ben Zavin, wanted him to drop the religious satire and make the play an ‘‘apologia’’ (Fabre 446) for religious fundamentalism. A performance of the English version of the play without sets or costumes was given on May 4, 1959 at the American Embassy Theatre in Paris but failed to attract adequate financial support. It was given as a dramatic reading on two occasions, first on February 19, 1959 at the American Theatre Association in Paris and on May 27, 1959 at the Recamier Theatre in Paris. A full production was planned for late 1959 in Paris and rehearsals were held but the project failed to materialize for lack of financial backing. Wright finally abandoned his plans to stage ‘‘Daddy Goodness’’ after these repeated failures and turned his hand to writing haiku poetry and his ill-fated novel, ‘‘Island of Hallucinations.’’ The play, thus, is another example of the literary disappointments and frustrations which Wright experienced in his final years. He was so discouraged that he wrote to Reynolds on November 25, ‘‘abandoning writing for a time’’ and was ‘‘looking for some other way to make a living’’ (Fabre 475). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

DAILY WORKER The official newspaper of the Communist Party of America, it was founded in 1924 and was circulated throughout the United States. It was the only white-controlled newspaper in America to give regular attention and space to important issues affecting black Americans. It was also one of the very few white newspapers which employed African-American reporters and editors. Wright began writing for the Daily Worker six months after arriving in New York in the spring of 1937 when he was named director of its

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Harlem bureau. His job consisted of editing and reporting on a wide variety of issues and events which the party considered important. Although his $80 per month salary was less than half of what he made at the Chicago Post Office, and Wright often chafed at the numbing routine of his work as editor, his experience with the Daily Worker proved extremely beneficial in his development as a writer and political thinker. The job put him in regular contact with important communist officials such as Benjamin Davis, Jr. as well as novelist Michael Gold and critic Edwin Seaver. And the observation and research he did for his Daily Worker articles deepened his understanding of black urban life which was very helpful as he was composing Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices. He explored an extraordinary range of subject matter in his Daily Worker pieces. In the first six months he produced 40 bylined articles, and within a year he wrote over 200 articles. He covered a wide range of material, including rent strikes, lynchings, the Scottsboro Case, communist rallies, and visits by black leaders. Over a three-year period he would write many other revealing articles on Joe Louis’s triumphant victory over Max Schmeling, Hudie Ledbetter’s music, Negro theatre, and federal legislation to ban lynchings. Wright, however, was never really happy with his duties as a Daily Worker journalist, viewing his work as a distraction from what he really was interested in, creative literature. He considered many of his assignments trivial, especially reporting on the large number of communist meetings taking place in New York. And from the very beginning, he was quite uncomfortable with pressure he received from party officials, sensing a tension between what he perceived as an AfricanAmerican man and the orthodox party line which he was expected to express. He particularly resented the promptings and criticism of James W. Ford, a black party leader who viewed Wright suspiciously as a loner whose views were far too individualistic and who was unable to submit

Darrow, Clarence himself to organizational discipline. As Mark Naison has observed, ‘‘James Ford hated and mistrusted Richard Wright’’ (Naison 210). Wright clearly reciprocated these feelings and his conflict with Ford and other communist supervisors eventually contributed to his breaking with the party in 1942. The Daily Worker’s responses to Wright’s writing is an interesting mixture. While it reviewed his early work such as ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ and Uncle Tom’s Children with enthusiastic praise, it had a painfully mixed response to Native Son, celebrating the novel for its criticism of capitalism and racism but faulting it for its weak portrayal of white communists and its failure to meet the thematic demands of party orthodoxy. (Wright was stung by this criticism and it confirmed his desire to free himself of communist influence.) Daily Worker reviews of ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ and Black Boy, works completed after Wright left the party, were extremely hostile. Selected Bibliography: Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States from the Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

DARK LEGEND: A STUDY IN MURDER (FREDERIC WERTHAM) Published in 1941 by eminent psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, Dark Legend is a case study of a young Italian immigrant who stabbed his mother to death after he had become enraged by her sexually promiscuous behavior following the death of her husband. Wright read this Freudian analysis of matricide shortly after it appeared and wrote to Wertham with enthusiastic praise of the book, finding it ‘‘enlightening’’ and describing it as ‘‘the most comprehensive psychological statement in relation to contemporary crime that I have come across’’ (Fabre, Richard Wright: Books, 171). He then contacted Wertham and sought his assistance

in handling a comparable murder case. Wright at that time was deeply involved in the trial of Clinton Brewer, a black man who at two points in his life had stabbed a woman to death when each refused his offer of marriage. (He killed his first victim in 1921 and then served nineteen years of a life sentence in prison. After Wright helped to secure his release from prison in 1941, he killed his second victim a few weeks after being paroled. He later became the model for Erskine Fowler, the protagonist of Wright’s novel Savage Holiday, a book that was dedicated to Brewer.) On Wright’s urging, Wertham agreed to interview Brewer in prison and then testified in his trial as an expert witness. Wertham saved Brewer from the electric chair by presenting evidence that he was insane and therefore legally incapable of murder. Wright’s keen interest in Dark Legend: A Study in Murder vividly reveals his fascination with criminal behavior as a function of environmental pressures which overwhelm a person’s free will and result in compulsive acts of violence. Like the Leopold and Loeb murder of Bobby Franks and Robert Nixon’s killing of a white woman who surprised him in a botched burglary attempt, the matricide described in Wertham’s book fascinated Wright because he saw such criminal behavior as extreme illustrations of a deterministic philosophy of human existence. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Kinnamon, Keneth, The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

DARROW, CLARENCE (18 April 1857– 13 March 1938) Attorney, author, and orator, Darrow is regarded by many as the most distinguished defense lawyer in American history. A staunch opponent of capital punishment and a supporter of organized labor in its struggles against large corporations, Darrow also took courageous stands against racial discrimination and the persecution of radical 91

Darrow, Clarence political groups. In an age of conservative reaction, he was a defender of a wide range of liberal causes. As Arthur Weinberg observed, ‘‘He defended the weak and the strong but never the strong against the weak. He was primarily the defender of the underdog, the inarticulate’’ (Weinberg V1). He was born in the small town of Kinsman, Ohio to parents of modest means. He attended Allegheny College from 1873 to 1874, taught school for three years while reading for the law, and, in 1877, studied law at the University of Michigan. He apprenticed at a law office in Youngstown, Ohio and, after passing an oral exam, was admitted to the bar at the age of 21. After practicing law for ten years in Youngstown and Ashtabula, Ohio, he moved to Chicago in 1887 where he lived and practiced law for the remainder of his life. He resigned his lucrative position in the law department of the Chicago and Northwestern Railway in 1894 to defend Eugene Debs, the leader of the American Railroad Union, in his struggles on behalf of railroad workers. This case brought Darrow into national prominence and began his long association with organized labor. In 1908, he defended Big Bill Haywood, a labor organizer who was falsely accused of murdering the governor of Idaho and won an acquittal for Haywood in a nationally publicized trial. In 1911, he defended the McNamara brothers, labor activists who were accused of dynamiting the Los Angeles Times Building. His two greatest triumphs were the Leopold and Loeb case in 1924 and the Scopes trial in 1925. Arguing eloquently against the death penalty, he saved Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold from the electric chair in a trial which received international publicity. Although he technically lost the Scopes trial to his long-time nemesis William Jennings Bryan when a jury ruled in favor of suppressing the teaching of evolution in Tennessee schools, Darrow was ultimately the victor since elaborate coverage of the trial by radio, wire services, and print journalism secured national

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and world opinion for his argument. The Scopes trial would be seen by future generations as a victory of modern progressive thought over religious dogma and blind devotion to tradition. Richard Wright admired Darrow, seeing him as a courageous defender of oppressed minorities and an advocate of liberal causes. According to Hazel Rowley, Wright became strongly interested in the Loeb/Leopold case when he read about it in the Jackson, Mississippi newspapers in 1924, and he had a copy of Darrow’s Plea in Defense of Loeb and Leopold on his writing desk when he was in the process of writing Native Son (Rowley 153). Margaret Walker revealed that Wright visited her in Chicago in 1938 to do research on the Robert Nixon case and the Loeb/Leopold trial and took out books about Clarence Darrow on her library card (Walker 124). She believed that Boris Max, Bigger Thomas’s defense lawyer in Native Son, was modeled after Clarence Darrow. Wright was drawn to Darrow for a number of important reasons. As a communist, he admired Darrow’s defense of radical political groups and would have been particularly impressed with Darrow’s defense of twenty members of the Communist Labor Party who were accused in 1920 of conspiring to overthrow the government by force. As a black man, Wright would also have admired Darrow’s successful defense in 1926 of Dr. Ossian Sweet, a black doctor who was accused of murder when he killed a white man while defending his family against a mob protesting the Sweet’s moving into an all-white neighborhood. And Wright, a life-long opponent of religious bigotry and a passionate supporter of intellectual freedom, would certainly have strongly agreed with Darrow’s arguments in the Scopes trial. Philosophically, Wright and Darrow also had much in common. Both were determinists who saw human behavior shaped by environmental forces and both believed that by reshaping the social environment people could construct a more just and humane world. In his 1902 ‘‘Address to the Inmates of the Cook County Jail,’’ Darrow argued that crime was a ‘‘disease’’ (Weinberg 11)

Davis, Benjamin, Jr. caused by unjust social and economic systems which could be cured by re-engineering those systems to result in ‘‘fair conditions of life’’ (14). Max makes very similar arguments in his defense of Bigger in Native Son and this defense goes to the core of Wright’s political, social, and ethical vision. From his earliest poems and stories to his last published work, Wright deeply believed, as did Darrow, that depraved environments produced human suffering and failure but that such environments could be rehabilitated so that ‘‘a new mode of life’’ (Wright 275) could emerge. Selected Bibliography: Darrow, Clarence. Clarence Darrow’s Plea for Mercy in the Loeb-Leopold Case. Chicago: Wilson Publishing Co., 1925. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Tierney, Kevin. Darrow: A Biography. New York: Thomas Crowell, 1979. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Weinberg, Arthur. Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Wright, Richard. Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998.

DAVIS, BENJAMIN, JR. (8 September 1903–22 August 1964) Born in Dawson, Georgia to affluent and influential parents, he graduated from Amherst College in 1922. At Amherst he was an All-American football star and excelled in his studies. He entered Harvard Law School in 1925 and graduated in 1928. Although benefiting from an outwardly comfortable life in the Deep South, he was deeply scarred by southern racism and violence. While a college student, he was arrested for sitting in the white section of a trolley car and escaped jail only by the intervention of his father and family friends. Like Wright, his experiences in the South led him toward leftist causes and strategies. Intending to pursue a conventional life as a lawyer in Atlanta, he was radicalized by the Angelo Herndon Case. Herndon, who was threatened with capital punishment for

organizing black workers under an obsolete slave insurrection statute, was successfully defended by Davis and William Patterson who got the Georgia decision overturned when the U.S. Supreme Court declared its insurrection law unconstitutional. As a result of his involvement in this case, Davis joined the Communist Party of America in 1933 and remained a loyal communist until his death. Davis then played a prominent role in the Scottsboro Case trial which drew national and international attention. He was one of the team of lawyers appointed by the party to represent the Scottsboro boys who had been falsely accused of raping two white women. Through Davis’s efforts, the defendants were spared capital punishment and were eventually freed. Because of threats to his life in the South brought on by his playing such prominent roles in two such important cases which successfully challenged southern racism and also spurred by his desire to play a larger role in the party, Davis moved to New York in the mid-1930s, working on a number of communist periodicals. He became editor of the Harlem Liberator and also was strongly involved in writing for and editing the Daily Worker and the Negro Liberator. He soon became the party’s leading black figure in Harlem and helped to found the National Negro Congress. He developed a close friendship with Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., replacing Powell on the New York City Council when Powell vacated that post in 1943 to represent Harlem in the U.S. House of Representatives. In 1945, he was elected for another term and fought hard for rent control, better pay for teachers, and eliminating racial discrimination in New York. By 1949, however, he became a victim of the increasing hostility toward leftist politics growing in Cold War America and was defeated in his bid for re-election to the city council. Worse, he was tried and convicted with ten other important communist leaders for violating the Smith Act, which criminalized the teaching of Marxist/Leninist thought. As a result, he and his ten associates were incarcerated in federal prison from 1951–55. 93

Davis, Frank Marshall His final years were characterized by turbulence in the American Communist Party and harassment by the FBI. However, he took an active role in the civil rights movement, participating in important marches and speaking regularly on college campuses. Wright met Davis in the mid-1930s when both were members of the Harlem branch of the Daily Worker which Davis headed. The two were members of the same party cell and became close friends. Davis encouraged Wright to write about a wide variety of subjects and was an enthusiastic supporter of his work. Davis was a witness in Wright’s marriage to Ellen Poplar. As Wright began to distance himself from communism and became openly critical of party ideology and strategy, his friendship with Davis cooled. Davis’s review of Native Son was ambivalent, praising the novel for its sharp criticism of American racism and capitalism but faulting it for its negative portrayal of black life and its lukewarm depiction of white communists. Wright was stung by such criticism although the two remained friends. Their friendship was clearly dissolved by 1944 when Wright publicized his break with communism in his essay ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Davis regarded this as a betrayal of their work in the party and a personal attack on fellow communists. Wright, in turn, came to see Davis as ‘‘corrupt’’ (Rowley 317), someone whose personal integrity had been compromised by his devotion to the party line. When Davis was sentenced to prison in 1951 for violating the Smith Act, Wright admitted in a letter to Dorothy Norman that he felt no sympathy for Davis and, indeed, took a ‘‘grim satisfaction’’ (Rowley 378) in his demise. Selected Bibliography: Gates, Henry Louis and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (eds.). African American Lives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers

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University Press, 1991. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

DAVIS, FRANK MARSHALL (31 December 1905–6 June 1987) In December 1948, Frank Marshall Davis and his wife Helen left the volatile politics of Chicago for Hawaii, ostensibly for a well-deserved, extended vacation. Davis had been worn to a frazzle by participating in positions ranging from executive editor of the Associated Negro Press (ANP); cofounder and managing editor of the labor weekly Chicago Star; membership in such radical organizations as the Chicago Civil Liberties committee, the Civil Rights Congress, and the American Youth for Democracy; and teaching the history of jazz at the Lincoln School, a community center that had earned the FBI’s designation of ‘‘a subversive organization.’’ The subtext for all of his fervent involvement was the destruction of white supremacy in preparation for the millennium of a truly multi-racial, democratic nation. More conservative voices read his activism as a form of radical subversion, in which he allegedly propagated the overthrow of the U.S. government ‘‘by force and violence.’’ He and Helen joined the Communist Party in the early 1940s as closet members, but clearly their motives were not to advocate government upheaval. Nevertheless, their political choices elicited intense scrutiny from the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Davises’ departure for Hawaii, then, assumed greater meaning: it became an act of survival; a flight away from a city embroiled in heightened labor, political, and social conflict; and a desperate attempt to escape the government’s intrusion into their personal lives. Davis’s commitment to social causes was longstanding. It had its origins in the conflicted interracial relations of Arkansas City, Kansas, the place of his 1905 birth. In his Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet (1992), he introduced how his childhood experiences formed the mantra reiterating his own raison d’eˆtre: that the

Davis, Frank Marshall world must privilege democracy for all people in order to accommodate its multiracial composition. One of his foundational beliefs was that race as a biological or social construct was illogical and therefore fallacious. In making this argument, Davis proved to be a man ahead of his times. For in the 1940s, the fight to erase the boundaries erected by racial differences in an era burdened by the persistence of Jim Crow laws and to replace this practice with a vision for a ‘‘raceless’’ society was virtually unprecedented. In this, his most engaging period as a journalist, advocate for civil and labor rights, and poet, he met and befriended Richard Wright. By happenstance, both of them arrived in Chicago in the same year, 1927. Their real relationship did not begin until 1936, when they met at the National Negro Congress. Wright had already pricked the nation’s conscience with short fiction later collected and published under the deliberately ironic title Uncle Tom’s Children and with a series of poems that spoke directly to social causes. Davis’s Black Man’s Verse appeared in 1935, which ultimately won for him the first Julius Rosenwald Fellowship for Poetry. Together, they participated in the Southside Writers’ Group, also in 1936, which set them on course for an aesthetic and personal relationship that would last until the end of World War II. Their different perspectives on art and politics slowly challenged their personal relationship after Davis wrote a series of reviews of Wright’s work. In an appreciative review of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), Davis celebrated the collection as ‘‘strong,’’ ‘‘brilliant,’’ and ‘‘the most absorbing fiction penned by a Negro since George Schuyler’s Black No More [1931].’’ There is little doubt that Davis was most inspired by ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ the last narrative in this collection, because Wright’s treatment of interracial protest instigated by the Communist Party agreed with his own aesthetic vision. Summarizing his assessment, Davis wrote: ‘‘These stories are strong fare, beautiful with the beauty of naked truth, harsh as a tornado, authentic as life itself, as elemental and burning as a forest fire.’’

When Native Son appeared in 1940, Davis was nearly hyperbolic in his praise. Simply put, it was ‘‘the greatest novel to come from the pen of an American Negro,’’ and it ranked ‘‘with the best work of any modern American.’’ It was in his review of 12 Million Black Voices (1941) that a barely discernible edge began creeping into Davis’s criticism. He felt that Wright’s focus on the masses of African Americans, albeit with Marxist leanings, ‘‘cannot tell the entire story unless he tells also of those Duskymericans who, like himself, have overcome the handicap of color to win acclaim and admiration of the white world.’’ The rift that had slowly developed between Davis and Wright erupted into an unbridgeable chasm when Black Boy (1945) appeared. Their differences are succinctly captured in the title of Davis’s review: ‘‘Richard Wright’s New Book, Black Boy, Out of Step With War Torn World.’’ Rhetorically, Davis asked: ‘‘Should [a writer] feel free to write at any time about whatever comes to mind? Or does he, in the midst of an all-out war against fascism, when every intelligent person knows that words are weapons, have the moral duty to use his art to further the fight for democracy?’’ Davis’s question betrays a problem he and others had been wrestling with. They shared the feeling that Wright had become an individualist, whose concern for ‘‘the struggle’’ had given way to self-interest. Davis minced few words in pointing to Wright’s choice of Black Boy as the title, which, he felt, reeked with ‘‘commercialism.’’ Also he must have seen the book in manuscript form because he was disturbed by what he perceived as Wright’s preoccupation with pornography, a salaciousness that diminished the book’s potential for political effectiveness and contributed instead to its commercial appeal. In short, Black Boy was poorly timed; it failed to connect southern racism with Hitlerian racial theory, and its focus on interracial conflict supposedly impeded the efforts to achieve harmony between the races. After publishing his third collection of poems, 47th Street: Poems (1948), Davis and his wife traded Chicago’s fabled harsh winters for the 95

Davis, George temperate, balmy climate of Hawaii. Many were left feeling that Davis had ‘‘sold out’’ and abrogated his social commitment by leaving Chicago. Others felt that he had been exiled to the South Pacific. Conceptually, ‘‘exile’’ has at least two meanings: First, it means political banishment. That is to say, a person is forced to leave his country to avoid harassment or worse. Second, a person leaves of his own volition and awaits a propitious time to return. If home never changes, the exiled one adapts to life in a foreign land. Thus, in a parallel that is nothing short of ironic, Davis and Wright arrived in Chicago at the same time and, in opposite parts of the world, experienced exile from it too. John Edgar Tidwell Selected Bibliography: Davis, Frank Marshall. Black Moods: Collected Poems. Ed. John Edgar Tidwell. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Davis, Frank Marshall. Livin’ the Blues: Memoirs of a Black Journalist and Poet. Ed. John Edgar Tidwell. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Davis, Frank Marshall. Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press. Ed. John Edgar Tidwell. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Tidwell, John Edgar. ‘‘An Interview With Frank Marshall Davis.’’ Black American Literature Forum 19.3 (1985): 105–108.

DAVIS, GEORGE (4 February 1906– 25 November 1957) Fiction writer and magazine editor George Davis influenced the careers of many artists and writers whose professional endeavors surpassed Davis’s own literary aspirations. Born of Scotch-English ancestry to Robert Anthony Davis, a country doctor, and Georgiana Davis, a housewife, he was one of five male siblings. Davis spent his first three years in Chicago; however, owing to his mother’s ailing health, his father moved the family to Detroit, Michigan. Davis finished high school there and spent a brief stint at the College of Detroit. The post–World War I years of the 1920s speak to Davis’s response to the jazz age and its

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symptoms of rootlessness and indeterminacy. He vacillated between jobs, and, finally, in June 1927, he sailed for France where it seems he began to take writing seriously. Upon returning to America, Davis published his only work, Opening of a Door, which garnered him the Harper Prize of 1931. After Door, Davis’s own attempts at publishing seem to have floundered, owing to frequent rejections, and because of such experience, made him understandably sympathetic to the struggles of writers whom he handled. His contact with and influence upon rising stars seem to have taken two paths. On the one hand, Davis’s professional career as an editor started in the 1930s by his becoming a young literary editor at Vanity Fair and then fiction editor at Harper’s Bazaar where he remained until 1940. Davis then transferred to another magazine, Mademoiselle, where he remained as fiction editor until 1949. In his last endeavor, Davis became managing editor of Flair, a magazine he attempted to model upon the high standards of Vanity Fair where he had started out in his career. Davis’s professional life overlapped with his personal life and often involved the same people whom he represented. For example, Davis cultivated an infamous, bohemian lifestyle in the 1940s that often exceeded his position as a respected editor. He established a residence at 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn which became famous for the off-beat living arrangements of its inhabitants. He sectioned it into rooms and through its doors passed such distinguished personages as W. H. Auden, the English poet, and his companion Chester Kallam; Oliver Smith; Paul and Jane Bowles; Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears; Gypsy Rose Lee, the striptease artist; Anaı¨s Nin, the diarist and novelist; and young fiction writer Carson McCullers. Biographers of Auden and McCullers report on Davis’s ‘‘sordid,’’ ‘‘raffish,’’ and ‘‘bawdy’’ lifestyle that encouraged wild parties, drinking binges, and rompings in the nude. He himself was affable, likable, and openly homosexual. The house at 7 Middagh Place he

Detective Fiction came to dub as ‘‘our menagerie’’ because of the avant-garde or idiosyncratic behaviors of the assorted homosexuals, bisexuals, and heterosexuals who passed through its doors, inclusive infrequently of the rare pets residing there. Carson McCullers, while separated from her husband James Reeves McCullers, fell in love with Erika Mann and several other women afterwards. Gypsy Rose Lee entertained night visits from her gangster boyfriend. And W. H. Auden, one of the first residents, became self-appointed resident manager and went about assigning rooms, collecting rents, planning meals, and regulating curfews. He openly grumbled at small infractions upsetting his sense of order. Still, Anaı¨s Nin more accurately identified the true purpose of Davis’s brownstone as being an artists’ colony or haven for intellectuals when she gave it the name ‘‘February House.’’ And Richard Wright was one of those transient residents. Wright had become acquainted with Davis when the latter placed Wright’s short story ‘‘Almos’ A Man’’ with Harper’s Bazaar in January 1940. By March 1940, Wright had become internationally renowned for publication of his first novel Native Son. By the time that Wright became an occupant of February House in summer 1941, Davis had re-sectioned the three-story brownstone into lower, middle, and upper flats so that long-term occupants would have more space. Although families were rare, Richard Wright, his white Jewish wife Ellen, and their young child Julia resided on the lower level for three months. He did not participate in the bohemian antics and eventually moved to a quieter dwelling several blocks away. Having grown up in a puritanical home under the strong grip of a religious-zealot grandmother during his childhood in Mississippi, Wright was somewhat appalled over McCullers’s vacillating moods of excessive talking or drinking. Yet, he befriended everyone regardless of contradictory, personal lifestyles. Davis remained involved in the arts until the end of his life. His stature in the literary world evolved more from his role as agent to the people whom he nurtured as opposed to his own singular

literary achievements. In 1951, Davis was married late in life to Lotte Lenya, and the couple resided in New York. The Vienna-born singer had enjoyed success in the New York stage version of ‘‘Three Penny Opera.’’ In October of 1957, Davis accompanied his wife to Berlin for her recording engagements. In the week prior to his death on November 25, 1957, Davis suffered a heart attack and entered a Berlin hospital where he died at the age of fifty-one. Virginia Whatley Smith Selected Bibliography: Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Doubleday, 1975. Davenport-Hines, Richard. Auden. New York: Pantheon, 1995. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hecht, Anthony. The Hidden Law: The Poetry of W. H. Auden. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993. ‘‘George Davis, Wrote and Edited Fiction.’’ New York Times. Nov. 26, 1957, 33. Savigneau, Josayne. Carson McCullers: A Life. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

DETECTIVE FICTION As a young man growing up in Mississippi, Wright was an avid reader of popular fiction, especially dime novels, westerns, and detective fiction. As Keneth Kinnamon has noted, one of the first genres which Wright was drawn to as a boy was the detective fiction appearing in magazines such as Flynn’s Detective Weekly and Argosy AllStory Magazine (Kinnamon 27). And Wright observed in Black Boy that between 1923 and 1925 he became a faithful reader of Flynn’s Detective Weekly, fascinated by the exciting plots and criminal figures which that magazine specialized in. Wright’s boyhood friend, Joe Brown, remarked in a letter to Constance Webb that Wright as a teenager ‘‘loved western stories . . . and detective stories’’ (Rowley 30). After Wright moved to Memphis in 1927 and became impressed with H. L. Mencken’s A Book of Prejudices, his reading tastes matured and he immersed himself in the masterworks of nineteenth and twentieth century masterpieces by writers such as Emile Zola, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 97

Deux Magots and Theodore Dreiser. But he never lost his enthusiasm for narratives centering on crime. Zola’s La Beˆte Humaine, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy are, after all, detective novels of a sort, relentlessly probing the roots of crime and offering sensational plots filled with substantial violence. Moreover, Wright came to regard Edgar Allan Poe, the father of detective fiction, as one of his favorite American authors. And Wright also developed a strong appetite for film noir movies when he lived in Chicago, New York and Paris. Wright’s long-time interest in detective fiction and other narratives dealing with crime were put to good use in his mature fiction. As Ross Pudaloff has argued, such stories provided him with plots, themes, and characters which he would complicate and use for ironic purposes in novels such as Native Son, The Outsider, and Savage Holiday. And, as Dan McCall has revealed, the settings in Native Son and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ bear a closer resemblance to the surrealistic world depicted in Poe’s detective and horror stories than to the photographic settings found in the realistic and naturalistic masterpieces which Wright admired. Just as Dreiser had used unlikely materials from popular culture such as the Alger myth as a basis to create a complex vision of modern American life in Sister Carrie, Wright transformed the simplistic plots and cardboard characters of ordinary detective fiction, endowing them with deep social significance and profound psychological meaning.

was a popular gathering point for French intellectuals and writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Wright came to prefer the Cafe´ Tournon across from the Luxembourg Gardens where he became, in Arnold Rampersad’s words, the ‘‘unofficial spokesman for the African American colony in Paris’’ (Rampersad 899). This group came to include novelists James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and William Gardner Smith as well as cartoonist Ollie Harrington and journalist Richard Gibson. Such cafe´s provided African-American expatriates in Paris a kind of a ‘‘home’’ in what Wright described as an ‘‘alien’’ land. They met regularly in cafe´ s such as the Deux Magots, Cafe´ Flore´ , and Cafe´ Tournon to discuss their work, exchange news from America, and meet visitors from home. Such cafe´ society also had a darker side as it could become a center for intense personal rivalries and political intrigue. In an unpublished novel written late in his life, ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ Wright offered a trenchant satire on French cafe´s such as the Tournon and the Deux Magots.

Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. Pudaloff, Ross. ‘‘Celebrity as Identity: Richard Wright’s Native Son and Mass Culture,’’ Studies in American Fiction II (Spring 1983): 3–18. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

A popular mode of fiction emerging in nineteenth century America which featured heroic narratives usually set on the American West, the Revolutionary War, or the Civil War. Plots centered on the sensational deeds of male heroes as they fought a wide variety of ‘‘bad guys,’’ including Indians, desperadoes, and criminals. This form was initiated by the publishers Beadle and Mead in 1860 with a novel entitled Malaeska: The Indian Wife of the White Hunter which sold 300,000 copies in its first year. As the genre developed, it often took the form of series involving

DEUX MAGOTS A cafe´ in the St. Germain section of Paris that Wright frequented in his early days in Paris, it 98

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City: Doubleday, 1980. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Chronology’’ in Richard Wright: Early Works. New York: Library of America, 1991.

DIME NOVELS

Diop, Alioune actual figures such as Buffalo Bill and Ned Buntline or fictional characters like Deadwood Dick and Nick Carter. Because of their low cost, which was made possible by mass printing techniques, dime novels were immensely popular during the last forty years of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century. This genre also gave birth to other forms of popular fiction such as the Horatio Alger novels and other boys’ books such as the Frank Merriwell series. Detective fiction in men’s magazines such as Flynn’s Detective Weekly also evolved from dime novels. As a young person growing up in Mississippi, Wright eagerly devoured popular fiction, especially dime novels focusing on crime, and this reading left a lasting imprint on his imagination and would play an important role in his development as a mature writer. As Michel Fabre has observed, Wright’s ‘‘usual fare’’ of reading before he arrived in Memphis in 1925 consisted of ‘‘detective stories, dime novels, and popular fiction’’ (Fabre 66) which fed his strong interest in American success stories and their opposite, stories about crime. He read widely in men’s magazines such as Argosy and Flynn’s Detective Weekly, direct descendents of dime novels such as the Nick Carter series that presented sensational crimes and melodramatic plots in which law and order inevitably triumphed over crime. As a mature writer, Wright maintained his strong interest in crime and what produced it. Novels such as Native Son, The Outsider, and Savage Holiday and most of the stories contained in Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men examine horrific crimes and present highly sensational plots which were often seen in dime novels and related popular fiction. But the mature Wright artfully signified on these materials rather than literally imitating them; that is, he transformed them to express his unique vision of twentiethcentury black life. Wright’s fiction embeds crime stories in a richly ironic context, endowing them with powerfully complex and disturbing meanings which are never found in the popular fiction of his time. The crimes he describes are never

adequately understood or justly punished. Law and order never triumphs in works such as Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ or Savage Holiday. Indeed, the reverse is true as the American legal system and its functionaries compound problems with injustice rooted in systematic racism. And whereas the crude dime novels and detective fiction that fascinated Wright as a young boy emphasized dramatic outer action and provided little or no character development, Wright’s fiction is always focused on the psychological motivations and sociological background which drive his plots. The potboilers which Wright devoured in his youth, therefore, became one of the many sources which fired his imagination and helped to produce fiction of startling social insights and psychological depth. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘Wright’s Native Son and Two Novels by Zola: A Comparative Study.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18 (Fall 1984), 100–05. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Pudaloff, Ross. ‘‘Celebrity as Identity: Native Son and Mass Culture.’’ Studies in American Fiction 2 (Spring 1983), 3–18.

DIOP, ALIOUNE (10 January 1910– 2 May 1980) Editor, publisher, political activist, and statesman, Alioune Diop became a formidable presence in the intellectual and political arenas to decolonize Africa of European imperialism. Born to Muslim parents in Saint Louis, Senegal, Diop followed the traditional path of colonized Africans under French rule. His father was a postal worker whose modest income from his government position enabled Diop to exceed normal barriers to secondary education for French-speaking Africans and graduate from the Lyce´e Faidherbe in Saint Louis and then to matriculate from the University of Algiers with a baccalaureate in 1931. His life work seemed destined to be that of a teacher for Diop then crossed the Atlantic to Europe where he studied classical literature at the University of Sorbonne and then taught classical languages at a 99

Diop, Alioune Paris lyce´ e briefly in 1937. His conversion to Roman Catholicism also attested to Diop’s selfimage as an assimilated subject for it signified Diop’s rejection of tribal religion as well as the normative Muslim faith of the Senegalese that became introduced by Arabs to black Africans in the thirteenth century. Diop’s birth in 1910 and experience of the French-governed educational systems at home and abroad reflect his Europeanized identity reformation created by the French colonization of Senegal and West Africa. The French, in fact, were one of the fourteen European nations at the Berlin Conference in December 1884–February 1885 that met to arbitrarily divide up black Africa and thus to destroy and to reshape its tribal and provincial demarcations of states, kingdoms, and empires extant since precolonial times. The result was irredeemable damage to the African personality by Europe’s warping of customs and ethics of altruism intrinsic to culture and collective identity formation. The post–World War II era marks Diop’s shift from passive academic to activist politician, starting in Europe. He returned to Senegal and accepted the post of colonial administrator (chief de cabinet, 1939–46). But upon returning to France in 1947 as the Senegalese representative to the Paris senate, he found himself caught up in the swirl of anticolonial activism. Within hours after the close of World War II in 1946, for instance, Indonesia took the lead and announced its independence from colonial rule. In Britain, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and George Padmore and C. L. R. James of the West Indies organized the Manchester Conference of 1946 in which black Africans convened to commence plans for decolonizing Africa, Ghana being the lead country. Diop, in Paris, became embroiled in the body politics of Pan-African initiatives and French aesthetic movements calling for anticolonial rule of French West Africa. In Paris, it was inevitable that the paths of Alioune Diop and Richard Wright would cross. Wright arrived on the Paris scene also during

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these political upheavals as a new expatriate in 1946 just as the Manchester Conference and French intellectual movements were converging on common goals of humanist liberation. Wright took up residency on the Left Bank at 14 rue Monsieur de la Prince. Diop, in 1947, moved to 42 rue Descartes. And also in 1947, Wright and Diop both attended a meeting of French intellectuals led by Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre´ Gide, Albert Camus, Aime´ Ce´saire, and others who agreed to form an organization called Pre´sence Africaine. Moreover, it formed a journal by the same title, and Diop was elected its editor. Its purpose was to inspire debates on global humanism between Africa and the West. Its contributors included Richard Wright, Julius Nyere, Wole Soyinka, Le´opold Senghor, David Diop, Leroi Jones, Eric Williams, and Chinua Achebe, to name a few. The articles primarily were published in French, but in 1960, the journal was published in English. Initially, its topics concerned conflicts in French West Africa, but as its circulation widened to include all of Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and America, the subjects broadened and became more political. Diop’s journal also promoted the aesthetics of the Ne´gritude movement and its somewhat romanticized and idealized concepts of African life and culture similar to the nostalgia of the 1920s Harlem Renaissance movement in the United States. Another activity involving Diop and Wright was Diop’s organization of the International Congresses of Negro Writers and Artists. The first one convened in 1956 in Paris. Wright’s correspondence contains several letters of exchange between him and Diop, with Diop urging Wright to attend the Paris meeting as a keynote speaker. Wright already had visited Nkrumah’s Ghana and published his first travel book Black Power in 1954 about the trip. And the author’s sudden exposure to the limited, ethnocentric ideologies of the Ne´ gritude Movement founded by Aime´ Ce´ saire and Leonard Dumas in the 1930s; the Pan African platform being espoused by Nkrumah, Padmore, and James in the 1940s; and the

Dodson, Owen anticolonial sentiments being vaunted by French intellectuals in the 1950s all explain Richard Wright’s huge intellectual leap as an existentialist thinker and global humanist that frustrated his American critics. Paris was its nexus, and Diop and Wright were on the same platform. In fact, the International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists of 1956 formed another subgroup called the Society for African Culture, and Diop was actively engaged in its fundraising aspects and corresponded frequently with Wright. A few years later, Diop also encouraged Wright to attend the International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists meeting, this time in Rome, Italy, in 1959, but Wright by then had become disillusioned with the organization. Diop remained devoted to Pre´sence Africaine and was a premiere editor and political activist as well as scholar. While he ran the organization and managed its journal, he also published some significant articles of his own between 1947 and 1970. For instance, his essays ‘‘Niam n’goura or Pre´ sence Africaine’s raison d’eˆ tre,’’ 1947; ‘‘L’Artiste n’est pas seul au monde,’’ 1951; ‘‘Discours d’ouverture au premier congre` s international des peuples e´ crivains et artistes noirs,’’ 1956; and ‘‘Discours d’ouverture de la table ronde sur ‘e´ lite et peuple dans l’Afrique d’aujourd’hui,’’ 1970, all concerned the advancement of Africanist people not only in mainland Africa, but those in the diaspora. Diop’s perception of Pan-Africanism in a wider sense to embrace black people worldwide conforms to intellectual thoughts being redefined at these conferences in Paris and Europe between the 1950s and 1970s that presaged critical theories to become re-popularized in the 1990s. To broaden the exposure of African-authored texts to western culture, in fact, Diop also founded Pre´sence Africaine Editions in 1949 for that purpose. Diop envisioned a decolonized Africa and worked assiduously for emancipation of French West African peoples. Ironically, as Richard Wright laid plans for a fourth travel book in 1960, he had become more attuned to African culture than previously in his travel narrative of

Black Power in 1954. Had he lived instead of dying on November 28, 1960 in Paris, Wright would have traveled to French West Africa, and specifically to Diop’s Senegal, as his manuscript plans indicate. On the other hand, Diop recognized the imperfection of western religion and the role that the church played in Africa’s regression. A devout Catholic all his life, Diop, nonetheless, became highly critical of the church and its narrow vision of failing to grasp the full humanity of Africans that Christianity espoused. Diop died on May 2, 1980. He left behind a wife, two sons, and three daughters. If any one singular event defined his life, it was the founding of Pre´sence Africaine that celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1997. Virginia Whatley Smith Selected Bibliography: Coats, Geoffrey. ‘‘From Whence We Come: Alioune Diop and Saint-Louis, Senegal.’’ Research in African Literatures. V. 28 (1997): 206–19. ‘‘Diop, Alioune.’’ The Annual Obituary 1980. Ed. Roland Turner. First ed. New York: St. Martin’s P, 1980. 269–70. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Smith, Virginia Whatley. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 2002.

DODSON, OWEN (28 November 1914– 21 June 1983) Owen Dodson’s career as a writer spans nearly fifty years during which time he achieved excellence in a variety of literary forms, including poetry, fiction, and drama. Born in Brooklyn to a prominent black family whose circle of friends included Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and James Weldon Johnson, he distinguished himself as a high school student and earned a full scholarship to Bates College where he began to write poetry and published poems in Phylon, Opportunity, and The New York Herald Tribune before graduating. He received an M.F.A. from Yale University in 1938. While at Yale, he wrote an award-winning play, Divine Comedy, and completed another play, The Garden of Time, which uses the Medea story to examine the history of American racism. 101

Dostoevsky, Fyodor He taught briefly at Hampton Institute and Spelman College before joining the faculty at Howard University where he taught in the Drama department for twenty-three years. While at Howard, he worked closely with a new generation of black writers, including LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka). He also wrote two outstanding novels while teaching at Howard, Boy at The Window (1951), and Come Home Early, Child (1977). He directed the world premier of James Baldwin’s Amen Corner at Howard in 1953. Dodson distinguished himself as an important African-American poet. His first collection of poems, Powerful Long Ladder (1946), is an eloquent plea for racial harmony and contains some of his best-known work. After retiring from teaching, he published The Confession of Stone: Song Cycles (1970), which many regard as his masterpiece, a religious poem consisting of a series of monologues concerning the life of Jesus. Working in traditional forms like the sonnet, Dodson was unusually successful in linking these forms to black speech and rhetoric. Wright and Dodson became friends in New York during the mid-1930s and had one of Dodson’s poems published in New Challenge, a leftist journal designed as a venue for young black writers which Wright edited with Dorothy West and Marian Minus. They were brought together in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s by a mutual friend, political cartoonist Ollie Harrington, whom Dodson knew from his time at Yale and Wright became close friends with in Paris. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965. Hatch, James V. ‘‘Remembering Owen Dodson’’ in Artist and Influence 1985 edited by Leo Hamalian and Judith Wilson. No. 3, New York: Hatch-Billops Collection, 1985.

DOSTOEVSKY, FYODOR (1821–1881) Nineteenth-century Russian novelist who strongly influenced Wright throughout his career. Wright began reading Dostoevsky’s fiction at age nineteen

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and in Black Boy cites him as one of the authors who awakened him both as a person and a writer by providing him with ‘‘new ways of looking and seeing’’ (Wright 272) leading to a deepened ‘‘sense of life itself ’’ (Wright 274). In a 1960 interview shortly before his death, Wright claimed that ‘‘Dostoevsky was my model when I started writing’’ (Kinnamon 241). Indeed, throughout his career Wright acknowledged that Dostoevsky’s work, particularly Crime and Punishment, The House of the Dead, Notes from the Underground, and The Possessed, gave him lenses through which he could see his own experience more deeply and truly. For example, he considered The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky’s great memoir about his exile in Siberia, to be a ‘‘window’’ through which he could see his own prison-like experiences in the segregated South (Kinnamon 81). He also admired Dostoevsky’s penetrating analyses of his characters’ psychological states, claiming in a 1955 interview that ‘‘Foremost among the writers who have influenced me in my attitude toward the psychological state of modern man is Dostoevsky’’ (Kinnamon 163). And Dostoevsky’s profound critique of modern politics in The Possessed would surely have been of use to Wright as he questioned the aims and principles of the Communist Party during the period of the Stalin purges. While Dostoevsky inspired Wright in a great variety of ways, it would be a mistake to claim that Wright merely copied the Russian novelist’s works. Quite to the contrary, Wright ‘‘signified’’ upon Dostoevsky’s writing; that is, he used certain motifs and themes from books such as Crime and Punishment and Notes from the Underground and then transformed them to express a uniquely African-American vision. Native Son therefore resonates against Crime and Punishment so as to deepen its meanings while still expressing something quite new, a vision of the black ghetto as seen from the point of view of an insider. ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ likewise, is not a carbon copy of Notes from the Underground

‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ but a fresh expression of how a segregated society has pushed African Americans into a new kind of underworld. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Magistrale, Tony. ‘‘From St. Petersburg to Chicago: Wright’s Crime and Punishment.’’ Comparative Literature Studies 23 (spring, 1986), 59–70.

‘‘DOUBLE VICTORY’’ ‘‘Double victory,’’ or ‘‘double v’’ as it as commonly known, was a strategy devised by AfricanAmerican intellectuals and leaders during World War II which envisioned black Americans as fighting a kind of two-fronted war: a military struggle against Germany and Japan and a political struggle in the United States to achieve racial justice and equality. African-American figures such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and H. Phillip Randolph initially opposed the war in Europe, viewing it as a war between capitalist countries with colonialist agendas. Moreover, they remembered the shabby treatment which black veterans received in the United States after participating in World War I. They had little enthusiasm, therefore, for ‘‘a war of liberation’’ in Europe when they realized how African-American people were anything but liberated at home, suffering de jure segregation in the South and de facto segregation in the North. To make matters even worse, war industries treated black workers unfairly, giving them lower wages and fewer benefits than their white counterparts. And the armed forces were rigidly segregated, usually restricting blacks to menial roles. Even the Red Cross practiced racist policies, refusing black blood donations at the outset of the war and later keeping the blood of African Americans in separate containers. It was understandable, therefore, when Wright in 1941 wrote a New Masses article entitled ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ which urged black

people not to support American involvement in World War II. But after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, it became apparent to Wright and many other black intellectuals who had opposed the war that war with Germany and Japan was necessary but should have the unique meaning to black people that was contained in the concept of the ‘‘double v.’’ One of the first consequences of this strategy was the desegregating of American war industries by presidential order when A. Phillip Randolph threatened a March on Washington if this were not done. In a larger sense, the idea of double victory saw World War II as a preamble to the vast changes brought about in postwar society by the civil rights and black power movements. Wright gave perhaps the clearest description of the idea of double victory in his 1941 introduction to a condensed version of 12 Million Black Voices when he stressed that ‘‘The American Negro is allied with the anti-Axis powers’’ but also is engaged in ‘‘a fight to preserve the kind of America where the struggle for the extension of democracy can be taken up with renewed vigor when our enemies are crushed’’ (Fabre 227). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

‘‘DOWN BY THE RIVERSIDE’’ Wright wrote this story in Chicago in the fall of 1934 as part of a series of interrelated stories about the racism, violence, and injustice which black people faced in the rural South. The collection was eventually published in 1938 by Harper and Brothers as Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas and was reissued two years later in expanded form as Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories. According to Michel Fabre, Wright got the idea for ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ when he read Burrows’s Basis for Social Thought and was struck by a passage describing a woman who risked her life to save a drowning man, something which Burrows claimed illustrated her ‘‘social 103

‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ consciousness,’’ her ‘‘desire to save and serve others’’ (Fabre 121). Wright’s story, like so much of his fiction, consists of powerful ironic inversions of such idealistic sentiments. The story’s central character, Brother Mann, is a black farmer who saves a white family from drowning but is murdered by a white mob shortly after he has performed this heroic action. And the story is filled with other bitter ironies which reduce conventional moral sentiments to absurdity. The title refers to a traditional spiritual which exhorts people to lead human lives by turning away from violence and embracing peace: Ahm gonna lay down mah sword and shield Down by the riverside. Ah ain gonna study war no more. (Wright 57–58)

Wright’s narrative, in sharp contrast, examines a world where fear and hatred create a perpetual war between the races which results in a series of senselessly violent acts. His ‘‘riverside’’ is a place of terrible bloodshed, not a setting for a baptism which will cleanse people of sin. A brief summary of the story vividly illustrates how destructively violent is Wright’s nightmarish world. The story is set during a massive flood modeled after the catastrophic flood of the Mississippi River which has been described as one of the most damaging natural disasters ever to afflict the American South. And the brutal actions of most of the story’s white characters mirror the ravages of nature. When Mann’s pregnant wife is about to give birth, he is forced to steal a boat to transport her to the hospital. But the white owner of the boat attempts to shoot him when he spots Mann and his wife on the river. A fight erupts between the two, resulting in the while man’s death. The delay brought on by this violent skirmish is partly responsible for Mann’s wife dying in childbirth just as she arrives at the hospital. At this point, Mann is commandeered by white troops to serve on a rescue squad and he risks his own life to save a family of white people from drowning. But when he is recognized by these people as the man who stole their boat and killed 104

one of them, they report him to the authorities after they safely reach the shore. The story concludes with a lynch mob pursuing Mann as they shout ‘‘kill the black bastard’’ (Wright 89). Mann is reduced to ‘‘a cold numbness’’ (Wright 92) as he dies in a hail of bullets. In American Hunger, Wright declared that the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children ‘‘had posed the question: what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die in a country that denied his humanity?’’ and that he was ’’dissatisfied’’ (Wright 81) with the answer provided by ‘‘Down by the Riverside.’’ This story certainly describes a social environment intent on denying the humanity of black people but its central character is unable to assert ‘‘will’’ effectively as a means of asserting or protecting his humanity. Instead, he dies on all fours crawling in the river’s mud as he is tracked down and killed by a lynch mob. The final two stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, however, provide a more satisfying answer to Wright’s question as black central characters rebel against a racist society and heroically assert their humanity. Silas, the protagonist of ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ kills the white man who seduces his wife and dies defying a white mob. Reverend Taylor, the hero of ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ goes much further in asserting his humanity against southern society, organizing a protest march centered in the idea that ‘‘Freedom belongs to the strong’’ (Wright 161). As he leads a demonstration in front of city hall, he experiences a purifying baptism which Wright’s river could not provide. A ‘‘baptism of clean joy swept over him’’ as he thinks ‘‘This is the way’’ (Wright 161). The four stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, therefore, dramatize a slow but steady progression from victimhood to human dignity as Wright’s characters create, in the words of a traditional spiritual, a ‘‘way out of no way’’ through human will and political action. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Tracy. ‘‘The Role of Water Imagery in Uncle Tom’s Children.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Spring 1988) 5–16. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s

‘‘The Dozens’’ Children. New York: Signet Books, 1963. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: 1977.

‘‘THE DOZENS’’ A kind of African-American folk expression taking the form of a verbal game of joking about, taunting, or insulting the relatives, particularly the mothers, of one’s opponent. Profoundly ironic and inversive, the dozens usually involve a rising scale of verbal abuse starting with playful joking and becoming increasingly more aggressive and insulting. One wins in ‘‘playing the dozens’’ by outdoing one’s opponents with imaginative skill and verbal dexterity. Played well among friends who are aware of the game’s conventions, ‘‘the dozens’’ results in laughter. Played poorly by people lacking the skill not to cross the line of serious insult, the dozens can erupt in violence. The dozens are usually played by males who come from the ranks of ordinary blacks from working class or poverty backgrounds. Middle class and upper class African Americans often regard the dozens as crude and demeaning. Wright, who in ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States’’ expressed his admiration for the folk expression of ordinary black people and who articulated distaste for the more refined literature of the black upper and middle class, admired the energy and verbal cleverness of the dozens. He particularly liked the fact that they expressed ‘‘the Negro’s point of view’’ by ‘‘jeering at’’ what the dominant society considers ‘‘decent, holy, just, wise, straight, right, and uplifting’’ (Wright 89). Realizing that conventional society hypocritically proclaimed those pious virtues while treating blacks in ways that were anything but ‘‘just’’ and ‘‘right,’’ he enjoyed the dozens for their honesty and ability to deflate the pieties of the dominant culture. The aggressively ribald and subversive tone of the dozens can be found throughout Wright’s work as he ironically contrasts the bleak lives of his black characters with their deepest human aspirations and American desires. ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ the opening story in Uncle Tom’s

Children, begins with two young black men literally playing the dozens with one declaring ‘‘Yo mama don wear no drawers’’ and the other responding ‘‘Ah seena when she pulled em off ’’ (Wright 18). Shortly afterwards, their earthy remarks are ironically juxtaposed with the spiritual they sing which declares: Dis train, Oh Hallelujah, Dis train bound for Glory Ef yuh ride no need fer fret er worry (Wright 19)

As the story will make clear, the world these two young men inhabit will offer them very little opportunities for ‘‘glory’’ but will confront them always with the gross facts of southern life—a brutally segregated world of injustice and violence. The funky dozens, therefore, distill the truth about their world while their sacred music articulates a cruel illusion. In segregated Mississippi blacks have plenty to ‘‘fret’’ and ‘‘worry’’ about. The bitterly ironic joking which Bigger and Gus engage in when they observe an airplane flying overhead early in Native Son also smacks of the inversive ironies found in the dozens. As Bigger expresses his very American desire to ‘‘rise’’ in American life which the plane evokes, Gus sarcastically reminds him that such flying is reserved for whites only. The laughter which Gus’s remark evokes in them is quite similar to the harshly ironic laughter generated by the dozens. The Long Dream, the last novel Wright published during his lifetime, contains a similar jocular encounter between two young men which recalls the humor of the dozens. As Zeke, Tony, and Fishbelly engage in a contest of who can recite the most ribald song, they sing lyrics such as: Old man Bud Was a man like this He saved his money By loving his fis’ . . . (Wright 101)

Although they consider such songs ‘‘cool and crazy’’ (Wright 102), Wright makes it clear in the narrative which follows that their lives are 105

Drake, St. Clair masturbatory, made sterile by an air-tight system of legal segregation which deprives them of significant action and productivity. Selected Bibliography: Low, W. A. and Virgil A. Clift (eds.). Encyclopedia of Black America. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981. Wright, Richard. ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States’’ in White Man, Listen. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1957. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Signet, 1963.

DRAKE, ST. CLAIR (2 January 1911– 15 June 1990) Anthropologist, sociologist, writer, educator, and peace activist, John Gibb St. Clair Drake pioneered black studies, anthropological research, and civil rights initiatives for black people that have impacted culture to the present day. Born in Suffolk, Virginia, to John Gibb, an immigrant from Barbados and a Baptist minister, and Virginia Gibb, an African American and a schoolteacher, St. Clair Drake was destined to work towards improving the lives of black people owing to the professional successes of his parents. Drake split his childhood and adolescence between Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Staunton, Virginia. After high school, he attended Hampton Institute in Virginia from 1927–31 where he majored in biology and graduated with honors. However, after studying there with Professor Allison Davis, Drake’s interests shifted to anthropology. From the start of his academic life, Drake devoted his time to improving the quality of life for African Americans. He was born into a segregated world where the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling of 1896 on de jure segregation mandated Jim Crow separatism and unequal opportunities for African Americans. Drake’s education, academic appointments, and civil activism all overlap, but cohesively point to his resistance to unequal treatment of black people. In the 1930s and after graduation, Drake taught high school for a year in a rural part of Virginia. However, at Hampton Drake had begun to read literature by black

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militants and that inspired him to spend the summer of 1931 with Quaker activists who were traveling around the country campaigning for world peace. He was ahead of his time for such civil activism, especially since this was the lynching era in history, and Drake himself escaped an episode. However, he also wisely recognized that advanced education provides greater authority to voicing dissent. In 1937, Drake entered the graduate program in anthropology at the University of Chicago as a Rosenwald Fellow. During the eight-year span of his studies, he went to the British Isles in the 1940s to conduct field studies about the impact of race relations on the black inhabitants of Cardiff, Wales. This dissertation project was the beginning of Drake’s extensive scientific studies to follow. In the 1940s, Drake’s academic endeavors were broken by the outbreak of World War II, and then restarted afterwards. He chose to serve his time from 1939–45 in the Merchant Marines to avoid segregation in the regular armed forces. After military service and completion of his dissertation, Drake joined the faculty of Roosevelt University where he taught from 1946–58. While in Chicago, he forged a professional relationship with another social scientist, Horace Cayton. Already Drake had published one work entitled Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class in 1941. After he met Cayton, also a graduate of the University of Chicago in sociology, they co-authored a seminal work entitled Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City in 1945. The 830-page document was hailed as an objective urban study about segregation, crime, and discrimination in Chicago’s Black Belt. The authors included thousands of incidents in pictures and words about the daily struggles of life. The work became the defining text by Cayton and Drake and a classic in black studies. Drake’s career only escalated after Black Metropolis, and so did his humanist activism on behalf of Africanist people worldwide. For example, during the 1950s and 1960s, Drake spent

Dreiser, Theodore much time working abroad. He traveled to Africa where he headed the Department of Sociology at the University of Ghana from 1958–61, and acted as advisor to Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. He became advisor also to other African leaders in the throes of independence. Back in the United States, Drake accepted a position as professor at Stanford University, and became its first Director of Black Studies. He taught courses in anthropology and sociology, and held his faculty appointment from 1969 until retirement in 1979. Before and after retirement, Drake also taught courses at Dillard University, the University of Chicago, Boston University, and Columbia University. During this time, Drake also published Race Relations in A Time of Rapid Social Change (1966), The Redemption of Africa and Black Religion (1970), and numerous poems and essays. Especially significant during the 1940s to 1960s periods are Drake’s contacts with Richard Wright. Once Wright had taken exile in Paris in 1946, he became ensconced in the Pan-African Movements involving George Padmore, C. L. R. James, and Kwame Nkrumah, and the French intellectual movement to decolonize French West Africa involving Jean-Paul Sartre, Andre´ Gide, Albert Camus, and Alioune Diop. Since Drake had ties to Wright from Chicago and the publication of Black Metropolis, he naturally kept in contact with Wright once abroad. Drake also had conducted field research in Kenya for his dissertation and stayed in London where he had active contact with Nkrumah and Padmore as the latter group made plans for Ghana’s independence. In fact, Wright himself went to Ghana to witness Nkrumah’s political moves for creating an independent nation, the results of which the author reported in his travel narrative Black Power (1954). The mistake which Drake, or rather Drake’s wife, made was failing to check their health once they left Africa. Drake’s wife went for a checkup at the Center for Tropical Diseases in London and discovered that she had contracted amoebic dysentary. Drake’s letters to Wright indicate that the treatment was lengthy and arduous, but Elizabeth Drake recovered. Wright, on the

other hand, made the fatal mistake of not getting a checkup once he left Ghana, and his amoebic dysentary festered for five years. By the time the author discovered the problem, he was in declining health so greatly that he died in Paris on November 28, 1960. Drake, like Horace Cayton, was a loyal friend and colleague of Wright and was devastated by the author’s death. In the meantime, after retirement from Stanford in 1979, Drake continued to be active in black studies. In the 1980s, he accepted lecture posts at various colleges and also served as a consultant to various African statesmen. However, Drake recognized danger when he saw it from having escaped lynching in his youthful days as an activist in the South with the Quaker group. In Africa, when regimes tended to be taken over by military guerrillas, versus academic politicians like Nkrumah, Drake felt that it was too dangerous in 1988 to continue in consulting positions. However, he never ceased writing and published his two-volume series Black Folk Here and There, 1987–90 that provided a diasporic study of Africanist people and their customs and race theories of blackness in accord with contemporary scholarship. Drake died at home in Palo Alto, California on June 18, 1990 at age seventy-nine. His pioneering contributions to the field of anthropology were critically important in terms of his scientific studies on the quality of life of African Americans and Africanist people. Virginia Whatley Smith Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Smith, Virginia Whatley. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings. Jackson: U of Mississippi P, 2002. Stabler, Ernest. ‘‘Kenya and Tanzania: Strategies and Realities in Education and Development.’’ African Affairs (January 1970): 33–56. ‘‘St. Clair Drake, Pioneer in Study of Black Americans, Dies at 79.’’ New York Times. June 21, 1970, B7.

DREISER, THEODORE (27 August 1871– 28 December 1945) Wright once observed in a radio interview that he valued Dreiser’s fiction ‘‘above perhaps the work 107

Du Bois, W. E. B. of any American writer’’ (Kinnamon 38), and in a New York Herald interview, he characterized Dreiser as ‘‘the greatest writer this country ever produced’’ (Kinnamon 38). Like James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and many other American writers emerging in the first half of the twentieth century, Wright saw Dreiser as a trailblazer who cleared the air of Victorian cliche´s and taboos, making possible a free, honest, and detailed account of troubling new forces developing in modern America. Dreiser clearly was one of the writers Wright described in Black Boy who helped him to see the world in strikingly fresh ways and could teach him to use words as ‘‘weapons’’ which change an oppressive social environment. As a writer who had a firsthand knowledge of stark poverty and who considered himself as an outsider and a rebel, Dreiser had much in common with Wright. While growing up, both had felt oppressed by the hypocrisy and cruelty of fundamentalist Christianity and cultivated a life-long suspicion of all forms of conventional religion. And both experienced a decisive turning point in their lives when they left the repressive backwaters of their childhood and adolescence to experience both the difficulties and possibilities of the modern city. Wright, therefore, responded hungrily to Dreiser’s fiction because he saw in it a powerful revelation of his own experience. At the end of Black Boy, he stresses that reading Sister Carrie and Jennie Gerhardt provided him not only with a ‘‘vivid sense’’ of his mother’s suffering but also a ‘‘sense of life itself ’’ (Wright 274). Dreiser’s naturalism, shocking to so many contemporary readers, was liberating to Wright because it gave him a lucid, coherent vision of the environmental forces which had shaped his life. Moreover, Dreiser’s fiction also gave him a way of fighting and transcending those forces which had crushed most of the people he knew since novels like The Genius and The Titan provided compelling narratives of outsiders who became successes through sheer force of consciousness and will. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wright scholarship contains

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many superb comparative studies linking Wright with Dreiser. Several early reviews of Native Son compared that novel with An American Tragedy, breaking ground for much more detailed studies emerging in the 1970s and 1980s. Wright’s autobiography Black Boy/American Hunger has also been compared by many critics with Dreiser’s autobiographical writings, particularly Dawn. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘Urban Frontiers, Neighborhoods, and Traps: The City in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, and Wright’s Native Son’’ in Theodore Dreiser and American Culture. Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. ‘‘Native Son and An American Tragedy: Two Different Interpretations of Crime and Guilt.’’ The Centennial Review 23 (Spring 1979), 208–26. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson, University of Mississippi Press. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

DU BOIS, W. E. B. (23 February 1868– 27 August 1963) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in western Massachusetts in the small town of Great Barrington which had a population of 5,000, less than 50 of whom were black. He therefore grew up in a world which had few of the overt signs of American racism. He excelled academically, and, after graduating from high school, he enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. It was there that he discovered first-hand the brutality and injustice of southern racism and he made a commitment to bond with his fellow blacks in their struggle for freedom and equality. While at Fisk, he taught for two summers at rural black schools and became the editor of the school newspaper which provided him with his first public outlet for airing his views on American racial problems. After graduating from Fisk in 1888, he entered Harvard as a junior, studying under William James, Josiah Royce, and George Santayana. He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard cum

Du Bois, W. E. B. laude in 1890 and entered their graduate school, securing his M.A. degree in 1891. He then studied at the University of Berlin for two years, returning to Harvard where he received his doctorate in 1896. He was the first black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, and his dissertation, The Suppression of Slave Trade in America remains a seminal book. After teaching at Wilberforce College in Ohio for two years, Du Bois accepted a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania to conduct a research project on black life in Philadelphia. His work there resulted in the publication of The Philadelphia Negro, one of the landmark studies in American sociology. Du Bois was one of the first to apply empirical, scientific methods to social phenomena and is widely regarded as one of the ‘‘fathers’’ of modern social science. Du Bois then took a position at Atlanta University where he taught and continued his sociological research for thirteen years. It was there that he published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, entering into a widely discussed philosophical debate with Booker T. Washington. While Washington was an accommodationist who believed that African Americans should defer their political quest for civil rights, higher education, and social equality in favor of concentrating on industrial education which would empower them economically, Du Bois was a much more militant figure who advocated that blacks should immediately pursue social equality and justice, led by a ‘‘Talented Tenth’’ of highly educated blacks. From the early days of the twentieth century onward, Du Bois became a major figure in the struggle to achieve racial justice in America and throughout the world. In 1906, he was an important force in organizing the ‘‘Niagara Movement’’ which eventually became the NAACP. As a leader of that organization, he founded Crisis and edited that important journal for twenty-five years. He also organized a series of international conferences in London and Paris which led to the development of the Pan-African Movement which was devoted to eliminating European colonialism and creating independent black nations.

Du Bois made a trip to the Soviet Union in 1927 to observe the results of the Russian Revolution of 1917. He became greatly interested in Marxist thought and communist revolution, seeing them as possible vehicles to achieve black liberation. From the mid-1920s to the end of his life, he was sympathetic to the ideology and programs of the Communist Party, although he did not become an official member until shortly before his death in 1963. With the coming of the Cold War, Du Bois’s leftist beliefs and activities got him into increasing difficulty with the U.S. government. He was indicted in 1951 by the Department of Justice for failing to register as ‘‘an agent of a foreign principal’’ in connection with his chairing the Peace Information Center, an organization devoted to outlawing nuclear weapons. The State Department denied his request for a visa in 1956 to travel to the First International Congress for Negro Artists and Writers in Paris. He spent most of 1958 and 1959 living in the Soviet Union and communist China and lived his final years in Ghana, becoming a citizen of that country a few months before his death. Wright met Du Bois in 1940, shortly before Native Son appeared in print. The two, along with Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, had lunch in Chicago. The meeting went well and Du Bois in his Amsterdam News column described Wright as a ‘‘strong and intelligent’’ person who, together with Hughes, Bontemps, and Allison Davis, would be ‘‘sturdy pillars’’ (Rowley 190–91) of the struggle for racial justice. Du Bois later had strong praise for Native Son, revealing in a letter to Shirley Graham Davis that it was ‘‘a great piece of work’’ and that its author ‘‘will go far’’ (Rowley 193). He also approved of 12 Million Black Voices when it appeared in 1941, claiming in his review that it spoke accurately for the masses of black people, exposing the serious problems that white America had ignored. The relationship between Wright and Du Bois became strained when Wright left the Communist Party in 1942 and published his reasons for doing so two years later in ‘‘I Tried to Be a 109

Du Bois, W. E. B. Communist.’’ Du Bois now regarded Wright as a person who had reneged on important political responsibilities and retreated into a selfindulgent individualism. His New York Tribune review of Black Boy in 1945 sharply reversed his earlier positive assessments of Wright’s work. He questioned the authenticity of Black Boy, claiming that its author’s account of his personal life was ‘‘terribly overdrawn’’ and lacking in sympathy and understanding. Du Bois also found Wright’s account of African-American life to be grossly unbalanced, a ‘‘misjudgment of black folk’’ (Du Bois 2) which focused on its negative features while ignoring its achievements and beauties. Du Bois was especially critical of Wright’s ‘‘solution’’ to the problems he portrays, a convenient withdrawal into self. He describes the book’s persona as ‘‘a loathsome brat’’ who is ‘‘self-centered to the exclusion of everybody and everything else’’ (Du Bois 2).

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Although Du Bois continued to be sharply critical of Wright’s later books such as White Man, Listen! and Black Power, Wright in his later years praised Du Bois as an important figure in the history of black liberation movements. In a 1953 interview, he pointed out that Du Bois was ‘‘One of the predecessors’’ of ‘‘the New Negro Movement’’ (Kinnamon 156). In a 1960 interview, he stated that American Negroes such as Du Bois and Caribbean blacks like George Padmore and Marcus Garvey were ‘‘at the root’’ of the Pan-African Movement and they had ‘‘injected black nationalism’’ into Africa (Kinnamon 228). Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

E EIGHT MEN (1961) In 1961, one year after Wright’s unexpected death, an eight-story collection of short fiction was published. Eight Men, true to its title, presented an experimental miscellany clustered around the author’s characteristic themes of alienation, restlessness, oppression, identity politics, and race struggle as experienced by eight different male protagonists. In 1938, Wright had produced the critically acclaimed short prose collection, Uncle Tom’s Children. All of the stories in Eight Men (some of which had been previously published) include the word ‘‘man’’ in the title, and only two (‘‘Big Black Good Man’’ and ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like That’’) deviate from an American setting. In order of presentation, the constituent stories are ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man,’’ ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ ‘‘Big Black Good Man,’’ ‘‘The Man Who Saw the Flood,’’ ‘‘Man of All Work,’’ ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like That,’’ ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow,’’ and ‘‘The Man Who Went to Chicago.’’ Written over the course of three decades (the 1930s to the 1950s), these stories were arranged without reference to order of composition, chronology, or relative length. ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ is the longest piece, ‘‘The Man Who Saw the Flood’’ the shortest. The last story, ‘‘The Man Who Went to

Chicago,’’ is the only one to employ first-person narration; all else use the third-person. Writing in the midst of a self-imposed exile in France, Wright dedicated Eight Men to European friends who made him ‘‘feel at home in an alien land.’’ In some ways, this may be an ironical reversal of what he saw as the condition of the black man in America, a person made to feel alien in his homeland. In the stories, a sense of displacement is pronounced, but intermingled with wry humor, startling imagery, and searing philosophical speculation. Edward Margolies reads the collection as ‘‘more psychological, more sophisticated, perhaps even more self-consciously stories’’ than Wright’s earlier prose work. This text signals a shift in aesthetic orientation and theoretical preoccupation (139). Richard Sullivan declares the protagonists ‘‘at their best and worst, real men’’ and the entire text ‘‘beautifully, pitifully, terribly true’’ (5). Robert Butler, disagreeing with the argument that Eight Men’s presentation is random and uneven, traces a formal and thematic unity from start to finish. Rebounding from the effects of soul-crushing victimization, these men’s ability to grapple with adverse environmental forces produces a vision of existential selfhood linked to meaningful social action (154–55). Critically and commercially, the text was not as well received as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son 111

Eight Men (1940), or Black Boy. Saunders Redding declared that Wright’s best work had already been completed prior to 1945, and that ‘‘Memory alone was not enough to keep the torment vital’’ (33). For the author, however, the will to reinvent was apparent. Two stories—‘‘Man of All Work’’ and ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like —are composed entirely of dialogue, a daring move that deliberately effaces the atmosphere of control created by mediating prose passages. Wright’s talent for gritty realism and description range (from the lyrical to the grotesque) is upheld in pieces like ‘‘Big Black Good Man’’ and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ The first story, ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost A Man,’’ was written during the thirties, as was the fourth story, ‘‘The Man Who Saw the Flood.’’ The former focuses upon Dave Saunders, an adolescent who fantasizes about purchasing a gun. To him, the gun as fetish object symbolizes virility, power, maturity, and manhood, all the attributes that he lacks in his position as a farm laborer for Mr. Hawkins, his white employer. He does not even control his own wages as they are paid to his mother in advance. When Dave finally purchases an antiquated pistol, he accidentally shoots and kills Hawkins’s mule, a gaffe that leaves him stunned and mortified. Wright constructs a clear parallel between the downtrodden animal and the overworked protagonist. Apart from being laughed at by the community, the youth is required to pay for his carelessness through more hard labor. Instead of submitting to his punishment, he jumps onto a train heading northwards, still in possession of both his dreams and his symbolically freighted firearm. It is through this pyrrhic victory that Wright revisits the prevalent theme of the black fugitive. The next story, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ was a product of the forties, as were ‘‘The Man Who Went to Chicago’’ and ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow.’’ The first selection has received the most critical attention in the recent decades, particularly with regard to its conjunction with existential philosophy and stark

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critique of American materialism. Like Dave Saunders, Fred Daniels flees from a crime, going underground into the city sewers in order to escape a false murder charge. The fiction allegorizes the darkness implicit in the human character, bifurcating the world into one above ground (surface) and one below (depth). Essential human guilt is one of the most disconcerting realizations of the protagonist as he travels in the subterranean maze, digging through the walls of buildings adjacent to the sewers. Unobserved, he witnesses the activities of a black church, an undertaker’s establishment, a movie theater, a butcher shop, a radio store, and a jeweler’s. He steals such items as watches, rings, diamonds, a bloody cleaver, a radio, money, a gun, and a typewriter, but his subsequent actions deconstruct their assumed meanings and value. When he surfaces to present his truths to the police, he finds himself acquitted of any wrongdoing. He is eventually killed for his dangerous clarity of vision, and his body returns to the very sewers that catalyzed his epiphany. The stories of the fifties were ‘‘Big Black Good Man,’’ ‘‘Man of All Work,’’ and ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like That.’’ ‘‘Big Black Good Man’’ unfolds from the point of view of a white European, Olaf Jenson of Copenhagen. An elderly night porter at an inn that caters to foreign seamen, Jenson encounters an unnamed black ‘‘giant’’ who demands shelter and recreation during his brief sojourn. The imposing figure of the Afro-American sailor compels Jenson to reflect upon his contrastive whiteness, panicked masculinity, and perceived lack of power. The overdetermined sexual suggestiveness of his foil is an obvious preoccupation. The story engages color and race stereotypes while broaching the tabooed pairing of a black male with a white female, here a prostitute named Lena. The difference in setting makes for a revision of the presumed immutability of race relations, especially if one does away with the assumption that American racism is a normative template for Western attitudes toward the black male. ‘‘The Man Who Saw the Flood’’ is a vignette describing the troubles of a tenant farmer and

Elaine, Arkansas his family as they return to survey the results of a devastating flood. The atmosphere of dejection, trauma, and staggering helplessness recalls ‘‘Down By the Riverside’’ from Uncle Tom’s Children as well as the flood scenes in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). The story may be short, but the pathos is pronounced. The anxiety and dogged determination of the black father emerge here in stark relief and are reiterated in the subsequent story, ‘‘Man of All Work.’’ Carl, an unemployed cook, decides to don his wife’s clothes in order to provide for his newly expanded family. When he answers a white family’s advertisement, he is given the work of a maid, cook, and nanny. The role of the black ‘‘mammy’’ as performance emerges with ironical humor and precision. Sexually harassed by his male employer while cross-dressed, Carl assumes the dangerous position filled historically by black females in subordinate, domestic positions (for instance, slaves like Harriet Jacobs). The story addresses the gendered politics of domination, homosexual panic, and the specter of violence in apparently normal familial relations. Violence is inextricable from the demise of Saul Saunders, the anti-hero of ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow.’’ Gripped by listlessness, aversion, and alcoholic oblivion, he moves through life with an almost surreal disconnection. While working as a library janitor, he kills a strange, middle-aged female librarian who attempts to sexually provoke him against his will. As with other characters from Wright’s oeuvre that commit crimes inadvertently or without typical murderous passion, Saul falls into a spiral of incriminating evidence that leaves him egregiously responsible for the criminal act. The text’s ending is notable for its judicial precision; although he is guilty, Saul is absolved from the noxious and dated stereotype of the black rapist preying on defenseless white women. ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like That’’ is perhaps the most thematically adventurous of the entire collection, moving between two continents and two disparate religious affiliations. A French artist and his wife travel to Africa where they accidentally strike a young native with their vehicle.

Taking Babu under their wing as a servant and artistic inspiration, the couple eventually returns to France with their obsequious servant in tow. The similarity in naming between Babu and Melville’s ‘‘Negro Babo’’ from Benito Cereno (1855– 56) is striking, as is the symbolic presence of ancestral bones (to recall Toni Morrison’s use of a similar motif in Song of Solomon, 1977). The juxtaposition of African and European political mentalities makes for a classic ‘‘clash of cultures’’ scenario. The pivotal themes include the bicultural initiation (Babu’s French experience is perhaps reminiscent of a black cosmopolite like Olaudah Equiano, or J. M. Coetzee’s Friday from Foe [1986]), the imperialist arrogance of the visitors, the racist constructions of Africans as exotic, primitive, or simian-like, and the potency of otherness as creative capital. Like ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ the story deals with the ironic absolution of guilt from a murder charge by a misinformed police force. From modern allegory to autobiographical expose´, Eight Men rises from the fruitful chaos of anger, terror, fear, and nausea to introduce the possibilities of reconciliation, however provisional, in the American racial scene and beyond. Nancy Kang Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert J. ‘‘Thematic and Formal Unity in Richard Wright’s Eight Men.’’ The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Ed. Butler. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1995, pp. 151– 59. Margolies, Edward. ‘‘The Short Stories: Uncle Tom’s Children; Eight Men.’’ Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982, pp. 128–50. Redding, Saunders. ‘‘Review of Eight Men.’’ New York Herald-Tribune Book Review 22 Jan 1961, p. 33. Sullivan, Richard. ‘‘Lives of More Than Quiet Desperation.’’ New York Times Book Review 22 January 1965, p. 5.

ELAINE, ARKANSAS A small town along the Mississippi River in Phillips County, Arkansas, it is 25 miles south of West Helena. It was the site of one of Wright’s most traumatic childhood experiences. 113

Elaine, Arkansas When the Wright family experienced severe difficulty as a result of his father abandoning them and his mother becoming seriously ill, they initially went to live with his grandmother Wilson in Jackson, Mississippi, but in the fall of 1916 they relocated to Elaine, Arkansas to live with Wright’s Aunt Maggie and her husband, Silas Hoskins. Wright, who considered Maggie his favorite aunt and who saw her husband as a kind of father surrogate, was initially happy in Elaine. Silas owned a prosperous saloon catering to black lumbermen and provided well for Wright, his brother, and mother. In sharp contrast to the hard years he spent in Memphis where he was often hungry and had to beg for food, Wright ate well and was given loving attention by his aunt, uncle, and mother. All of this changed, however, when white men from Elaine grew jealous of Silas’s business success and murdered him to confiscate his property. The Wrights were forced to flee in terror during the middle of the night, going to West Helena where they went into hiding for a month. They then returned to Jackson to live on Lynch Street with Grandmother Wilson. Nobody was ever brought to justice for the murder, Silas’s body was not recovered, and his property never reclaimed. He simply disappeared, and the episode was never discussed. All of this left deep emotional and psychological scars on the eight-year-old Wright which would last for the remainder of his life. As Margaret Walker has observed, Wright’s childhood in the South gave him a ‘‘psychic wound’’ (Walker 42) which tormented him as a child and which he tried to diagnose and heal as a man through his writing. As he revealed in Black Boy: Uncle Silas had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking at the white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as the white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. Why had we not fought back, I asked my mother, and the fear that was in her made her slap me into silence. (Wright 64)

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Wright as a very young boy had been given a brutal epiphany of how the segregated South worked. If a black man ever stepped out of his ‘‘place’’ by either succeeding in life or breaking the law, a harsh penalty, sometimes resulting in sudden death, would be invoked. What troubled Wright most was the utter passivity with which blacks had to endure such an unjust system, lapsing into defensive silence rather than articulating grievances or taking action to change the system. Wright’s alternative to such ‘‘silent suffering’’ (Wright 359) which made pain ‘‘meaningless’’ (Wright 117) was his art and political activism. By writing about his painful experiences growing up in places like Elaine, Arkansas, he could gain a lucid understanding of how his society functioned, and he could use his writing as a weapon of social protest. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the central character of ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ a story included in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), is named after Wright’s Uncle Silas. But unlike the actual person who was simply a victim of white racists, his fictional counterpart is a rebel who fights back against the system. Even though he is burned alive in his house by a lynch mob, he goes to his death defiantly killing several of the men who attack him. The unreported, unpunished murder of Silas Hoskins in Elaine, Arkansas was not an isolated incident but rather a part of a deeply entrenched pattern of racial violence which characterized the South that Wright knew as a child and young man. Places like Elaine, Memphis, and Jackson regularly erupted in terrible racial violence. Memphis was known as the ‘‘murder capital of the nation’’ (Kinnamon 9), and, less than a year after Wright left there, a mentally defective black man was lynched on the outskirts of the city by a mob of 5,000 people. Elaine, Arkansas exploded in one of the worst riots of the summer of 1919, a time known as ‘‘Red Summer’’ when 25 race riots took place in 21 American cities. When black sharecroppers met to form an organization that would secure better treatment from plantation owners, their meeting was violently broken

Eliot, T. S. up by a white sheriff and his deputy. After the deputy was killed in the ensuing melee, a reign of terror broke out which resulted in the deaths of over 100 black men. Later in life when Wright worked as a bellboy in a Jackson, Mississippi hotel, a black co-worker named Ray Robinson was castrated and run out of town after he had consensual sex with a white woman. See also Maggie Wilson. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

ELIOT, T. S. (26 September 1888– 4 January 1965) A seminal poet, critic, and dramatist, Thomas Stearns Eliot was one of the foremost modernists who helped to transform twentieth-century literature. His first book of poems, Prufrock and Other Observations, appeared in 1915 and presented a disturbingly anti-heroic vision of modern man lost in a spiritually arid world. He completed The Waste Land in 1921, a long free verse poem describing the crisis in Western civilization as a result of World War I. Like James Joyce’s Ulysses, it contrasts the spiritually vibrant and morally coherent societies of the past with a modern world damaged by violence and the decay of conventional values and institutions. This poem established Eliot as a major force in twentieth century literature and a leading voice of the ‘‘lost generation’’ of artists and writers that included Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, and Ezra Pound. With the publication of Ash Wednesday in 1930, Eliot created a radically new direction for his art. A direct result of his conversion to Anglicanism in the late 1920s, this poem rejects the bleak pessimism of his early work in favor of a very austere belief in Christian redemption. His last book of poems, Four Quartets, appeared in 1943 and is also centered in the possibility of personal and cultural redemption through a recovery of religious faith and Christian institutions.

The final part of Eliot’s career was devoted, for the most part, to drama and prose work. His most important books of literary and cultural criticism include The Idea of a Christian Society (1940), On Poetry and Poets (1957), and Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1949). He also wrote a number of important plays, most notably Murder in the Cathedral (1935), The Cocktail Party (1950), The Confidential Clerk (1954), and The Elder Statesman (1959). These plays were written in verse and, like his poetry, center on the search for belief in a problematic, spiritually impoverished modern world. Wright began reading Eliot’s poetry in the early 1930s while he was working in the Chicago Post Office. When he joined the John Reed Club of Chicago in 1933 he was pleased to find that Eliot was one of the poets discussed in club meetings. Although Eliot was regarded by most Marxists as a ‘‘decadent’’ bourgeois writer, Wright was deeply impressed by his formal experimentation and penetrating analysis of Western culture after World War I. As Michel Fabre observes in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, Wright’s ‘‘early poetry stemmed from Whitman, T. S. Eliot, and the blues’’ (Fabre xvi). The novel which most vividly exhibits Eliot’s strong influence on Eliot is Lawd Today! Begun in 1935 when Wright was reading Eliot’s poetry ‘‘with passion’’ (Walker 313), the book makes specific references to ‘‘The Waste Land’’ as Part III is entitled ‘‘Rat’s Alley’’ and begins with Eliot’s inversion of Marvell’s ‘‘To His Coy Mistress’’: ‘‘But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones, and chuckles spread from ear to ear’’ (Wright 162). The structure of the novel is strongly influenced by Eliot’s impressionistic technique of freely associating diverse fragments of high art and popular culture. Just as Eliot mixes bits of ragtime music with allusions to Homer and Dante, Wright artfully constructs a collage of newspaper clippings, radio broadcasts, modernist poems and popular music. Both Wright and Eliot use fragmented narrative to suggest the incoherence and rapid disintegration of contemporary life. Wright, like Eliot, ironically 115

Ellison, Ralph Waldo juxtaposes the decadent twentieth century with a more meaningful and vital past. While The Waste Land contrasts the world of Homer’s Odyssey and Dante’s Comedia with his own spiritually bankrupt society, Wright contrasts the sterile narrative of his central character, Jake Jackson, with the heroic story of Abraham Lincoln. Wright’s poetry also envisions depression America as a waste land of collapsed values and crumbling institutions.‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ (1934) argues that the gods of capitalism have been destroyed by the calamities of twentieth-century history and looks forward to a rebirth of culture brought about by Marxist revolution. ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ (1934), likewise, imagines a sterile old world of ‘‘empty silos,’’ ‘‘smokeless stack pipes,’’ ‘‘unfinished skyscrapers,’’ and ‘‘deserted farms’’ which will be swept away by a proletarian revolution pictured as ‘‘a red stream of anger.’’ ‘‘Transcontinental’’ is a modern Jeremiad predicting the downfall of a decadent capitalistic society. Like Eliot’s ‘‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’’ Wright’s poem portrays conventional society with trivialized images of people playing golf and enjoying cocktails while their world is collapsing. Eliot and Wright were primarily urban writers who saw the modern city as a nightmarish waste land. Native Son, with its rats scurrying over Chicago’s South Side, its buildings ’’tumbling down with rot’’ (Wright 174), and its houses with windows resembling ‘‘the eye-sockets of empty skulls’’ (Wright 281), clearly resembles the ‘‘Unreal City’’ of Eliot’s great poem. Wright makes his debt to Eliot quite explicit in the first paragraph of American Hunger when he describes Chicago in the thirties as an ‘‘unreal city’’ that is ‘‘wreathed in palls of grey smoke’’ and whose houses are ‘‘sinking slowly into the dark prairie’’ (Wright 1). Wright and Eliot regarded the modern city as a revelation of a culture that was falling apart because it had lost contact with animating human values. As Wright would stress in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ the dark, cold, and empty city which destroys people like Bigger Thomas is an

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extension of ‘‘a world whose metaphysical meanings had vanished’’ (Wright 446). While Eliot would find a way of redeeming such a world through religious faith, Wright would seek redemption in secular terms, first with communist politics and later with existentialist philosophy. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright Richard. Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Wright, Richard. Lawd Today! Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986.

ELLISON, RALPH WALDO (1 March 1914–16 April 1994) African-American novelist, short story writer and cultural critic who maintained a close personal friendship with Wright from the mid 1930s to the mid 1940s. When Ellison left Tuskegee Institute in 1936 and arrived in New York to pursue a career in symphonic music and sculpture, he met Wright during his first week in Harlem and soon became Wright’s prote´ ge´ . It was Wright who convinced Ellison that he should be a writer and who published Ellison’s first literary review in New Challenge. Wright also introduced Ellison to leftist writers, organizers, and activists and oversaw Ellison’s literary apprenticeship in stories such as ‘‘A Party Down at the Square,’’ ‘‘Boy on a Train,’’ and ‘‘I Did Not Know Their Names’’ which bear a close stylistic and thematic kinship to Wright’s early protest literature. Arnold Rampersad has written in detail about the early friendship between Ellison and Wright. In this crucial period when Wright was composing Native Son, Ellison served as a sounding board for Wright’s ideas and read drafts of the novel. Ellison also wrote a strong review of Native Son in New Masses, praising the book for its artistry, emotional power, and philosophical depth. When Wright married Dhimah Meadman in 1939,

England Ellison served as Wright’s best man; the year before, Wright had been one of two witnesses at Ellison’s wedding Rose Poindexter (113). With the publication of Invisible Man in 1952, however, Ellison’s literary career would veer sharply away from Wright’s example and practice. Ellison’s novel was hailed as a new direction in African-American literature by critics who praised it for its sharp critique of leftist politics, its stylistic subtlety, and its complex use of black folkloric and musical tradition. After being criticized by Irving Howe for leaving the tradition of black protest literature which Wright had brought to a high degree of excellence, Ellison wrote two influential essays in which he distinguished himself sharply from Wright both as a writer and a person. In ‘‘People Are Living Under Here’’ and ‘‘The World and the Jug,’’ Ellison contrasts his social background with Wright’s, stressing that he was not raised in the brutally segregated South which Wright had to endure but was instead raised in the ‘‘border’’ state of Oklahoma which provided the freedom he needed to pursue the American possibilities denied to Wright. Ellison also stressed that stylistically he wanted to move beyond the techniques of naturalism and proletarian literature which Wright embraced so that he could utilize a wider range of modernist styles and also make greater use of black music and folklore. Ultimately, Ellison wanted not only to sharply indict American racism but also celebrate what he described as the ‘‘magical fluidity of American life.’’ But critics have overstressed the differences between Wright and Ellison while forgetting their important affinities. It is much closer to the truth to claim that Ellison ‘‘signified upon’’ Wright’s work rather than simply rejecting it; that is, he built upon the foundation which Wright created by echoing motifs from Wright’s work and then endowing these motifs with fresh meanings. (Just as Wright had ‘‘signified upon’’ Crime and Punishment and An American Tragedy when he wrote Native Son.) Wright’s pioneering treatment of the relationship between race, politics, and violence freed Ellison to pursue these subjects in his

own way. And key scenes and symbols from Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and Black Boy resonate in Invisible Man, extending rather than canceling out Wright’s meanings. As Keneth Kinnamon once remarked, Ellison’s invisible man ‘‘was both blood brother to Bigger Thomas and first cousin to Camus’s Meursault and Dostoevsky’s ‘‘Underground Man’’ (Kinnamon 657). Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990. Callahan, John. In the African-American Grain: Call and Response in Twentieth-Century Black Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 1990. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius. New York: John Wiley, 2002. Kinnamon, Keneth and Richard Barksdale (eds.). Black Writers of America. New York: McMillan, 1972. Rampersad, Arnold. Ralph Ellison: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007.

ENGLAND Although he never lived in England for more than a few months, that country played an interesting role in Wright’s life and career. He first visited England in late December 1946 after spending eight months in France. In his three-week stay in London, he met George Padmore, a black intellectual and activist from Trinidad who had married an English woman and was a main force in Pan-Africanism, a movement dedicated to unifying African nations and freeing them from colonial rule. He eventually developed a life-long friendship with the Padmores who introduced him to anti-colonialist leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams. The Padmores would later interest Wright in Ghana and helped to pave the way for his visit there in 1953. While in London in January 1947, Wright also met South African journalist and novelist Peter Abrahams. The day before he left England to return to New York, Wright gave a speech at the Colored Writers’ Club which focused on American race relations. Wright’s initial reactions to England were mixed. London, like Paris was in a state of 117

‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ considerable physical deterioration from the war and food was scarce and poor in quality. But, unlike Paris which appeared to be free of racial friction and social snobbery, London was a sharply divided world, and Wright ‘‘was shocked by the starkness of British class distinctions’’ (Rowley 347). He also deplored British racial attitudes and the attempt to limit immigration of non-white people from the Caribbean and India. But Wright was nevertheless greatly stimulated by the political ferment he observed in England and regarded London as a major center in the struggle against colonialism. He also sensed that the war had severely damaged the British class system, becoming keenly interested in the social transformations which were beginning to occur throughout England. In 1952, Wright returned to London and spent several months there as he completed a full draft of The Outsider, a novel he had started on Long Island in 1947 but was never able to devote his full attention to in France. His social life and political activities in Paris had become serious distractions, and he felt the need to isolate himself in a small flat in southeast London where he worked intensively on the novel. His friendship with the Padmores had deepened, and he often visited them in their small apartment on Cranleigh Street in north London which had become an important meeting place for anti-colonial activists. It was during his visits to the Padmores’ apartment that Wright began to make plans to visit Ghana. By 1953, Wright and his wife were considering leaving Paris and moving to London. Wright had never become fluent in French and had grown tired of the political intrigues and personal rivalries of the expatriate colony in Paris. In 1956, the Wrights seriously discussed a permanent move to London with Dorothy Padmore who discouraged them from doing so because she knew how British racism and class distinctions would disturb Wright. But in 1957, Wright sought the help of his friend John Strachey, a Labor Party Member of Parliament, in securing a resident visa to live in England indefinitely, but Strachey’s efforts

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proved fruitless. Wright suspected that his communist past and sharp criticism of Western policies in the Cold War had made him a persona non grata to British officials. In the spring of 1959, Ellen Wright made several visits to London to look for a place where her family could live on a permanent basis. Her daughter Julia was enrolled at Cambridge University and she felt that her own career as a literary agent would prosper better in England than in France. Wright, however, was never granted a visa by British officials to join his family for any extended period of time. The best he could manage was to secure in 1959 a ‘‘visitor’s visa’’ (Fabre 493) which allowed him to stay in England for no more than a twelve-month trial period. This allowed him to visit his family in London in September 1959 after being hassled by British officials when he tried to enter the country at Folkestone. After a brief visit, he returned to France disgusted and humiliated. His final trip to England took place a short time later when he flew to London to attend George Padmore’s funeral on September 21. During this short stay in London, Wright went to the Alien’s Division of the Home Office to discuss the possibility of obtaining a long-term visa. British officials denied his request without giving him any clear reason for their decision. It was at this point that he gave up his plans for living in London, rented a small apartment on the rue Regis in Paris, and lived the remainder of his life separated from his family. In a letter to Strachey he observed: ‘‘I’ll stay in France where I have friends. I had elected to live in England, but was made to feel I was not wanted’’ (Fabre 495). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘THE ETHICS OF LIVING JIM CROW’’ Wright wrote this autobiographical sketch about growing up in the Deep South in 1936 when he

‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ was working for the Federal Writers Project in Chicago and Jack Conroy, a friend and coworker, urged him to expand it into a full-length biography. It was published a year later in American Stuff, an anthology of works by WPA writers. It was included as a preface to the 1940 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children and eventually became the germ for Black Boy and was incorporated into that book nearly word for word. As a preface to Uncle Tom’s Children, the form in which most readers find it today, it serves the same function that ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ supplies for Native Son; that is, both furnish compelling documentary evidence from Wright’s actual experience which authenticates what he says in his literary work. As such, it consists of a series of anecdotes from Wright’s boyhood experiences which are cautionary tales dramatizing ‘‘gems of Jim Crow Wisdom’’ (18). Starting with his first experience of racism as he and a group of black cohorts engage in a cinder-throwing battle with a gang of white boys and concluding with his work experiences in Jackson and Memphis as a young man, each individual story illustrates the ways in which white southerners enforce a system of racial segregation and domination through intimidation, violence, and terror. Wright describes the savage beating of a black woman by white store owners when she falls behind in her credit payments and he also recounts the story of a young black man who was castrated and driven out of town when he was discovered having sex with a white prostitute. His own ‘‘Jim Crow education’’ is ‘‘broadened and deepened’’ (14) by his work experiences. As a bellhop in a Jackson hotel, he delivers liquor and cigarettes to naked prostitutes and their customers who are not ashamed in his presence because he was not ‘‘regarded as human’’ (14) by them. He is forced to quit his jobs in optical shops in Jackson, Mississippi and Memphis when white co-workers feel threatened by his curiosity to learn about ‘‘white man’s work’’ (10) and threaten him with violence. What Wright discovers through these painful experiences is that he must learn to master his ‘‘dual role’’ (16) in life, outwardly seeming to

accept the injustices and humiliations of southern life but inwardly trying to salvage as much human dignity and opportunity as possible. He provides a powerful example of what W. E. B. Du Bois called the ‘‘double consciousness’’ of American blacks when he reveals how he managed to borrow books from the Memphis Library. Denied borrowing privileges in segregated Memphis because he was black, Wright secretly borrowed a library card from a white co-worker at the optical store and then forged a note for the white librarian which read: ‘‘Please let this nigger boy have the following books’’ (16). In this way, he constructed a dual self consisting of an outer social role as ‘‘nigger boy’’ which pleases whites but also an inward self which uses the books as a way of developing a liberating human identity. Like Frederick Douglass and many other AfricanAmerican slaves who were forbidden by white society to obtain an education and were forced to devise ingenious strategies to secure the learning they needed to develop as human beings, Wright overcame the mental slavery imposed upon the segregated South by becoming a trickster artfully playing a double role to his own advantage. Throughout ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ Wright interprets his experience in powerfully symbolic terms which go to the core of the vision of American life which he would continue to explore in masterpieces such as Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and Black Boy/American Hunger. After being severely beaten by his mother who punishes him for fighting against whites, he goes to bed and is terrified by symbolic images of ‘‘monstrous white faces, suspended from the ceiling, leering at me’’ (18) and, from that point on, the sight of white people induces in him ‘‘an overreaching symbol of fear’’ (8). In the same way, the stories of terrible violence inflicted upon black people by southern whites defines his segregated world as a symbolic hell held together by violence and terror. He concludes ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ by raising the question ‘‘How do Negroes feel about the way they live?’’ and supplies a troubling 119

‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ answer in the words of his friend who observes, ‘‘Lawd, Man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices ‘n’ them ol’ lynch mobs, there wouldn’t be nothin’ but uproar down here!’’ (17). It is no overstatement to say that from writing this extraordinary biographical sketch in 1936 to the rest of his career, Wright dedicated himself to finding alternatives to such ‘‘uproar’’ in his personal life and transforming this chaotic ‘‘uproar’’ into carefully formed art in his writing. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: New American Library, 1963.

‘‘EVERYWHERE BURNING WATERS RISE’’ Written in a brash, free-wheeling style reminiscent of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, this poem was published in the May—June 1934 issue of Left Front, the official publication of the John Reed Clubs of the Middle West. Like ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ and ‘‘Strength’’ which were published earlier that year in Left Front, ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ gives voice to Wright’s belief in communist ideology when he was an emerging writer and was an enthusiastic member of the John Reed Club of Chicago. The poem envisions capitalism as a monster which has produced ‘‘mountains of hunger,’’ ‘‘swamps of suffering,’’ ‘‘plains of hopelessness,’’ and ‘‘forests of despair.’’ Marxist revolution, imaged as ‘‘a red stream of molten anger,’’ will destroy the foundations of this corrupt society and then ‘‘build’’ a new and more just world ‘‘on the cleared and conquered grounds.’’ Wright uses an extended naturalistic metaphor to describe the inevitability of this world-wide revolution. It begins when small groups of men gather, as their ‘‘red moisture of revolt’’ condenses, forming ‘‘tiny red pools’’ of discontent. Then hundreds of such groups coalesce, joining protest marches which produce ‘‘small red rills’’ of anger. Eventually ‘‘thousands’’ form a political movement which swells into ‘‘a roaring torrential 120

tide’’ which becomes a ‘‘foaming sea of revolution.’’ At this point the ‘‘roaring torrential tide’’ is ‘‘strangely transformed into waters of fire,’’ a red river of ‘‘liquid lava’’ which will incinerate the old order of ‘‘oppressive privilege’’ and purify history so that a new society may flourish on ‘‘cleared and conquered ground.’’ Margaret Walker has observed that ‘‘It cannot be stressed enough that Wright began as a poet’’ because it was in writing leftist verse that his ‘‘genius found its first flowering’’ (Walker, 65). Poems such as ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ are valuable not only because they clearly reveal the political and social thinking of Wright when he emerged as a writer but also because such poems employ in embryonic form important motifs which he would amplify and refine in his mature work. Fire, which Wright used artfully as an extended metaphor in ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise,’’ becomes what Keneth Kinnamon has described as ‘‘a central metaphor of Wright’s creative imagination’’ (Kinnamon 15), resonating in much of his subsequent writing. It is used brilliantly in Uncle Tom’s Children as a physical image to describe lynchings and as a metaphor of a coming revolution. Native Son uses fire not only to project Bigger’s anger but also the hot pangs of conscience which he suffers as he imagines Mary’s head in the furnace of the Dalton’s home. Black Boy/American Hunger begins with the narrator almost destroying himself and his family when he sets the curtains of his home ablaze and it ends by imagining the segregated South in Dantean terms as a fiery hell. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

EXISTENTIALISM The term existentialism was probably coined by French philosopher Gabriel Marcel in the mid1940s, intending to identify the emerging ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and his partner Simone de Beauvoir (Cooper 1). As its name suggests,

Existentialism existentialism is a philosophy of existence, beginning from an individual’s subjectivity and claiming that this very subjectivity is the only authentic fact in existence (Odajnyk 9–10). The roots of existentialism are complex and disputable, but are often traced to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who bitterly attacked Hegelian abstract metaphysics and the complacency of the Lutheran church in the midnineteenth century. In the mid-twentieth century, Martin Heidegger and, in particular, Sartre, were associated with existentialism. From the 1950s onward, numerous writers and philosophers of the past and present, including Karl Jaspers, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Kafka, and many more, became associated with the word ‘‘existentialism.’’ Sartre, however, was the only self-declared existentialist among them and only after years of resisting the term. The existentialist term was also applied to Sartre and Richard Wright’s contemporary Albert Camus, whose L’etranger (The Outsider) shares its title, in translation, with Wright’s 1953 novel and is in some ways thematically comparable with Native Son. Following the re-emergence of existentialism studies in 1990s academia, we may ascertain the following concepts as essential to this philosophy: 1. Existence belongs only to human beings, and not to animals or inanimate objects. An oft-cited phrase in this vein: ‘‘human being is the only Being for whom Being is an issue’’ (Lehan 14). In existentialism, a human being is not the subject of his/ her circumstances, or an example of a particular essence, but is in him/herself a manner of existence (MacDonald 3). 2. There are various ways in which humans live and exist in relation to the radical contingency in the root of existence. That is, the essence of a human being is never at a preordained state of development by which everyone may be measured according to a standard. Human beings are in the continuous process of ‘‘becoming,’’ and we are always oriented towards the future (MacDonald 5–8). 3. The essence of an individual is not fixed in advance of that individual (beyond indisputable physicality such as genetic makeup). One’s active choices

determine one’s essence, or as Sartre famously phrased it, ‘‘Existence precedes essence.’’ This concept is significant because it most clearly challenges the long-established Cartesian divide between mind and body established in the seventeenth century. 4. Individuals are prone to falling away from the choices that define their existence and into the ‘‘herd’’ mentality. When humans fail to face the reality of ambiguity, choosing to resolve situations by ignoring some of the poles between which one’s existence stands, they are said to be in ‘‘bad faith’’ by the Sartre-school of existentialists (Cooper 119). Sartre, for example, maintained that Freud’s theories of the unconscious’ influence on behavior were in bad faith, in that they encouraged an unauthentic life and displaced free will (Lehan 17).

The influence of Sartre and other existentialists on Richard Wright is quite significant. Shortly after Sartre first delivered his Existentialism and Humanism essay, he and Simone de Beauvoir published Richard Wright’s story ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ in a new journal, Les Temps Modernes (Rowley 326). The August–September 1946 issue was devoted to American writing and featured Wright prominently. A year before his permanent move to Paris, Wright began studying the formal derivations of existentialism (Rowley 326). He met Sartre in March 1946 in New York City, while in January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir visited New York for three weeks, spending much of her time with the Wrights (Rowley 326–27, 351). Sartre had called for writers with not only philosophical sensibilities but also a sense of history. As a black man removed from the Jim Crow South into the Communist Party between world wars, Wright—aware of his own historical context and of the unique African-American position in his place and time—was exactly the kind of writer Sartre favored. Indeed, existentialists such as Sartre and de Beauvoir saw Wright as an exemplar of the ‘‘committed literature’’ they advocated in a postwar world. In the same year that he met Sartre and de Beauvoir, Wright was introduced to Albert Camus, who had apparently aided the French publication of Black Boy on Wright’s behalf. Later, in the autumn of 1947, after arriving in Paris, 121

Existentialism Wright read Camus’s L’etranger, in English, for the first time. He read it slowly and carefully, admiring Camus’s use of fiction to express a philosophy, but found the work ‘‘devoid of passion’’ (Rowley 357–63). Just prior to Wright’s permanent move to France, the popular ‘‘cult’’ of existentialism travelled across the Atlantic Ocean to America. Wright told his friend Gertrude Stein that ‘‘New York is buzzing over existentialism’’ (Rowley 326). French journalist Maria le Hardouin came to Wright’s Greenwich Village home to interview him for the French newspaper Combat in the summer of 1947. According to Le Hardouin, Wright’s talk jumped from topic to topic until he suddenly asked, ‘‘What about Existentialism?’’ (Rowley 352–53). When Le Hardouin explained that she was unconvinced of existentialism’s merits, Wright responded, ‘‘I’m personally convinced of it. It is impossible that certain desires, which come to us in our childhood with an irresistible force, are not already the result of a choice that we struggled with and made before we were even conscious of it’’ (Rowley 353). Prior to encountering the actual term existentialism, Wright had already lived many of its familiar struggles. An atheist who developed a sense of self reliance from an early age, Wright had always felt the existentialist’s alienation, not only as a minority in the American South, but

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notably amongst his own people. Thus, some consideration of the essential elements of existentialist philosophy are present in most of Wright’s literature, perhaps most clearly in ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ (1942, 1944), a story written during Wright’s separation from the Communist Party. It has also been argued that the growth of the Bigger Thomas character in Native Son, particularly in the prison scenes, reveals an existentialist character. 1953’s The Outsider most clearly deals with existentialism (incorporating quotes from Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, which Wright had closely studied), and has been described as the first American existentialist novel. Regan Tyndall Selected Bibliography: Columbia Encyclopedia, 5th Edition. ‘‘Existentialism.’’ New York: CU Press, 1993. Cooper, David. Existentialism: A Reconstruction. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999. Lehan, Richard. A Dangerous Crossing: French Literary Existentialism and the Modern American Novel. Carbondale, Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. MacDonald, Paul S., ed. The Existentialist Reader: an Anthology of Key Texts. New York: Routledge, 2000. Odajnyk, Walter. Marxism and Existentialism. New York: Anchor Books, 1965. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2001. Solomon, Robert C., ed. Existentialism. New York: Random House, 1974.

F FANON, FRANTZ (20 July 1925– 6 December 1961) A clinical psychologist, writer, and political revolutionary, Fanon is best known for two books Black Skins, White Masks, published in 1952, and The Wretched of the Earth, which appeared shortly before his death in 1961. The former book examines the psychological damage inflicted on colonized people while the latter book is a call to arms, directing oppressed blacks to throw off the yoke of their white oppressors with the ‘‘cleansing violence’’ of revolution. Both books were extremely influential, becoming part of the ideological foundation of liberation movements in Africa and the United States. He was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique, a French colony. One of eight children in a middle class family, Fanon was educated at the Lyce´ e Schoelcher in the Martinique capital of Fort-de-France where he was taught by Aime´ Ce´saire whose leftist politics helped to radicalize Fanon as a young man. During World War II, Fanon enlisted in the French army and received the Croix de Guerre for bravery in 1944. After the war, he returned to Martinique where he worked in Ce´saire’s successful campaigns for mayor of Fort-de-France and membership in the French National Assembly. Although he did not become a member

of the Communist Party, he shared many of Ce´saire’s Marxist beliefs, especially his call for oppressed people to overthrow their white colonial rulers with a violent revolution. He also was in agreement with Ce´saire’s rejection of black assimilation into white society. He went to France in 1947 to begin his studies in psychiatry and became involved in black liberation movements led by Ce´ saire and Le´ opold Senghor. He completed his medical degree in 1951, practiced psychiatry in France for two years, and then moved to Algeria in 1953 to become director of the psychiatric department at Blida-Joinville Hospital. When the Algerian War broke out a year later, he became a member of the Algerian Front de Liberation Nationale, the rebel force committed to freeing Algeria from French rule. In 1957, he was expelled from Algeria, taking up residence in Tunisia where he continued to oppose French rule in Africa and worked for the underground newspaper, Resistance algerienne. His political work made him the subject of two assassination attempts. In the late 1950s, Fanon was diagnosed with leukemia and was treated in the Soviet Union and the United States. He died in Washington, DC shortly after completing Wretched of the Earth and was buried in Algeria after lying in state in Tunisia. 123

Farish, Minnie Wright and Fanon developed a strong sevenyear friendship which was initiated by Fanon contacting him by mail in 1953. He had read all of Wright’s works in English and was deeply impressed by Wright’s lucid assessment of racial problems. He was especially impressed by Wright’s ‘‘exploration’’ of the ‘‘revolutionary potential’’ of ‘‘the Negro masses’’ (Fabre 212) and agreed with Wright’s description in Black Power of how black Americans were colonized in their own country by the dominant white society. Fanon must also have been struck by the similarity between Black Faces, White Masks and Native Son in their description of how a black minority masks its real feelings to survive in a culture controlled by racist whites. Wright, who had a long-term fascination for psychology and psychiatry, quickly became interested in Fanon’s work. As Margaret Walker has pointed out, Black Skins, White Masks strongly influenced Wright, particularly in his essay ‘‘The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People,’’ an essay included in White Man, Listen! Wright and Fanon participated in the First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers which Pre´sence Africaine organized in Paris in 1956. Wright delivered a paper ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization’’ which argued that emerging African nations must use western technology and industrialization to free themselves from western domination. Fanon’s paper, ‘‘Racism and Culture’’ argued that ‘‘racism is a plague on humanity’’ and that it especially ‘‘haunts and vitiates American culture’’ (Walker 280). Wright’s contact in Paris with black revolutionaries such as Fanon, Ce´ saire, and Senghor broadened his outlook on American racial problems by putting them into an international context. But, as Hazel Rowley has pointed out, he was much more comfortable with Fanon’s very concrete, secular ideas than he was with Senghor’s and Ce´ saire’s more spiritualized concept of Ne´gritude: Wright had never felt comfortable with the Ne´gritude movement and its racial mysticism. 124

He deplored Senghor’s idea that the Negro was intuitive, whereas the European was Cartesian. Nor could he understand Senghor’s enthusiasm for the ancestor cult religion. Wright had more in common with Frantz Fanon of Martinique . . . who believed that violent revolution would be necessary to end the repression of colonialism. (Walker 478)

In the same way, Fanon was much more deeply influenced by Wright’s work than were the fathers of Ne´gritude. Wright and Fanon, coming from such very different cultures, were remarkably in agreement in both their diagnosis of the disease of racism and their prescription for its cures. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. ‘‘Wright, Negritude and African Writing’’ in The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

FARISH, MINNIE She was one of Wright’s friends at both Jim Hill Public School and Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson, Mississippi when he attended those schools from 1921 to 1925. She was part of a lively group of friends which included Wright, Dick Jordan, Joe Brown, D. C. Blackburn, Lewis Anderson, Essie Lee Ward, and Sarah McNeamer. An excellent student, she surpassed Wright in mathematics and civics, but he got better grades in English and history (Fabre 48). When Wright gave the valedictory address entitled ‘‘Attributes of Life’’ at Smith Robertson’s commencement exercises on May 29, 1925, Minnie Farish was one of the other four outstanding students to deliver a graduation speech. In a conversation with Margaret Walker in Jackson, Mississippi, where she lived for many years, Farish remembered Wright as a gifted storyteller who could hold people ‘‘spellbound’’ with ghost stories and murder mysteries (Walker 27).

Farrell, James Thomas The strong friendships which Wright established with Farish, Jordan, Brown, and Ward when he was a student in Jackson for four years were extremely important in his development. They broke the painful isolation which he experienced as a child because of his family’s constant movements and also put him in contact with peers who were serious students and regarded education as a vital means of personal development and social advancement. As he reveals in Black Boy/American Hunger, his days at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson enabled him to make friendships with ‘‘boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking’’ and this ‘‘revitalized [my] being,’’ thus empowering him to envision a hopeful ‘‘future’’ (Wright 147) for himself. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

FARRELL, JAMES THOMAS (27 February 1904–11 August 1979) Farrell was a pioneer in American ethnic literature and urban fiction, producing a massive series of novels and short stories, including Studs Lonigan, the O’Neill/O’Flaherty penology, and Calico Shoes and Other Stories. The world created in this fiction is an Irish-Catholic working class neighborhood in the south side of Chicago from the early twentieth century to the end of the Great Depression. A disciple of Theodore Dreiser and an admirer of Sherwood Anderson, Farrell worked brilliantly in the realist/naturalist tradition, meticulously studying the environmental pressures of urban life while also stressing the ways some people can cope with and even transcend such pressures. Farrell was also an astute literary critic and social activist who was strongly engaged in the leftist politics of the 1930s. While never becoming a member of the Communist Party, he was closely associated with many communist theorizers and writers, and he frequently

contributed to radically leftist journals such as New Masses and organizations such as the League of American Writers. Like Steinbeck and Dos Passos, he eventually grew disenchanted with radical politics after the Stalin purges of the late 1930s and spent the remainder of his career as a political maverick who deplored the excesses of both the right and the left. His most important books of literary and cultural criticism include A Note on Literary Criticism (1937), The League of Frightened Philistines (1947), and Reflections at Fifty and Other Essays (1956). Wright and Farrell had a long and mutually beneficial relationship as writers and friends. They met in Chicago in 1935 when Wright was working on ‘‘Cesspool’’ (later published as Lawd Today!), a book Farrell advised him on and tried to get published by Vanguard Press. Both were delegates to the first American Writers Congress held in New York in 1935 and were named to the national council of The League of American Writers. Farrell wrote a strongly favorable review of Uncle Tom’s Children for Partisan Review in 1938, describing the book as an important literary achievement. They worked together on various leftist projects after Wright moved to New York in 1937 and maintained significant contact with each other during Wright’s years in Paris. In a 1960 French interview, Wright listed Farrell, along with Anderson, Dreiser, and Dostoevsky, as ‘‘among the great novelists I go back to most often’’ (Kinnamon 210) for artistic refreshment and inspiration. Wright and Farrell, therefore, had much in common both as individuals and artists. Both grew up in poverty and reported powerfully about the inequities of American capitalism. They came to literary maturity during the Great Depression and regarded their art as a way of lucidly diagnosing the problems of a society on the verge of collapse while also suggesting ways in which modern society might be repaired. However, each was a fiercely individualistic person who had deep-seated suspicions of political abstraction and propaganda, and this caused them to break away eventually from the leftist politics which 125

A Father’s Law they embraced as young men. At key points in their career, each chose artistic freedom and integrity over ideological conformity. Wright and Farrell were also deeply committed to using a full range of modernist styles ranging from standard mimetic techniques to highly expressionistic methods which enabled them to probe the interior depths of their alienated protagonists. For this reason both men were finally uncomfortable with being too closely aligned with any formalized literary schools. Farrell’s work was particularly useful to Wright in the early stages of his career when he was working on ‘‘Cesspool,’’ Uncle Tom’s Children, and Native Son. Farrell’s uncompromising desire to oppose popular taste and focus on the unpleasant truths of modern urban life encouraged Wright to tackle controversial subject matter and challenge long-established taboos. As Michel Fabre has pointed out, reading Studs Lonigan ‘‘inspired Wright to borrow a number of techniques’’ (Fabre 135) such as fragmented narration and dream sequences to probe more deeply into the subconscious lives of his central characters. Farrell also benefited greatly from his relationship with Wright who taught him about the plight of American black people and how their condition is integrally bound up with the fate of the nation. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘Farrell’s Ethnic Neighborhood and Wright’s Urban Ghetto: Two Versions of Chicago’s South Side.’’ MELUS 18 (spring 1993), 103–11. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

A FATHER’S LAW Most probably written a few months before his death in 1960, A Father’s Law demonstrates Wright’s continuing exploration of such themes as guilt, criminality, race, and father-son relationships, the primal themes in The Long Dream (1958). The protagonist Rudolph Turner is a father, a Negro, a Catholic, and a police chief, a

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man who is himself subject to interrelated systems of law. Turner believes he has achieved success in his profession, but Wright makes success quite problematic. The setting of the novel is Brentwood Park, wealthy white suburb of Chicago that is troubled by a wave of crimes. Much of the plot is devoted to Turner’s agonizing about the difficulty of teaching his son Tommy what responsibility and morality might be. In long dialogues Turner has with Ed Seigel, a fellow policeman, Wright echoes the philosophical discussions between Cross Damon and Ely Houston in The Outsider (1953). As Turner reads crime reports about the problems in Brentwood Park, we discern traces of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ Turner’s investigations lead him to suspect his son is involved a series of murders. Although the focal point of the novel is a father’s relationship with his son, Wright skillfully integrates his preoccupation with the criminal mind, the philosophical insights of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, and the restricted freedoms of black American males. Wright eschews naturalism for trenchant psychological realism as he explores a father’s intense doubts about his son and that son’s rebellion against the law by ‘‘acting’’ criminal. Turner begins to feel that he ‘‘had lost control of not only his son but of his relation to him as a father.’’ What torments Turner greatly is the ‘‘overriding power of the notions of guilt,’’ notions Wright had explored in depth in The Outsider and Savage Holiday (1954). Turner can reach no satisfying conclusions about what guilt actually is. A Father’s Law is a cliffhanger because it ends as Turner reads the headline ‘‘POLICE CHIEF’S SON CONFESSES TO MURDER WAVE.’’ It is impossible to be certain whether Tommy is guilty or innocent. The novel is a case study of Wright’s recycling themes as he continued his unfinished quest to discover the best modernist means for representing multiple layers of black American masculinity. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow,

Faulkner, William 1973. Wright, Richard. A Father’s Law. New York: Harper Collins, 2008.

FAULKNER, WILLIAM (25 September 1897–6 July 1962) Nobel Prize–winning American novelist best known for his Yoknapatawpha saga, a series of novels set in northwest Mississippi from the first settling by Indians and pioneers to the middle of the twentieth century. Faulkner is regarded by many as the first truly great writer the South has produced and by common consent is seen as the catalyst for the ‘‘southern literary renaissance’’ which played such a pivotal role in the development of modern American literature. His best work includes The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Go Down, Moses (1942), and The Hamlet (1940). Wright’s attitude toward Faulkner and his writing perhaps can best be described as largely positive but touched with some hesitation and ambivalence. When asked in a 1938 interview who his favorite writers were, Wright named Andre´ Malraux and Faulkner, adding that ‘‘As a fellow Mississippian I know that Faulkner’s books deal with a phase of the very real South. He is the only white writer I know living in Mississippi who is trying to tell the truth in fiction’’ (Kinnamon 10). When asked two years later about what literary generation he felt identified with, Wright answered that he belonged to the generation ‘‘formed in 1929’’ which included novelists John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, James T. Farrell, and Michael Gold (Kinnamon 32). In 1950, upon receiving news of Faulkner winning the Nobel Prize, Wright praised him strongly, claiming that he was a ‘‘genius’’ who transcended the myths and stereotypes which had crippled the white South (Fabre 89). But Wright was also critical of Faulkner’s cultural conservatism and cringed when Faulkner would editorially comment on the need for gradualism in dealing with southern segregation.

He also was uncomfortable with many of Faulkner’s portrayal of black characters, especially when he would praise them for their ‘‘endurance’’ in suffering the injustices of southern racism. For Wright, endurance was never enough because it would result only in the human defeat suffered by people such as his father who was chained to the system of sharecropping and his mother whose paralysis became a symbol of ‘‘silent suffering’’ and victimization. While Faulkner’s black characters like Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury simply endure, Wright’s protagonists like Cross Damon are social and metaphysical rebels who strike back at a world intent on dehumanizing them. Faulkner also extended praise to Wright while harboring some ambivalence and criticism. In a 1958 Esquire interview, he characterized Wright as a Negro writer ‘‘who had a great deal of talent’’ and ‘‘who wrote one good book’’ but then ‘‘went astray’’ (Fabre 90) by emphasizing narrowly racial themes in his other works. Faulkner, whose critical pronouncements were often a disappointing contrast to his towering literary achievement, would surely have drawn an ironic smile from Wright who realized that the universal could be achieved only by paying full attention to the particularities of his own experience as an American black person. Their differences aside, Wright and Faulkner did have many significant things in common, and it is not surprising that several critics have written excellent comparative studies of their work. Both were Mississippians who deplored the South’s inability to come to terms with time by holding on to values and customs which were not only obsolete but atavistic. Both were also literary modernists who used a full range of fictional techniques to explore modern man’s condition of alienation. Self-taught geniuses, each developed bold new narratives and characters, revolutionizing modern American literature. They were indeed seminal writers who revitalized American literature and their work continues to inspire a wide range of modern writers.

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‘‘FB Eye Blues, The’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of a Genius. New York: John Wiley, 2002. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

‘‘FB EYE BLUES, THE’’ An unpublished poem which Wright composed in 1949 after he had taken up residence in France, it reveals Wright’s increasing annoyance with the FBI’s surveillance of him which would continue to his death in 1960. It employs a standard blues structure which repeats an opening line with some variation and then concludes the stanza with an ironic punch line. The poem thus begins: That old FB eye Tied a bell to my bed stall Said old FB eye Tied a bell to my bed stall Each time I love my baby, gover’ment knows it all.

Although the tone of most of the stanzas which follow is superficially playful, the net effect of the poem is to reveal Wright’s deep resentment over the way U.S. security agencies kept files on him and regarded him during the Cold War as a dangerous subversive. As the final line of the third stanza makes clear, Wright by 1949 was indeed ‘‘sick and tired of gover’ment spies.’’ Just as many traditional blues songs such as Leadbelly’s ‘‘Bourgeois Blues’’ or Jimmy Reed’s ‘‘Big Boss Man’’ ironically reduce authority figures to absurdity, Wright’s poem personifies the FBI as a snooping detective, a ‘‘snake,’’ a ‘‘rat,’’ and a ‘‘bloodhound.’’ Wright’s conflict with the FBI had a long history. He initially drew the attention of the agency because of his activities in the Communist Party. A file on him was initiated in 1941 when the publication of 12 Million Black Voices drew suspicions about his patriotism and linked him to 128

‘‘racialists’’ who were allegedly plotting the overthrow of the federal government. In 1944, he was placed on the Security Index, a list of people whom the FBI considered a threat to the nation’s security. For the remainder of his life, Wright remained a person of interest for J. Edgar Hoover and an elaborate file on him was constructed. Addison Gayle gained access to the FBI’s file on Wright under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act and reported his findings in Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. His research established the fact that surveillance on Wright began as early as 1938 and eventually developed into a full-scale ‘‘vendetta’’ (Gayle xiii). Gayle argues that Wright was deeply troubled by this and that the psychological tensions caused by FBI harassment may have played a significant role weakening Wright’s health and causing his premature death. (Wright’s poem would surely support Gayle’s view, concluding as it does with him proclaiming that being hounded by the FBI ‘‘Breaks my heart in two.’’) Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Gayle, Addison. The Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City: Doubleday, 1980.

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the American law enforcement agency that investigates federal crimes. Its history dates back to July 26, 1905 when a task force of federal agents was created by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. It was originally conceived as a reform of the ‘‘Progressive Movement,’’ replacing locally appointed officials with experts trained in the techniques of fighting crime. President Roosevelt recommended that this team of secret service agents be made a permanent part of the Justice Department. It was given the name ‘‘Bureau of Investigation’’ on March 16, 1909, and in July 1919 William J. Flynn was given the title of ‘‘Director of the Bureau of Investigation.’’ In its early years, it was given the task of investigating smuggling

Federal Theatre Project (FTP) along America’s northern and southern borders as well as enforcing the Mann Act which made it a federal crime to transport women across state borders for immoral purposes. Its scope of activities was greatly expanded from 1921 to 1933, the ‘‘Prohibition Era,’’ when crime in America became highly organized, and famous criminals such as Al Capone, John Dillinger, and Pretty Boy Floyd were tracked down and arrested by FBI agents. It was during this time that J. Edgar Hoover established himself as an important national figure, becoming head of the Bureau of Investigation on May 10, 1924. He transformed the organization, professionalizing its operations by extensive training programs and examinations. The organization was renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935 and became the nation’s premier law enforcement agency. It expanded its operations to fight the crime wave brought on by the Great Depression and developed an elaborate network of intelligence gathering operations. It made the investigation of what it considered ‘‘subversive’’ organizations a high priority and began developing elaborate files on people and organizations which it thought were engaged in seditious activities. It was especially suspicious of communist groups and civil rights organizations such as the NAACP and Urban League. Wright drew the notice of the FBI in the late 1930s because of his activities in the Communist Party. The bureau began a file on him when the 1941 publication of 12 Million Black Voices drew suspicions about his patriotism and linked him to ‘‘racialists’’ intent on undermining the U.S. government. In 1944, he was put on the Security Index, a list of people whom the FBI considered a threat to the nation’s security. For the rest of his life, Wright remained a person of interest for Hoover’s organization and an elaborate file on him continued to grow. Addison Gayle gained access to the FBI’s file on Wright under the Freedom of Information Act which congress passed in 1966 and reported his findings in a biographical study, Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. His research indicated that the FBI began its surveillance on Wright as early

as 1938 and eventually developed a full-scale ‘‘vendetta’’ (Gayle xiii) against him. Gayle argues that Wright was deeply troubled by this and that the psychological tensions caused by FBI harassment may have played a role in weakening Wright’s health and causing his premature death. Others have taken a more extreme view of this matter. Wright’s closest friend in Paris, Ollie Harrington, always had suspicions of foul play in Wright’s death and in 1977 expressed his view that Wright could have been murdered either by the CIA or FBI, organizations which had serious concerns about Wright’s political convictions and connections with revolutionary groups in Africa. Margaret Walker saw Wright’s death as part of a series of suspicious deaths of ‘‘black revolutionary leaders around the world’’ (Walker 343) which included Frantz Fanon and George Padmore. Like Harrington, she viewed the FBI as one of the organizations which might have eliminated Wright. Selected Bibliography: Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City: Doubleday, 1980. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

FEDERAL THEATRE PROJECT (FTP) Like the Federal Writers Project (FWP), the Federal Theatre Project was a New Deal program designed to rejuvenate American culture during the Great Depression. Its goal was two-fold: (1) To stimulate experimentation in theater which would reflect social issues in contemporary American life and (2) to make this theater available to people who otherwise would not be exposed to the live performance of dramatic works. For the most part, the FTP produced plays which were experimental in form and probed new subjects which had not been treated in conventional American theater. One experiment undertaken in the new FTP was a style of drama called ‘‘Living Newspaper’’ which would examine contemporary social issues. Arthur Trenet’s One Third of a Nation, for example, focused on a fire 129

Federal Writers Project (FWP) in a five-story apartment building. Orson Welles’s Macbeth employed an all-black cast and connected Shakespeare’s play with racial problems in contemporary America. Welles’s Julius Caesar, in the same way, drew parallels between ancient Rome and fascist Italy. The Swing Mikado was a jazz version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. Modern African-American theater underwent robust development in a special branch of the FTP called the ‘‘Negro Theatre Project’’ which was housed in Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre and produced a series of important plays, including Rudolf Fisher’s The Conjure Man and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Haiti. Theodore Ward wrote much of The Big White Fog while working for the Negro Theatre Project. To make it possible for poor and working class people to attend these plays, tickets were priced at twenty-five cents, or, lacking this, a person could be admitted by showing his or her welfare card. The FTP was terminated in 1938 when the House Un-American Activities Committee objected to its ‘‘communistic’’ themes. But, despite its brief history, it exerted a very positive effect on American theater in general and African-American theater in particular. Arthur Miller, who was later to revolutionize American theater, got his start as a FTP writer. Theodore Ward and other young black writers and actors laid the foundation in their FTP years for the extraordinary African-American theater which would emerge in the 1950s and 1960s, a community-based theater grounded in serious social concerns. Wright also benefited substantially from the FTP. In Chicago he gained much valuable experience by actively working on the production of several FTP plays as well as writing two plays. Although he did not publish these plays, they gave him useful experiences with dramatic techniques which he employed brilliantly in several novels as well as the dramatized version of Native Son. And the friendships he developed with Theodore Ward, John Houseman, and Orson Welles, each of whom he met through his FTP activities,

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played important roles in his development as an artist. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1953. Krutch, Joseph Wood. American Drama Since 1918. New York: George Braziller, 1967. Mitchell, Loften. Black Drama. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

FEDERAL WRITERS PROJECT (FWP) Created in 1935 as part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), it supported more than 6,600 writers, editors, and researchers during its four years of federal funding. Many writers who would go on to become distinguished novelists and poets worked for the Federal Writers Project (FWP), including Wright, Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Studs Terkel, Arna Bontemps, and Conrad Aiken. The WPA provided these writers not only a much-needed source of financial support, but also a feeling of connection to a literary community of young writers who were responding in their work to far-reaching cultural crises both at home and abroad. Wright joined the FWP in Chicago in the spring of 1935 and worked on a number of projects dealing with Chicago history and plays developed by the Federal Theatre Project, another arm of the WPA. He continued work for the FWP when he moved to New York in 1937, engaged in a study of Harlem which analyzed the formation of a ghetto and described its social characteristics. He left the FWP on May 18, 1939 when he was awarded a lucrative Guggenheim Fellowship which paid well over twice his FWP salary. Wright’s involvement in the FWP was critically important in his development as a writer for a number of reasons. First of all, it enabled him to overcome his personal and artistic isolation by putting him in close contact with a wide variety of writers who shared his concerns and helped him to clarify his ideas. His friendship with

‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, William Attaway, Arna Bontemps, and Theodore Ward were especially valuable and came at a crucial time in his career when he was writing Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. Secondly, Wright’s actual work with the FWP enabled him to do serious research on the problems black people faced as they moved from the rural south to the urban north. Finally, the overall program of research undertaken by the FWP gave Wright a broadened and deepened understanding of African-American history. Studies undertaken by the FWP, such as their pioneering interviews of ex-slaves collected in a seventeen volume series entitled Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery (1941), would surely have been useful to Wright as he meditated on the African-American past and how it impacted on twentieth-century problems. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967.

FICTION See The Gothic; Women in Wright’s Fiction.

FILM NOIR An American film style emerging in the 1930s and flourishing well into the mid-1950s which centered on tough-guy heroes, hard-boiled dialogue, and criminal activity. Exposing the dark side of American life in large cities such as New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, it employed dramatic black and white lighting effects, portraying the city as a sinister underworld. Featuring frank treatments of sex and graphic violence, it undercut the sentimental values of popular melodramas and musicals. Wright, who was an avid reader of detective fiction while living in Memphis and Chicago and who developed a strong appetite for films while living in New York, often going to ‘‘as many as three movies a day’’ (Fabre 200), was naturally drawn to film noir.

Film noir was rooted in the pulp detective fiction of the period as well as popular men’s magazines such as Flynn’s Detective Weekly and Argosy All Story Magazine. It also drew its inspiration from the ‘‘Ash Can School’’ of American painting, especially the stark engravings and bleak urban paintings of Edward Hopper. Some of the most notable film noir movies were adapted from the novels of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Mickey Spillane. Richard Wright used many film noir techniques in his fiction. Novels such as Lawd Today!, Native Son, and The Outsider center on tough-guy heroes who engage in criminal activity which is at the thematic core of each novel. Moreover, Wright uses hardboiled, carefully understated dialogue in each novel and does not shy away from depicting rough scenes of explicit sex. And the urban settings of these novels, particularly Native Son, achieve stunning chiaroscuro effects from carefully crafted black and white description. Wright’s cities closely resemble the nightmarish urban underworlds so prominent in film noir movies, much more than they resemble the carefully documented, nearly photographic, urban settings found in typical realistic and naturalistic fiction. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Pudaloff, Ross. ‘‘Celebrity as Identity: Native Son and Mass Culture.’’ Studies in American Fiction 11 (Spring 1983) 3–18.

FILM VERSIONS OF NATIVE SON See Native Son (film versions).

‘‘FIRE AND CLOUD’’ This novella played a prominent role in the development of Wright’s career, helping to draw national attention to him as a promising young American fiction writer. It was written in 1934 when Wright lived in Chicago, was a member of the Communist Party, and was a participant in the Federal Writers’ Project. He included it in 131

‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ the manuscript of Uncle Tom’s Children which he sent to his New York agent John J. Trounstine in 1935. Receiving no encouragement by Trounstine, who let the manuscript lay fallow for a year in his office, Wright decided to publish individual stories from Uncle Tom’s Children and submitted ’’Fire and Cloud’’ to Story magazine’s national contest in 1937 for authors involved in the Federal Writer’s Project. Much to Wright’s surprise, it won first prize of $500, winning out over a field of 500 submissions. It later won second prize in the O. Henry Awards of 1938, placing ahead of works by John Steinbeck and William Saroyan. The substantial windfall of money from these two highly prestigious contests was certainly important for Wright who was trying to scratch out a living for himself, his mother, and brother with his meager depression earnings from his job at the Chicago Post Office. But in the long run, the critical attention he received from doing so well in two highly competitive national contests proved much more significant. Winning Story magazine’s first prize was especially important since part of the award was to submit the winning manuscript to a major publishing house, Harper and Brothers. Story’s editors, Martha Foley and Whit Burnett, decided to send the complete text of Uncle Tom’s Children to Harper’s where prominent editors Eugene Saxton and Edward Aswell enthusiastically accepted it for publication. This not only initiated a long friendship and fruitful professional relationship between Wright and Aswell but propelled Wright into the national spotlight as a young American writer of real importance. The great success of ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ therefore, has genuine significance in the development of Wright’s career because it helped transform him from a little-known Marxist poet to a fiction writer of tremendous potential, an author with a fresh voice who would bring new things to American and African-American literary traditions. Wright assigned particular importance to ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ and strategically placed it as the final

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story in the 1938 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children. As Michel Fabre has noted, the story ‘‘was expressly designed to show the development of political awareness among Negroes’’ (Fabre 134). Whereas earlier stories such as ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ and ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ conclude with either the victimization of the central character or escaping the injustices of the Deep South by heading North, ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ centers on a character who remains in the South to oppose racial injustice and to help his fellow blacks to transform southern culture with political action. Reverend Daniel Taylor, the acknowledged leader of the black community in a small Mississippi town, finds himself caught between two forces, communist organizers who want him to support a demonstration protesting the treatment of black sharecroppers and the white political establishment which pressures him to oppose the demonstration. He is physically intimidated by whites who take him to the woods and beat him brutally, reminding him ‘‘how to stay in a nigger’s place’’ (Wright 146). While his son Jimmy wants to respond to the violence of whites with revenge resulting in more violence and bloodshed, Rev. Taylor is able to contain his hatred and rage with political action that transforms him into a potent leader. The story concludes with him conducting a march of poor whites and blacks demanding their rights at city hall from the town’s white mayor. While the story had earlier promised a fiery hell of interracial violence, it concludes with a ‘‘baptism of clean joy’’ (Wright 161) which sweeps over Rev. Taylor and his fellow protesters as he shouts ‘‘Freedom belongs to the strong’’ (Wright 161). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Margolies, Edward. ‘‘Wright’s Craft: The Short Stories.’’ From The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1969. Webb, Tracy. ‘‘The Role of Water Imagery in Uncle Tom’s Children.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Spring 1988) 5–16. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Signet Books, 1963.

First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists Conference

FIRST AMERICAN WRITERS CONGRESS After the John Reed Clubs and their journal, Left Front, were disbanded in the August 1934 Midwest Writers Congress, Alexander Trachtenburg proposed a new organization for leftist writers called the League of American Writers. It held its first meeting, called the First American Writers Congress, on April 26, 1935 in New York’s Carnegie Hall and Mecca Temple. Four thousand writers, intellectuals, and activists attended, including Wright, James T. Farrell, John Dos Passos, Jack Conroy, Edwin Seaver, and Michael Gold. Conroy presented a paper praising the vitality of literature and culture in the Soviet Union while Seaver spoke about the need for writers to harmonize their visions with orthodox Marxist ideology. Dos Passos and Farrell, however, were becoming increasingly disillusioned with events in the Soviet Union and warned writers not to sacrifice their personal beliefs on the altar of political conformity leading to what Farrell believed was a ‘‘revolutionary scholasticism’’ that could only produced ‘‘sterility’’ (Landers 134). Earl Browder’s paper stressed the need for communist writers to be ‘‘good writers.’’ Wright, who was named a delegate to the congress’s national committee, hitchhiked to New York to attend its first meeting. He gave an impassioned speech in favor of reinstituting the John Reed Clubs and was disappointed when he was unable to draw much support for his position. But his nine-day stay in New York was, nevertheless, a very positive experience for him. He was deeply impressed with many of the speeches he heard, particularly Farrell’s, which connected strongly with his own doubts about the party’s influence on writers. Wright’s contact with Farrell at the conference initiated an important literary friendship which proved beneficial to both writers. And the conference also gave him the opportunity to become acquainted with other leftists such as Gold and Seaver with whom he would later work when he became involved with the Communist

Party in New York. His stay in New York also afforded him the opportunity to see a wide variety of politically charged plays such as Clifford Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing. The American Writers Congress of 1935 would be followed by three other national meetings, each of which Wright attended and actively participated in. Selected Bibliography: Landers, Robert. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wald, Alan. James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 1978.

FIRST INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF NEGRO WRITERS AND ARTISTS CONFERENCE Opening in Paris on September 19, 1956, it was a gathering of black intellectuals, artists and political thinkers from all over the world who convened to discuss the problems of global racism and colonialism. It ended three days later with the resolution that western nations, which were responsible for these problems, must make a serious commitment to help restore the black cultures which were damaged by colonialism. Wright was a major organizer of the conference and delivered an important speech in the opening session. The conference featured papers by Aime´ Ce´saire, Le´opold Senghor, Frantz Fanon, and George Lamming. W. E. B. Du Bois was invited to the conference but was unable to attend because the U.S. government refused to grant him a visa. In an open letter to those in attendance, Du Bois deplored the actions of the American government, arguing that he was denied a visa in an effort to stop him from speaking freely on the issues of American racism and Cold War hostility to the Soviet Union. Wright’s response to the conference was painfully mixed. Although he supported Fanon’s belief 133

Fischer, John that revolution would be necessary to free colonized nations of western control, he was deeply suspicious, as he had earlier stressed in The Color Curtain, of the ‘‘racial mysticism’’ (Rowley 478) of the Ne´gritude movement, and he also rejected the idealization of the ancestral past endorsed by many black nationalists. As a western rationalist, Wright favored a rebuilding of colonized nations along socialist and Marxist lines. His speech, ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization,’’ stressed his hope for a blending of ‘‘national traditions with modern rationalism’’ (Fabre 438). At one point he argued, ‘‘We do not oppose the West; we want the effective application of western principles of freedom’’ (Rowley 479). He also spoke out strongly in favor of the liberation of women in third world nations and chided the conference for having so few female delegates. His speech drew a mixture of reactions. James Baldwin, who reported on the conference for American newspapers, found Wright’s speech somewhat muddled and out of touch with current realities. Many representatives from African nations objected to Wright’s western notions and his suspicion of native traditions and beliefs. Wright was generally disappointed with the conference and was especially let down by the responses to his speech. As he confided to his friend Daniel Gue´rin a few days afterwards, the conference left him ‘‘terribly depressed’’ (Fabre 441). See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

FISCHER, JOHN When Edward Aswell left Harper and Brothers in 1947, John Fischer became Wright’s new editor. Although Wright enjoyed an extremely fruitful relationship with Aswell, whom he regarded as a close friend and astute judge of his work, his dealings with Fischer were troubled from the beginning and eventually led to his leaving 134

Harper’s and being reunited with Aswell at Doubleday, which published The Long Dream in 1958. According to Constance Webb, Fischer ‘‘did not understand [Wright] or his personality’’ (Webb 355) and Wright rarely trusted his judgment. Part of the reason why it took so long for him to complete The Outsider was his resistance to Fischer’s editorial demands and his doubts about Fischer’s ability to understand what he was trying to accomplish in that novel. Arnold Rampersad has described the relationship between the two men as ‘‘antagonistic’’ (Rampersad 113). Wright’s agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., shared his suspicions of him and advised him to look for another publisher. Unlike Aswell, who was mainly liberal in his political views and was a reconstructed southerner who had emphatically rejected the racial attitudes he had been brought up with, Fischer was a political conservative who endorsed official American policies during the Cold War. He was therefore quite uncomfortable with Wright’s sharp criticisms of American culture and skeptical of his racial attitudes. A Texan who had won a Rhodes Scholarship and studied in England, he had published a book entitled The Scared Men of the Kremlin which Hazel Rowley has described as an ‘‘impassioned piece of Cold War propaganda’’ which could ‘‘have been written by the State Department’’ (Rowley 355). When Wright submitted in 1952 a full manuscript of the book which eventually became The Outsider consisting of nearly 800 typed pages, Fischer called for drastic cuts, insisting that the text be reduced by a third. He wanted stream of consciousness sections eliminated, thinking that they impeded the flow of the narrative. He also wanted several pages taken out which presented detailed discussions of ideological matters. Wright adamantly refused to eliminate whole sections and was particularly insistent that the stream of consciousness sequences be preserved since he considered them essential for the psychological development of his central character, Cross Damon. However, he did substantially reduce

Fisher, Dorothy Canfield the size of the passages which Fischer objected to, shortening the manuscript by one-sixth. In November 1952, Fischer did another ‘‘painstaking job of copyediting,’’ streamlining Wright’s prose by shortening descriptive passages and ‘‘weeding out adjectives’’ (Rowley 406) which he considered superfluous. After Wright reluctantly agreed to those changes, a copy editor ‘‘quietly removed two additional pages and several other passages and words from the manuscript’’ (Rampersad 3). Wright was not notified about these cuts and was given only two days to approve the galleys of a book which totaled over 400 printed pages. A ‘‘restored’’ text of The Outsider was published in 1991 by the Library of America which corrected the damage done by Fischer and others at Harper’s. Although editor Arnold Rampersad approved of Fischer’s demand that the original manuscript be greatly reduced, he objected strongly to the later changes made by Fischer and others which were not approved by Wright. The Library of America published ‘‘The final typescript of the novel as submitted by Wright’’ (Rampersad 3). Wright was troubled by the way Fischer handled The Outsider and refused to come to New York to promote the book. He would publish only two more books at Harper’s, Black Power in 1951 and Pagan Spain in 1956. He experienced conflict with Fischer in writing both books, and when Harper’s rejected Savage Holiday, he had the book published by World Publishing Co., thus ending a long and productive relationship with Harper’s. Objecting to what Michel Fabre has described as Fischer’s ‘‘authoritarian and sometimes misguided decisions’’ (Fabre 503) about his work, he was finally reunited with Aswell at Doubleday, which published The Long Dream in 1958. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. ‘‘The Library of America Edition of The Outsider’’ in The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Edited by Robert J. Butler. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995. Rampersad,

Arnold. ‘‘Too Honest for His Own Time.’’ The New York Times Book Review, (December 29, 1991), 3. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance, Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

FISHER, DOROTHY CANFIELD (17 February 1879–9 November 1958) A popular novelist of more than forty books, Fisher served on the Book-of-the-Month Club ‘‘Committee of Selection’’ from its inception in 1926 to 1951. In his role, she argued for Native Son and Black Boy to be chosen as main selections, or, as they are commonly known, ‘‘booksof-the-month.’’ A dual selection for March 1940 (with Conrad Richter’s The Trees), Native Son was the first novel by an African-American to be designated a book-of-the-month. Black Boy was a dual selection for March 1945 (with Glenway Wescott’s Apartment in Athens). Although Fisher’s literary taste was generally conservative, she opposed racial prejudice and was Wright’s strongest supporter on the ‘‘Committee of Selection.’’ Wright altered both Native Son and Black Boy to satisfy the Book-of-the-Month Club prior to publication. Wright’s manuscripts show that he deleted several sexually explicit passages from the novel at the request of club officials. Five years later, again at the behest of the Book-of-theMonth Club, he halved an autobiography then in page proofs entitled American Hunger (published in its entirety in 1977) and wrote a new conclusion for the abbreviated version. Fisher’s correspondence with Wright reveals that she urged him to give the conclusion a more optimistic tone than he initially planned. He incorporated some of her suggestions into the text which he entitled Black Boy. Fisher lauded the work in a Book-of-the-Month Club News review. Fisher also wrote introductions to Native Son and Black Boy. Of the former she wrote, ‘‘It is not surprising that this novel plumbs blacker depths of human experience than American literature has yet had, comparable only to Dostoevsky’s revelation of human misery in 135

Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction wrongdoing.’’ About Black Boy, she wrote that she was proud to ‘‘help bring to the thoughtful attention of intelligent, morally responsible Americans, the honest, dreadful, heart-breaking story of a Negro childhood and youth, as set down by that rarely gifted American author, Richard Wright.’’ Mark Madigan Selected Bibliography: Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Ed. Mark J. Madigan. Columbia: U Missouri P, 1993. Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. ‘‘Review of Black Boy.’’ Book-of-the-Month Club News (February 1945): 2–3. Thaddeus, Janice. ‘‘The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.’’ American Literature 57 (May 1985): 199–214. Washington, Ida. Dorothy Canfield Fisher: A Biography. Shelburne, Vermont: New England P, 1982. Wright, Richard. Early Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Wright, Richard. Later Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991.

FLYNN’S WEEKLY DETECTIVE FICTION Begun on September 20, 1924 as Flynn’s, it became Flynn’s Weekly on May 29, 1926 and later Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction on June 18, 1927. From 1928 to 1951 it was published under the following names: Detective Weekly Fiction, Flynn’s Detective, Flynn’s Detective Fiction Magazine, and Detective Fiction. It was started as a pulp magazine by Munsey Company, the publisher of other men’s magazines such as Argosy. Its first editor was William Flynn, a former Secret Service agent, and it featured stories from his own experience as well as memoirs from other law enforcement officers. Over the years, some of the best known mystery and detective fiction writers, including Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Max Brand, and Earl Stanley Gardner, placed their work in this magazine. The magazine specialized in many ‘‘crime does not pay’’ stories which focused on how detectives and police officers tracked down criminals who eventually got their just punishments from the 136

American justice system. The magazine also ran several series on famous criminals such as John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd, always portraying these unfavorably. As the magazine developed in the 1920s and 1930s, it became increasingly sensationalistic, featuring action packed stories and lurid covers. As a young person growing up in Mississippi, Wright eagerly devoured popular fiction, especially dime novels focusing on crime, and this reading left a lasting imprint on his imagination and would play an important role in his development as a mature writer. As Michel Fabre has observed, Wright’s ‘‘usual fare’’ of reading before he arrived in Memphis in 1925 consisted of ‘‘detective stories, dime novels, and popular fiction’’ (Fabre 66) which fed his strong interest in American success stories and their opposite, stories about crime. He read widely in men’s magazines such as Argosy and Flynn’s Detective Weekly, direct descendents of dime novels such as the Nick Carter series that presented sensational crimes and melodramatic plots in which law and order inevitably triumphed over crime. As a mature writer, Wright maintained his strong interest in crime and what produced it. Novels such as Native Son, The Outsider, and Savage Holiday, and most of the stories contained in Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men examine horrific crimes and present highly sensational plots which one often sees in dime novels and related detective fiction. Indeed, he got the original idea for ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ from a story in True Detective magazine. But the mature Wright artfully ‘‘signified on’’ these materials rather than literally imitating them; that is, he transformed them to express his unique vision of twentieth-century black life (True Detective, August 1941). Wright’s fiction embeds crime stories in a richly ironic context, endowing them with powerfully complex and disturbing meanings which are never found in the popular fiction of his time. The crimes he describes are never adequately understood or justly punished. Law and order never triumphs in works such as Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who

Ford, James W. Lived Underground,’’ or Savage Holiday. Indeed, the reverse is true as the American legal system and its functionaries compound problems with injustice rooted in systematic racism. And whereas the crude dime novels and detective fiction that fascinated Wright as a young boy emphasized dramatic outer action and provided little or no character development, Wright’s fiction is always focused on the psychological motivations and sociological background which drive his plots. The potboilers which Wright devoured in his youth, therefore, became one of the many sources which fired his inversive imagination and helped to produce fiction of startling social insights and psychological depth. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘Wright’s Native Son and Two Novels by Zola: A Comparative Study.’’ Black American Literature Forum, 18 (Fall 1984), 100–05. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Pudaloff, Ross. ’’Celebrity as Identity: Native Son and Mass Culture.’’ Studies in American Fiction, 2 (Spring 1983), 3–18.

FORD, JAMES W. (1893–1957) A labor union organizer and important AfricanAmerican leader in the Communist Party of the United States of America, Ford was born in Pratt City, Alabama of working class parents. His father was an underpaid steelworker and his mother was a domestic. His family’s lack of financial resources forced him to go to work at age 13 as a water boy for a railroad gang and later as a mechanic’s helper. From a very early age he was embittered by southern racism and violence. The lynching of his uncle left emotional scars which remained for the rest of his life. Like Wright, he was liberated from the ‘‘place’’ defined for him by southern whites through education. He became an avid reader as a young boy, and, despite long hours of demanding work on a series of menial jobs, he graduated from high school and won a scholarship to Fisk University. At Fisk he became a campus leader, an accomplished student, and an outstanding athlete. He

lettered in football, track, and tennis and later played semi-professional baseball in Chicago. He left Fisk in 1917 to fight in World War I, serving in France in the Signal Corps. He rose to the status of a non-commissioned officer and at one point organized a successful protest against a white officer for mistreating a black soldier which resulted in the officer being relieved of his command. After receiving his honorable discharge, he returned to Fisk and graduated in 1920. He then went to Chicago in search of work and, like Richard Wright, found a job in the Chicago Post Office, working as a parcel post dispatcher. He soon joined the postal workers’ union, becoming involved in battles against Jim Crow practices. He eventually became deeply involved with the trade union movement and developed a close friendship with A. Phillip Randolph, the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the strongest black union in the United States. His militant union activities resulted from his being fired from the Chicago Post Office in 1927. He joined the Communist Party in 1926 and quickly rose through its ranks, becoming in 1927 the delegate to the Fourth World Congress of the International Labor Movement in Moscow. He traveled widely through the Soviet Union for two years, becoming convinced that a Marxist revolution had been successfully completed there and that the only hope for racial justice in America lay in a similar people’s revolt. Returning to the United States, he became an important figure in the Harlem branch of the party and eventually a nationally prominent figure in American communist politics. He entered American presidential politics in 1932 when he was named as William Z. Foster’s running mate on the party’s presidential ticket. He was again chosen by the Communist Party as its vicepresidential candidate in the elections of 1936 and 1940. His publications include numerous pamphlets and monographs as well as a book, The Negro and the Democratic Front. He contributed regularly to the Daily Worker and other communist 137

‘‘Foreword’’ to Blues Fell This Morning by Paul Oliver journals. His writings stress the need for American blacks to form broad national and international coalitions with workers and dispossessed minorities. He remained a deeply committed communist until his death in 1957. Richard Wright met Ford in New York when he worked for the Harlem branch of the Daily Worker. From the very beginning the two did not get along with each other, as Wright resented what he regarded as Ford’s strict adherence to the party line and Ford saw Wright as a stubborn intellectual who could not submit himself to party discipline. As Mark Naison observed, ‘‘James Ford hated and mistrusted Wright’’ (Naison 210), resenting Wright’s refusal to write on the topics he assigned to him for the Daily Worker and being deeply suspicious of Wright’s fierce individualism. After Wright’s defection from the Party, Ford wrote a long essay entitled ‘‘The Case of Richard Wright: A Disservice to the Negro People’’ in which he castigated Wright for portraying black people in a consistently negative way and also betraying his former associates in the party. Wright clearly returned such animosity with equal force, regarding Ford as a party hack and a bully. When Ford was sentenced to federal prison in 1951 as a result of the ‘‘red scare’’ which overtook the country during the Cold War, Wright confided to Dorothy Norman that he took a ‘‘grim satisfaction’’ (Rowley 378) in his demise. Selected Bibliography: Logan, Rayford and Michael E. Winston. Dictionary of American Negro Biography. New York: W. W. Norton, 1982. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times.. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘FOREWORD’’ TO BLUES FELL THIS MORNING BY PAUL OLIVER A British blues scholar who established himself as a pioneer in the field of blues research with his first book Blues Fell This Morning, Paul Oliver

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met Wright for the first time at a cafe´ in Paris in March 1956. In the course of their conversation, Wright said that he was interested in the blues, and Oliver told Wright that he had been writing a book on the blues for several years. Almost a year later in February 1957, Oliver wrote Wright requesting a short foreword to his book on the blues, enclosing a synopsis of ‘‘The Projected Book on Blues and Negro Folk Song.’’ In receipt of the letter, Wright wrote Oliver agreeing with him that he was prepared to read Oliver’s manuscript in order to write a foreword to it. One more year later in May 1958, Oliver wrote Wright apologizing for the delay due to difficult completion of additional data such as discographies and appendices. Oliver finally sent the final draft of Blues Fell This Morning in December 1958, apologizing for the further delay in revising the manuscript, and Wright immediately read the manuscript and agreed to write a foreword to the book. Wright finished the foreword and sent off the draft to him in January 1959. Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of the Blues (London: Cassell) by Paul Oliver was finally published with Wright’s foreword in March 1960. In the foreword, Wright wrote that Oliver presented us with ‘‘this interesting and challenging documentary volume’’ (x) although he was ‘‘geographically far enough from the broiling scene of America’s racial strife’’ (xi). Wright also wrote in the 19 March 1960 letter to his Dutch translator Margrit de Sablonie`re that Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning is ‘‘an indictment of racial conditions in America shown through the Negro’s songs, something a little on the line of my ‘Literature of the Negro in the United States’ ’’ (Fabre 620n19). Toru Kiuchi Selected Bibliography: Michel Fabre’s Private Collection, Paris. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning: The Meaning of the Blues. New York: Horizon Press, 1960. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

France

FOURTH AMERICAN WRITERS CONFERENCE

his integrity as an artist, resulted in his formal break with communism in 1942.

Opening in New York on June 6, 1941, it was centered in the Communist Party’s strong opposition to American involvement in World War II. The party at that time was assured by the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact that Hitler’s Germany was no threat to Russia and envisioned the war as a struggle between equally pernicious capitalist forces. It was therefore ideologically committed to neutrality. Wright delivered a powerfully anti-war speech at the Congress entitled ‘‘What We Think of Their War’’ which was later published in the June 17, 1941 issue of New Masses as ‘‘Not My People’s War.’’ In it he describes in careful detail the racial injustices suffered by American blacks, citing segregation in the North and the South as well as in the armed forces. He also describes American racial violence and widespread disenfranchisement. He therefore urges African Americans to refrain from risking their lives in a war against a racist enemy until the problems of racial injustice in their own country have been resolved. Two weeks after Wright delivered this anti-war speech, the Communist Party had completely reversed their stance about the war when Hitler broke the non-aggression pact with Stalin by invading Russia. Now the party regarded World War II as a ‘‘people’s war’’ against fascism and urged America to join in the fight against Germany and Japan. Wright was greatly disturbed by this sudden change of policy and hesitated to join what the party now described as the American people’s mobilization in the war against fascism. He was even more upset when the [arty pressured him not to give the anti-war speech he had delivered at the writers’ congress when he was called upon to accept the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal later that summer. Wright greatly resented the party’s manipulation of his writing and this, added to his previous doubts about ideological pressures put upon him which he regarded as a threat to

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Not My People’s War,’’ New Masses, no. 39 (June 17, 1941), 8–9, 12.

FRANCE Richard Wright’s short life but long journey first led him to crisscross the ‘‘black belt,’’ fleeing domestic violence and racism across backwater Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas to Chicago and New York. Unfortunately, even the northern cities of his home country seemed no more the promised land than had been his hometown in the South. Over the same period, it was France, with its enlightened liberalism toward blacks beginning with Alexandre Dumas, which attracted Wright long before 1940. In the 1930s, he had discovered Marcel Proust and Louis Aragon and admired Andre´ Malraux and especially Andre´ Gide. But his finances and then the war precluded a visit. After the immediate success of Black Boy (1945) brought economic security, he corresponded with Gertrude Stein, met JeanPaul Sartre in New York, and visited Paris in 1946 at the invitation of the French government. He immigrated to France in June 1947 and died in Paris on November 28, 1960. For Wright, France long represented an idealized destination then, finally, a more realistic location in which to live and die. From his early works until the end of his life, France developed from the object of a dreamy collective escapism at the conclusion of Lawd Today! (‘‘Gee, I’d like to go to France’’) to the taboo topic of ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ (‘‘France, and how Negro soldiers fared there; French women’’) to the nightmare ambience in ‘‘Island of Hallucinations.’’ In the interim, Wright’s love affair with France naturally had its ups and downs, especially during the 1950s when he was caught between the promise of creative freedom early in the decade and his suspicion and isolationism at the end.

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Franco-American Fellowship Two points were the focus of his time outside of Paris, both of them in Normandy: Ailly and Moulin d’Ande´. For $5,000 he and his wife Ellen had found a farm near Ailly and stayed there all of August and most of September 1955. After essential renovations were complete in October, Ailly became his refuge from the interruptions of Paris, where he felt he was not advancing sufficiently on his many projects. Wright composed for long mornings in his study, then became a gentleman farmer in the afternoons. When his cold-storage cellar was full of produce, he would fill the back of the Citroen and deliver potatoes and corn, later peas and beans, to his friends back in Paris. The farm was still within easy striking distance of the capital and quite close to the home at Croisilles of his dear friends the Bokanowskis. In January 1957, he settled in alone to write the story of Fishbelly, which would become The Long Dream. By April of that year, some six hundred pages were ready. In 1959, when the Wrights planned to move to London, they regretfully placed their farm on the market. It was soon after that Wright began to re-visit more regularly the Moulin d’Ande´, near SaintPierre de Vauvray. Here was the sumptuous country estate of a French businessman who liked to welcome figures from the world of the arts and diplomacy. In 1957, Wright had visited in the company of Eugene Ionesco, Humbert Juin, and Rene´ de Obaldia for a book-signing and concert fund-raiser. He had returned there on various occasions, most recently in April 1959. Now that Ailly was sold, he went more regularly to work in a room reserved for his use and to stroll along the Seine in the calm Normandy countryside. For the summer of 1960, from mid-June to early September, punctuated by several visits to Paris, he was there again to revise ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ and work on his new manuscript. Ollie Harrington, Wright’s closest and most trusted friend, was visiting other friends at the Moulin on the November weekend when Richard Wright died alone in a Paris clinic. Roy Rosenstein

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Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. Second edition. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993. Rosenstein, Roy. ‘‘Richard Wright.’’ Bill Marshall, ed. France and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History (Transatlantic relations). Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 2005, 1234–5. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968.

FRANCO-AMERICAN FELLOWSHIP A group of African-American expatriates in Paris and their French and American friends which was formed in 1950 by Wright and William Rutherford. Wright was its first president and wrote the organization’s mission statement which asserted that: This group exists to serve the mutual and personal needs of its members’ to promote social and cultural relations; and to heighten the consciousness of its members in relation to the urgent issues confronting the world today. It proposes to attain these ends by dedicating its energies to an elucidation of the problem of human freedom amidst modern industrialization; to combat the deepening and extension of racist ideas and practices from whatever quarter they spring . . . to reaffirm the common identity and destiny of humankind and the internationalism of the human spirit. (Fabre 358)

The fellowship attempted to promote better relationships between France and America during the Cold War and also became actively involved in two American racial cases of the early 1950s, the Willie McGee trial and the trial of the Martinsville Seven, both of which involved black men accused of raping southern white women. It also actively protested job discrimination in American businesses abroad. Its cultural activities included lectures by internationally prominent intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre as well as exhibits of paintings by African-Americans. Novelist James Baldwin, journalist Ollie Stewart, and political commentator Louis Fischer were prominent members of the group.

Frazier, E. Franklin The FBI, which saw the Franco-American Fellowship as a communist front, kept surveillance on it and offered cash awards to members who would inform on the group. Realizing that the organization was being infiltrated by people sympathetic to the FBI, Wright resigned as president in November 1951. Without his leadership, the fellowship folded shortly thereafter. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

FRAZIER, E. FRANKLIN (24 September 1894–17 May 1962) An eminent African-American sociologist who wrote three seminal studies of black American life, The Negro Family in Chicago (1932), The Negro Family in the United States (1939), and Black Bourgeoisie (1957), Frazier was born in Baltimore, the son of a bank messenger. His father was self-educated and stressed the value of formal education as a means of self development and social advancement. Frazier went to Howard University on scholarship and graduated with honors in 1916. While an undergraduate, he was strongly influenced by socialist ideas and developed advanced skills in languages and mathematics. After brief teaching experiences at Tuskegee Institute, St. Paul’s Normal Institute in Virginia, and Baltimore High School, he took an M.A. in Sociology at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, graduating in 1920. Frazier then did research for one year at the New York School of Social Work before becoming a research fellow at the University of Copenhagen in the 1921–1922 academic year. He then returned to the United States where he worked for several years at Livingston College in Salisbury, North Carolina. In 1927, he became director of Atlanta University School of Social Work and instructor of Sociology at Morehouse University. It was during his years in Atlanta that he published over thirty articles on racial problems in the United States, culminating in the publication of

his seminal study ‘‘The Pathology of Race Prejudice.’’ The article was widely read and resulted in a series of editorials printed in the Atlanta Constitution which condemned his research. When he received a series of harassing phone calls and threats of lynching, Frazier left the South and enrolled in the doctoral program in Sociology at the University of Chicago where he studied under Robert Park. In 1929, he became a lecturer and research professor at Fisk University and completed his doctoral work in 1932. He then became head of the Department of Sociology at Fisk and gained national attention as an important sociologist with the publication of The Negro Family in Chicago and The Negro Family in the United States. Those two works argued that American racism from slavery onward had severely damaged the black family, resulting in illegitimate births, neglected children, dysfunctional fathers, and single-parent households. Frazier stressed that the social problems of twentieth-century AfricanAmerican life were rooted in the damage done to the black family and that rebuilding family life was an essential part of effectively dealing with racial problems in the United States. Wright’s life would certainly provide strong support for Frazier’s thesis. His family was severely damaged by southern racism, poverty, and violence. His father abandoned the family when Wright was a child, partly because of pressures brought on by his inability to find sufficient work to support his wife and children. This resulted in Wright and his brother being sent to a Memphis orphanage when his mother became too ill to raise them. And when he briefly enjoyed a warm and stable family life after he and his mother and brother went to live with his favorite aunt Maggie and her husband Silas Hoskins, Wright was then plunged into terrifying insecurity when Hoskins was murdered by whites who were jealous of his business success. For much of Wright’s formative years, he felt largely disconnected from family life as he was forced to live with relatives who, for the most part, failed to understand him and were unable to establish 141

Freud, Sigmund positive relationships with him. Except for his mother and Aunt Maggie, for whom he felt a deep and abiding love throughout his life, Wright was estranged from his family. It is not surprising, therefore, that Wright observed in Black Boy that the ‘‘shocks of childhood’’ had led him to perceive his social world as ‘‘unstable’’ and ‘‘void of great hope’’ (Wright 43). His lack of a secure family life left deep emotional scars on his personality and led him to perceive himself as a loner, what Robert Park and E. Franklin Frazier might have called a ‘‘marginal man.’’ Wright met Frazier in Chicago and later became friends with him when he lived in New York. They had many friends in common, including Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, and Lawrence Reddick. Although Frazier never became a member of the Communist Party, he and Wright shared many leftist ideals. In 1944, Wright planned a book on American race relations entitled ‘‘The Meaning of Negro Experience in America’’ which would consist of a series of essays by outstanding black scholars, and he invited Frazier to contribute to the collection. Frazier, whom Constance Webb characterized as Wright’s ‘‘old friend whom he admired more than almost any other American sociologist’’ (Webb 371), visited Wright several times in Paris and in 1956 helped him to organize an American contingent of artists and scholars to attend the First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers. When Wright planned in 1959 to tour Africa to do research on a book on French colonial Africa, he invited Frazier to join him. Frazier was unable to do so at the time, and Wright died before the trip could be arranged at a later date. Wright’s library included Frazier’s The Negro Family in Chicago, The Negro Family in the United States, and Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States (Fabre 56). And he certainly would have agreed with the thesis of Frazier’s ground breaking study, Black Bourgeoisie, a book which indicted the black middle class as narcissistic and conventional black leadership as failing to address the problems of

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black working class and poor people. As a communist and later as a radical on the noncommunist left, Wright saw the middle class as too complacent and materialistic to either understand or effectively deal with the problems of the black underclass. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

FREUD, SIGMUND (6 May 1856– 23 September 1939) Wright was seriously interested in psychology and was particularly drawn to Freud’s theories. He began reading Freud’s work during the 1930s when he lived in Chicago and was beginning to develop as a writer. He continued to be heavily influenced for the remainder of his career by Freud’s notions of human personality and how the deepest layers of human consciousness are revealed in dreams. At the time of his death in 1960, his personal library contained eight books written by Freud, including Basic Writings, The Future of an Illusion, Interpretation of Dreams, and The Questions of Lay Analysis. His sustained interest in Freud’s ideas also went beyond merely literary concerns as Wright himself underwent therapy by the Freudian psychotherapist Frederic Wertham and helped Wertham establish a free clinic in Harlem to make Freudian therapy available to black youth. Freud’s concept of id, superego, and ego fascinated Wright and played an important role in shaping his fiction. Margaret Walker has argued that Wright was ‘‘obsessed with psychoanalysis’’ (Walker 245) and that ‘‘his beliefs were strongly influenced by . . . what he perceived Freud to be saying’’ (Walker 5). Freud’s view that human beings were caught between the demands of their dark, irrational selves (the id) and their rational selves controlled by society (the superego) was dramatized in various forms in all of Wright’s mature fiction. In novels such as Native Son,

Freud, Sigmund The Outsider, and Savage Holiday the central characters find themselves in situations where they are not able to exert rational control with their superegos over their ids and explode in instinctual, irrational violence which erupt from the cores of their beings. (Savage Holiday, which is inscribed with a brief quotation from Totem and Taboo, has been described by Walker as an extended Freudian nightmare.) Wright, like Freud, saw dreams as a means of accessing the subconscious self and used dreams and surrealistically described outer action as a means of delving underneath the veneer of rational consciousness. In Native Son, for example, Bigger’s deepest promptings are revealed when he falls asleep after killing Mary Dalton and dreams that he is in a bus filled with white people who are gazing at a human head wrapped in newspaper on his lap. When a church bell tolls, the wrapping falls away, revealing his own decapitated head. This powerfully reveals that his deepest feelings about the killing go beyond an outer fear of getting caught and center on an inward guilt about what he has done. At his most profound subconscious level of perception, Bigger realizes that in killing Mary he has destroyed himself. The 1950 film version of the novel makes even more elaborate use of dreams to probe Freudian meanings. In order to escape the horror of his urban existence in the present, Bigger dreams of returning to a quiet pastoral world of the rural South where he was born. But as he traipses half-naked through a Mississippi cotton

field, he runs into a vicious plantation owner who reduces him to the status of a slave. He wakes up with the terrified awareness that his existence in the twentieth century is a kind of slavery and that there is no escape from this in an idealized past. Wright’s travel books also explore Freudian themes. Black Power imagines Africa as a cauldron of irrational forces, a kind of cultural id, which must be harnessed by the rational powers of western technology, industrialism, and socialism. Pagan Spain, in a similar way, envisions traditional Spanish culture as being rooted in a primitive past and expressed in totemic rituals such as the bull fight. Wright’s solution to the problems he witnessed in Spain was to reorganize its society with rational control centered in Marxist ideology. As Walker has stressed, Wright saw Spain ‘‘through Marxist and Freudian eyes’’ (Walker 252). While Marxism provided Wright with a coherent way of understanding the outer social world, Freudian psychology enabled Wright to move inward, lucidly exploring the complex feelings and thoughts which lay deeply buried within his characters. Selected Bibliography: McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Wertham, Frederic. ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son.’’ Journal of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy. (Winter 1944), 111–15. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Demonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

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G GARVEY, MARCUS (17 August 1887– June 1940) An orator, journalist, organizer and black nationalist, Garvey was born in St. Ann’s Parish, Jamaica to parents of unmixed African descent. The youngest of eleven children, he attended Anglican grammar school where he excelled academically and became an avid reader. His family’s financial problems forced him to leave school at age fourteen, becoming an apprentice at his uncle’s printing shop. In 1904 he moved to Kingston where he worked as a printer and became involved in union activities. He developed impressive skills as an orator and was active in the 1907 printers’ strike. He then worked for the United Fruit Company on a banana plantation in Costa Rica and got involved in newspaper work in Port Limo´n and Colo´n. He moved to London in 1912 where he studied briefly at Birbeck College and came to know Africans for the first time in his life. One of these Africans, Duse Muhammed Ali, piqued his interest in African independence and hired him to work as a writer for his African Times and Orient Review. While in England, Garvey read Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and was deeply influenced by Washington’s programs for black self-help by economic development.

He returned to Jamaica in 1914 and organized the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (U.N.I.A.), an organization devoted to establishing black pride, financial independence, and African liberation. He also developed a Jamaican trade school modeled after Tuskegee Institute. Garvey went to New York in March 1916 and traveled throughout the United States, eventually settling in Harlem where he established the headquarters for U.N.I.A. and began publishing a newspaper, Negro World. Garvey’s extraordinary oratorical and organizational skills soon made him a nationally prominent figure. His ‘‘Back to Africa’’ movement stirred the imaginations of the black masses, and his newspaper reached a circulation of 50,000. His Black Star Line, a steamship company designed to create trade between the United States and Africa, became one of the largest black-owned business in America. By the early 1920s, Garvey had become the charismatic leader of a mass movement of world-wide scope. Ironically, the Black Star Line led to Garvey’s downfall. Due to mismanagement and the hostility of government officials, the company failed. He was charged with fraudulent use of the mails in 1923 and sentenced to five years in prison. In 1927, President Coolidge commuted Garvey’s

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Garvey, Marcus sentence, deporting him to Jamaica where he attempted to rebuild his programs. During the Great Depression, Garvey’s appeal to African Americans dwindled as black people were forced to give their attention to more immediate problems. Garvey moved to London in 1935 where he published a small newspaper, Black Man, and offered correspondence courses in African philosophy. He died in obscurity in London in 1940 after suffering a stroke. Richard Wright first became acquainted with Garvey’s ideas when he arrived in Chicago in 1928 and would often listen to political speakers in Washington Park. He was particularly drawn to a white group of radicals known as ‘‘the bug club’’ who gave angry Marxist speeches and also an African-American group known as the Negro Forum who were composed of evangelical preachers, communists, and Garveyites. He formed friendships with some of these devoted followers of Garvey and had a brief romantic relationship with a young woman whose father was a fervent believer in Garvey’s ideas and programs. He sometimes visited their apartments, what he describes in American Hunger as ‘‘dingy flats’’ whose walls were covered with ‘‘maps of Africa and India and Japan’’ as well as ‘‘pictures of Japanese generals’’ and ‘‘portraits of Marcus Garvey in gaudy regalia’’ (Wright 28). Wright’s response to Garvey and his followers is an interesting mixture. Fresh from the South where blacks were either silenced or severely punished for speaking out against the white world, Wright was ‘‘enthralled’’ by the boldness of their criticisms and their ‘‘passionate rejection of America’’ (Wright 28). He felt that their pride in being black, what he termed their ‘‘racialistic outlook’’ gave them ‘‘a dignity that I had never before witnessed in Negroes’’ (Wright 28). He deeply respected Garvey’s successful organizing of ordinary black Americans, creating a mass movement of working class and poor people. And Wright also admired the ability of the Garveyites to commit themselves passionately to a unifying creed:

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Their lives were not cluttered with ideas in which they could only half believe. They could not create illusions which made them think they were living when they were not; their daily lives were too nakedly harsh to permit of camouflage. I understood their emotions for I partly shared them. (Wright 28)

Wright’s ambivalence here is quite revealing. For although he could identify with the singleminded devotion to a cause displayed by the Garveyites and envied their racial pride and aggressive attacks on the white system of racial oppression, he could not accept their faith in establishing a separate black nation. He could only ‘‘partly share’’ their world view because he was drawn to their ‘‘emotional dynamics’’ but could not embrace their ‘‘ideology’’ (Wright 28). As Michel Fabre has observed, the young Wright could sympathize with Garvey’s emotional appeals but ‘‘he never stopped thinking of himself as an American and a western man’’ (Fabre xix). Even in his early days in Chicago when he was thrilled by the spectacle of black people boldly speaking out against white oppression and envisioning a black homeland, Wright the rationalist thought that the Garveyites could ‘‘never achieve their goals’’ since ‘‘Africa was owned by Europe’’ and American blacks were ‘‘people of the west’’ (Wright 29). Late in his life, Wright declared in a 1957 interview that, however much he admired Garvey’s organizing of ‘‘some two million American Negroes,’’ he felt that Garvey’s ideas and programs were ‘‘romantic and impractical’’ (Kinnamon 177). It was communism, with its rationalism and western orientation, that captured Wright’s political imagination as a young man. But Garvey’s powerful image of Africa as a recovered black homeland would continue to fascinate Wright long after he had rejected communism and become involved with the PanAfrican movement. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow,

Ghana 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre, Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

GHANA A nation in western Africa bordered on the north by Burkina Faso, on the east by Togo, on the south by the Atlantic Ocean, and on the west by the Ivory Coast. It was formerly the British colony known as the Gold Coast and achieved status as an independent nation in 1957 under the leadership of its first president, Kwame Nkrumah. During the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries, it was coveted by European entrepreneurs and colonialists for its vast natural resources, especially gold, diamonds, lumber, manganese, and bauxite. It was also a major source of slaves for countries in the Americas. In the earth 19th century, Britain took control of Gold Coast properties, seizing them from private companies and by 1850 established an informal colonial government in Accra. In 1874, the British declared the Gold Coast a ‘‘colony of the Crown.’’ After World War II, a movement to expel the British and establish an independent nation was led by Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party which organized strikes and demonstrations against English rule. In 1957, Great Britain granted independence, and the Gold Coast became the independent nation of Ghana. Richard Wright, who had a strong interest in Africa since the early 1930s when he became intrigued by Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, became fascinated by the Gold Coast through his friend George Padmore, the Pan-Africanist who was closely associated with Nkrumah and spent his final years in Ghana as a political advisor. When Wright was in London in 1953 completing work on The Outsider, he often visited Padmore’s apartment on Cranleigh Street which was a gathering point for black revolutionaries who were committed to liberating African colonies from European rule. Padmore encouraged Wright to visit the Gold

Coast and arranged for him to secure a visa from British officials by convincing Nkrumah to write a letter of support for Wright’s visit. In June 1953, Wright left England by ship and arrived in the Gold Coast twelve days later. En route, he composed a letter to Nkrumah which stated, ‘‘I am one of the lost sons of Africa. There is something in me which never left this island’’ (Rowley 419). If Wright’s expectation was to recover a lost homeland, his actual experience in the Gold Coast proved to be bitterly disappointing. As Margaret Walker has stressed, Wright ‘‘suffered great cultural shock’’ while living in Africa and returned to Paris two and one-half months later with great ‘‘disappointment’’ (Walker 240). From the beginning, he was overcome by the physical squalor, general disorder, widespread disease, and overall backwardness he observed in Accra, Prampram, Christiansburg, and several rural villages. In Black Power, the book he published in 1954 about his African experiences, he deplored what he called the ‘‘static degradation’’ (Wright 120) of the Gold Coast and called for emerging African countries to reject their traditional religious and tribal customs in order to become modern nations which employed twentieth-century technology and urbanization to achieve economic and political independence from the west. To make matters worse, Wright was greatly disappointed by how he was received by black Africans who viewed him suspiciously as an outsider and treated him as a stranger. As he revealed in a 1960 interview, he detected a ‘‘psychological distance’’ between himself and the citizens of Ghana which he found ‘‘upsetting’’ (Kinnamon 237). His problems deepened when he tried to understand and perhaps become involved with Gold Coast politics. He felt that Nkrumah generally ignored him throughout his visit and was bitterly disillusioned when he visited the new assembly and found that it was modeled after British Parliament and did little to meet the pressing needs of the country’s people. As he recorded in his journal, his first-hand observations of the political life of Gold Coast politics resulted in 147

Gibson, Richard his having ‘‘lost all interest in the Gold Coast’’ and resolving to cut his visit short by three and one-half months. He returned to Paris greatly depressed about his African trip. As he confessed to Paul Reynolds, Jr., ‘‘I’m told that the Gold Coast is by far the best part of Africa’’ and ‘‘If that is so, I don’t want to see the worst’’ (Rowley 437). But Wright’s long-term commitment to opposing European colonialism and working for the creation of independent nations in Africa eventually enabled him to overcome the personal disappointment of his 1953 trip to the Gold Coast. After Ghana achieved independence in 1957, Wright’s faith in that country was revived. Late in his life, he wrote to Nkrumah, volunteering his services as a teacher and advisor. He also contacted the embassy of Ghana to become involved in the Movement for the Liberation of Africa. Nothing came of either of Wright’s attempts to become actively involved in Ghana’s politics and culture. Nkrumah never answered his letter and nobody in the Movement to Liberate Africa contacted him. Wright’s final attempt to find a homeland failed, and he was forced to live out his last years in a condition of aloneness in what he described in White Man, Listen! as being a member of a ‘‘tragic elite’’ forced to inhabit ‘‘the cliff-like margins of many cultures’’ as ‘‘lonely outsiders’’ (Wright v). Selected Bibliography: Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Moore, Jack B. ‘‘No Street Numbers in Accra: Richard Wright’s African Cities.’’ In The City in African-American Literature. edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Butler. Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday, 1957.

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GIBSON, RICHARD An African-American journalist whom Wright knew in Paris when Gibson worked as a reporter for Agence France-Presse. Richard Gibson was born in Los Angeles, raised in Philadelphia, and lived as an expatriate for many years in Paris and London. For most of his adult life, Gibson was affiliated with radical leftist organizations. In the early 1960s, he was a member of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, where he became acquainted with Lee Harvey Oswald, and, after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, he was interviewed by the CIA for information concerning Oswald. He authored several books on African liberation movements and was editor for the Algiers-based journal, Revolution Africaine. Wright came to know him when Gibson became embroiled in a nasty personal dispute with Wright’s close friend, cartoonist Ollie Harrington. In the summer of 1956, Harrington lived at the Cote d’Azur and sublet his Paris apartment to Gibson. When Harrington returned, Gibson refused to give up the apartment and would not allow Harrington to remove his furniture, paintings, and personal belongings. The two became embattled for nearly two years since Harrington was unwilling to call upon the French police to resolve the matter for fear that this dispute might endanger his status in France and result in his being deported to the United States. This long, drawn-out battle became known as the ‘‘Gibson Affair’’ and most members of the black expatriate community in Paris took sides in it. Wright supported his close friend Harrington and at one point visited the French embassy on his behalf, greatly annoying Gibson and his friend, William Gardner Smith. Their argument took on a new level of intensity in 1957 when Gibson and Smith sent a letter to Look and the London Observer criticizing French policy in Algeria and forging Harrington’s name on the letter. Since the French had a strict policy of deporting foreigners living in France who were critical of their political policies, Harrington regarded the letter as an attempt by Gibson and Smith to

Gide, Andre´ discredit him with French officials and have him sent back to the United States where he would be a target for the House Un-American Activities Committee. He hired a criminal lawyer, Jacques Mercier, to investigate the matter. When he got proof that Gibson had written the letters, he confronted him with this evidence at the Cafe´ Tournon where the two often gathered with other expatriate Americans. A fist fight broke out between the two men, resulting in Gibson being beaten so badly that he had to be hospitalized for a week. Wright was also victimized by Gibson’s chicanery when an article appeared in the November 12, 1958 issue of Time which quoted Wright as being extremely unhappy with the racial situation in America, claiming that racial problems have not changed for over 300 years. Wright, who certainly believed this but in fact never made the statement to a Time reporter, became enraged, sensing that Gibson had planted the remark as a way of endangering his position in France and getting him deported to the United States. He wrote a strong letter to the editors of Time, denying he had made the remarks cited in the article and accusing the magazine of ‘‘character assassination’’ (Rowley 496). He immediately suspected Gibson as the one who inserted the antiAmerican remarks in the Time article and began to see Gibson as working for the CIA or FBI. The matter was resolved when Gibson was questioned by French police and admitted to forging the letters to Look and the London Observer as well as making up the remarks ascribed to Wright in the Time article. Wright, eager to put the matter behind him and thus draw no further attention to himself by the authorities, decided not to press charges against Gibson. His suspicions that Gibson was part of a plot to discredit him, however, were deepened when he received a postcard from Havana on July 6, 1960 which said ‘‘Greetings from revolutionary Cuba, a really free and democratic land that dared to shake off the shackles of American imperialism’’ (Rowley 516). If such a card were found in his Paris apartment by French or American officials,

it would have created serious problems for Wright. Knowing what is now know about the elaborate files kept on Wright by the CIA and FBI, it is not difficult to see why he sensed that people like Gibson were part of a plot to discredit him. Wright’s feelings of being persecuted found their way into his novel, ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ which was begun in 1958 but never was published. The book portrays the black expatriate community in Paris as under heavy surveillance by French and American officials and their lives complicated by their own political intrigues and personal competition. Gibson is represented as Bill Hart, a black man who spies upon other blacks as a way of currying favor with government authorities. Selected Bibliography: Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris. New York: Scribners, 1995. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1980. Himes, Chester. My Life of Absurdity. New York: Paragon, 1976. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

GIDE, ANDRE´ (22 November 1869– 19 February 1951) A French fiction writer, autobiographer, and essayist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947, Gide was a major force in the development of modern literature. He was born in Paris, the son of a law professor at the University of Paris and the nephew of political economist, Charles Gide. His family enjoyed a privileged, upper-class lifestyle which enabled Gide to get an elite education and have the leisure to read widely. After his father died when he was eleven, Gide was raised by his mother, a severe religionist who ingrained Calvinistic principles in the young Gide. Gide rebelled against this religious training by refusing to go to college and instead pursuing the vocation of a writer. He published his first novel in 1891, The Notebooks of Andre´ Walter, an 149

Gide, Andre´ autobiographical narrative centering on an alienated youth attempting to become a writer. In 1893 and 1894, Gide traveled to Africa, initiating a fascination with Africa and a hatred of European colonialism. He returned to Africa in 1926, traveling widely through the Congo, French Equatorial Africa, Chad, and the Cameroons. His journey resulted in Travels in the Congo (1927) and Return from Chad (1928), Conradian narratives which were deeply critical of French colonial policies and economic exploitation of Africa. Gide’s leftist politics led him to a brief flirtation with communism in the late twenties and early thirties but his trip to the Soviet Union in 1936 disillusioned him bitterly. His Back from Russia (1937) described his final break with communism, criticizing the Soviet regime for betraying the Marxist principles of the Russian Revolution. As he revealed in his 1950 essay ‘‘Worshippers from Afar’’ which appeared in The God That Failed, Gide saw the Soviet Union degenerating into a repressive totalitarian state which punished independent thinking with exile and death. Communism, which had promised utopian justice and equality, had delivered ‘‘a new and terrible despotism’’ (Gide 176). Gide’s novels are, for the most part, nonpolitical, focusing on the inward lives of central characters who are alienated from conventional society. Gide meticulously analyzes the psychological complexities of his characters, brilliantly employing experimental techniques to dramatize their inner lives. His most successful and influential novels include The Immoralist (1902), Corydon (1920), and The Counterfeiters (1925). His Journal, published in 1939, is a landmark work in modern autobiographical writing. Wright began reading Gide’s fiction when he lived in Chicago and came in contact with him when the two attended the American Writers Congress in New York in 1935. Gide attended a reception given in Wright’s honor in Paris in 1946, and they discussed American racial problems and their disaffection from the Communist Party. They soon became friends and were

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involved in the founding of Pre´sence Africaine in 1947, a journal devoted to black culture, art, and politics. Gide was listed with Sartre and Camus as among the magazine’s patrons, and Wright was a member of its editorial board. Wright shared Gide’s strong opposition to European colonialism and greatly admired Gide’s writing. When asked in a 1947 interview about the French writers he preferred, Wright replied ‘‘I love Maupassant, Proust, Gide, and the marvelous Malraux’’ (Kinnamon 116). Wright deeply admired Gide’s explorations of self in his novels and short stories, especially his Dostoevskian probing of the minds of criminals and other marginalized people. When he read Gide’s Travels in the Congo in 1946, he was impressed by Gide’s astute analysis of the problems faced by twentiethcentury ‘‘third world’’ nations, and his reading of Gide’s book strengthened his resolve to make his own journeys in Africa. Although they came from radically different social and economic backgrounds, Wright and Gide shared a number of important similarities as individuals and writers. Both lost fathers at an early age and were brought up by women who exposed them to a severely puritanical religious tradition. Each was drawn to communism, partly in rebellion against their stern religious backgrounds, and each became bitterly disillusioned by what they perceived as the gap between Marxist principles and communist practices. Both recorded their political disillusionments in Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed. They remained maverick members on the noncommunist left and actively opposed both Soviet totalitarianism and European colonialism. Strong individualists who defended the prerogatives of the self, Wright and Gide were attracted to existentialism, a non-systematic philosophy which placed heavy emphasis on personal freedom and responsibility. Wright’s library contained eight books by Gide, including The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist, Travels in the Congo, and Journals (Fabre 60–61). See also Marxism.

Gold, Michael Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Gide, Andre´. ‘‘Worshippers from Afar’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1965. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

GOLD, MICHAEL (12 April 1893– 14 May 1967) He was born Irwin Granich to Jewish immigrant parents on New York’s lower East Side and after the Palmer Raids of 1919–20 took the named Michael Gold in honor of a Jewish Civil War veteran who was an abolitionist. He grew up in middle class circumstances, but after his father’s business failed, he was forced to drop out of school and went to work at age twelve to help support his family. He became a communist in 1914, influenced by the prose and poetry he read in the Marxist magazine, The Masses. His first poem, which focused on three anarchists who died in a bomb explosion, was published in The Masses, thus initiating a long literary career which lasted fifty years. He became part of a bohemian group living in Greenwich Village which included leftists such as John Reed and Emma Goldman and writers such as Eugene O’Neill and Floyd Dell. In 1921, he became one of the co-editors of The Liberator, which had become the official journal of the Communist Party of the United States when The Masses was repressed by government officials as part of their campaign against radical leftist organizations after World War I. Gold helped to found The New Masses in 1926, a magazine committed to publishing the writings of workers rather than the work of intellectuals coming from middle class backgrounds. He became editor-inchief of The New Masses in 1928. He published his autobiographical novel, Jews Without Money, in February 1930, and it was an immediate popular and critical success, going into its eleventh printing by October and drawing strong praise from American reviewers. Although set in the 1920s, it is a quintessential work of the

1930s, describing in exacting detail the harshness of ghetto life on New York’s lower East Side. Like Odets’s Waiting for Lefty and many other American masterworks of the Great Depression, it posits Marxist revolution as the cure for the myriad social ills which the book describes. With the extraordinary success of Jews Without Money, Gold became a nationally prominent writer and a leading figure of the American communist movement. In 1933, he became a regular columnist for The Daily Worker, a Communist Party newspaper which circulated widely throughout the United States and abroad. Unlike many leftist artists and intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s who lost their faith in communism, Gold’s radical beliefs and his faith in Marxist revolution remained unshaken throughout his life. He stayed true to his ideological connections all the way to his death and was extremely critical of American writers who abandoned their leftist beliefs in the 1940s and 1950s. Wright first met Gold in 1934 at the John Reed Club congress in Chicago. In that same year, he invited Gold to give a paper entitled ‘‘The Crisis of Modern Literature’’ at ‘‘The Second Congress Against War and Fascism’’ in Chicago. Gold was an established figure in leftist circles, and Wright, whom Gold described as ‘‘a shy and very young proletarian poet’’ (Kinnamon, Critical Essays 40) when he first met him, greatly admired Gold as a writer and organizer. When asked in 1940 about the literary generation to which he belonged, Wright answered that he identified with the generation of writers which included Gold, John Steinbeck, and James T. Farrell (Kinnamon, Conversations 32). Gold wrote a very favorable review of Native Son in the March 30, 1940 issue of Sunday Worker which argued that Wright had become a ‘‘national figure’’ with the publication of this groundbreaking novel and that the book ‘‘will burn itself on the imagination of this country . . . as has no other novel about Negroes since Uncle Tom’s Cabin’’ (Kinnamon, Critical Essays 40). Gold’s review offered a conventional Marxist reading of the novel, envisioning Bigger Thomas 151

Gorky, Maxim as a ‘‘poor boy’’ who was victimized by ‘‘white capitalism’’ and praising two communists, Jan and Max, for helping Bigger ‘‘to discover his own manhood’’ (Kinnamon, Critical Essays 41). However, after Ben Davis, Jr. wrote a review of Native Son faulting the novel for presenting an excessively negative and limited vision of African-American experience, Gold wrote a second review of Native Son in the September 29, 1940 issue of The Daily Worker which agreed with Davis’s criticism. Wright was stung by their disapproval and wrote a letter to Gold objecting to the Communist Party’s restricting the artistic freedom of its writers. Wright refused to view his own reality as a black man through the ‘‘lens’’ constructed by orthodox communist ideology. He emphasized to Gold that he would not violate his integrity as a writer by following ‘‘well established lines of perception and feeling’’ (Fabre 185) prescribed by party purists. This split with Gold, Davis, and other party officials over the issue of artistic freedom widened over the next two years and was one of the main reasons why Wright eventually left the Communist Party. Gold and Wright never repaired their ideological and personal break-up. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Madden, David. Proletarian Writers of the Thirties. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968. Kinnamon, Keneth. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Kinnamon, Keneth. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan, 1997.

GORKY, MAXIM (1868–1936) Russia’s greatest proletarian writer, Alexei Peshkov, called himself Gorky, ‘‘The Bitter.’’ Gorky liberated Russian realism from a relative conservatism. Raised by his grandparents, set to work at age eight, in his earliest and best fiction Gorky

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draws on difficult youth in advancing beyond the nineteenth-century giants Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov. Later, through a huge but perhaps necessarily uneven production of novels, stories, plays, and memoirs, Gorky constituted the only bridge, and a reluctant one at that, between two flawed political systems. His work documents the rise of the proletariat under tsarism and anticipates the coming of the revolution and later socialist realism, a term he fathered. Not an ideologue by nature, from the first he fell afoul of the two regimes: the tsarists, whom he criticized, imprisoned him, while the bolsheviks, whom he supported initially, distrusted him. Ultimately, it seems, Stalin had him poisoned when Russia’s unofficial laureate half-heartedly returned to the Soviet Union, having lived abroad too long among the e´ migre´ s, both before and after the revolution. Throughout his life, Gorky showed great generosity toward his fellows and an enduring commitment to his ideals but remained ill at ease amid the realities of any sociopolitical system. All his work underlines a widening gap between his high hopes for the people and his deeper doubts about their future and that of ‘‘mother Russia.’’ In particular, his most explosive play, The Lower Depths (1901), documents that same pessimistic ambivalence in its expansion of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (1865) from dramatic monologue to social tragedy. Like Dostoevsky, and later Richard Wright, Gorky at times seems suspended between dream and dread, anticipating the now familiar modernist conflict between romantic aspirations toward transcendence or escape and realist insistence on material or other constraints. The complementary worldviews of Dostoevsky and Gorky found favor with Wright as reflected in different periods in his writings. In 1937, Wright had included Gorky in ‘‘the [must-read] heritage of the Negro writer,’’ along with other white activists like Henri Barbusse and Jack London. Later, in 1955, he re-affirmed more blandly his admiration for Gorky as an influential ‘‘writer and artist

The Gothic (literary style) whose courage and humanity towered above politics.’’ Wright’s library indeed included several volumes by Gorky in sometimes hard-to-find English translation. As Dale Peterson recognized, Wright initially identified himself closely with Gorky’s life and writings: here were two fellow travelers in proletarian internationalism following a common path up from their brutal childhood circumstances toward worldwide social change. Yet, by 1942, an increasingly alienated Wright abandoned the collectivist militancy of the early Gorky for the existential isolation of Wright’s later years, a re-orientation which Dostoevsky and Gorky, to a degree, had themselves also undergone. See also Marxism. Roy Rosenstein Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Peterson, Dale E. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Long Journey from Gorky to Dostoevsky.’’ African American Review, 28, no. 3 (1994), 375–87).

THE GOTHIC (LITERARY STYLE) The fiction of Richard Wright has most frequently been associated with the tradition of African-American realism or ‘‘Black protest’’ fiction, but increasingly, literary critics are recognizing a clear gothic undertone in many of his works (cf. Joseph Bodziock and James Smethurst). Smethurst, in fact, contends that Wright’s Native Son is not a gothic novel, but an ‘‘anti-gothic’’ work condemning the capitalistic inheritance of gothic social and economic structures like slavery, transgressive sexuality, and unrightful and violent usurpations of inheritance and property (29). A fuller examination of Wright’s works actually presents an author who appears closest to the ‘‘masculine’’ or ‘‘male gothic’’ tradition that has been identified by current practitioners of gothic literary criticism (Williams 102–4). The major characteristic of this sort of gothic is a focus on evil as emanating from outside forces, external to and out of the control of the hero, such as a corrupt patriarchal system, or the almost supernatural machinations of an evil duke or monk. Other

dominant characteristics of the male gothic are its heavy use of doubles or doppelgangers (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), dreams as manifestations of internal fears or anxieties that also explain and further the plot (The Castle of Otranto), and persistent and fairly gratuitous beatings and violence against women, particularly the mother (The Monk). Any reader of Wright’s fiction can be recognize all of these characteristics throughout his works. For instance, it has long been recognized that a central problem in understanding Wright’s fiction has been coming to grips with the violence, motivated or unmotivated, toward female characters. In ‘‘Alas, Poor Richard,’’ James Baldwin observes that in black fiction ‘‘there is a great space where sex ought to be; and what usually fills this space is violence.’’ Baldwin interprets the violence in Wright’s fiction as ‘‘compulsive’’ and ‘‘gratuitous’’ because the source is never examined. But Baldwin suspects that the root of violence in Wright’s fiction is the rage of a man being castrated, that is, ‘‘unmanned’’ by a white society (187–88). But there are also personal issues behind the violence perpetuated against the mother in Wright’s fiction. Fabre’s biography explains many of the personal dimensions behind the fiction. For instance, Fabre recounts Wright’s intense interest in Freudian interpretations of violence as exemplified in Wright’s involvement with Clinton Brewer, a young black man imprisoned for killing a woman. Wright introduced Brewer to Dr. Frederic Wertham, a Freudian psychoanalyst, who helped plead for Brewer’s release. Wright and Wertham were successful; however, Brewer murdered another woman shortly after his release and this time Wright and Wertham had to marshal their energies to save Brewer from execution (Fabre 236–37). Wright’s interest in the Brewer case and his association with Wertham can be utilized to understand the generally gothic depiction of women in his fiction. That is, his increasingly self-conscious treatment of the Freudian theme centers on the relation to and influence of the mother. Significantly, women do not appear in 153

The Gothic (literary style) Wright’s fiction except as mothers or surrogatemother figures. Consequently, the hero is inevitably engaged in a fruitless quest for the mother’s undivided loyalty. It is a pattern in Wright’s heroes that they are both strongly attached to the mother-image and at the same time disillusioned by the corruption of what should have been her sexual inviolability. They are forced, then, into the position of accepting women either as an asexual, pure being, or as a whore, soiled and deserving of death. Such a psychology is identical to the one depicted at great length in one of the classics of the male gothic tradition, Matthew Lewis’s The Month (1796). Fabre further traces Wright’s personal ambivalence and fear of women to the beating he received from his mother after he set a fire in their house. Richard, according to Fabre, regarded this punishment ‘‘as a betrayal. It not only seriously inhibited his independent spirit but also caused him to doubt his relationship to his mother . . . . This episode brutally shattered the emotional security he had derived from the exclusive affection of his mother’’ (10). Wright presents his version of this betrayal in his autobiography Black Boy. After the beating, he describes himself as ‘‘lost in a fog of fear’’ so that whether he was awake or sleeping he was terrified of the ‘‘huge wobbly white bags, like the full udders of cows, suspended from the ceiling above me.’’ Later, he becomes gripped ‘‘by the fear that they were going to fall and drench me with some horrible liquid’’ (6). Clearly, the beating caused the child to see the maternal breasts not as nourishing but as destructive. This is made explicit when Richard remarks that ‘‘for a long time I was chastened whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me’’ (6). Besides rage and fear of women, the gothic manifests itself in the motif of beatings, real and imagined. Assaults, rapes, and murders of women characterize such male gothics as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto. Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today! (1935–37), depicts the struggles of a black

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middle-class post office employee, Jake. Written in the day-in-the-life style, Lawd Today! begins and ends with Jake’s beating his wife. The marriage of Jake and Lil has become not only loveless, but sexless. Her incapacity for sexual relations, the result of a botched abortion which Jake engineered, places Lil in a maternal position. Jake assumes a child-like position toward her and is so jealous of her conversations with the milkman that he returns to the house to spy on her. His frustrated dependence on her culminates in the frequent and violent beatings that later in Wright’s fiction become overt attempts at matricide. Whereas Lawd Today! presents the sexual frustrations of a son-figure, ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow,’’ part of the collection entitled Eight Men, depicts the murder of a woman who exists only as a ‘‘shadow’’ to the black hero, Saul Saunders. Similar to the gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe (‘‘William Wilson’’) or Henry James (‘‘The Jolly Corner’’), Wright is here using another of the persistent gothic techniques, a doubled or shadowed character who embodies the repressed or hidden side of the protagonist. To Saul, all people are shadows; however, women are particularly threatening. While working as a janitor, Saul is asked by a white librarian to clean under her desk. He finds her ‘‘sitting with her knees sprawled apart and her dress drawn halfway up her legs’’ (200). Saul becomes ‘‘baffled, humiliated, frightened, afraid to express his anger openly’’ (201). When the librarian calls Saul a ‘‘black nigger,’’ he slaps her, and she begins to scream. In his attempts to silence the librarian, he flees to the roof, finds a pile of wood, and grabs a piece of ‘‘oaken firewood’’ as a weapon. After hitting her over the head and strangling her, he finally plunges a knife into her throat and uses her pink panties as ‘‘a good mop to clean up the blood’’ (204). Native Son, the classic work of Wright’s career and a mid-point in his development, reveals more than Bigger’s response to Mary and Mrs. Dalton as white women. Significantly, in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’

The Gothic (literary style) Was Born’’ Wright claimed that he wrote Native Son ‘‘to free myself of this sense of shame and fear’’ (Native Son xxii). But rather than interpreting these emotions as purely as a desire for improved social and racial conditions, it seems that Wright was aware of the deeper psychological as well as gothic currents represented by Bigger. He writes: There seems to hover somewhere in that dark part of all our lives, in some more than in others, objectless, time less, spaceless element of primal fear and dread, stemming, perhaps, from our birth (depending upon whether one’s outlook is Freudian or non-Freudian!) a fear and dread which exercises an impelling influence upon our lives all out of proportion to its obscurity. (xxv)

It would seem that this fear and shame, then, constitutes the son’s dependence on the mother and her power to give birth. Bigger explains that he had always acted hard and tough toward his mother in order to conceal his frustration at being unable to support and please her. In Bigger’s case, this shame and fear find their only outlet in unconscious and displaced matricide, for by killing Mary and Bessie, Bigger escapes, momentarily and vicariously, from the frustration of his very gothic dilemma. Gothic works present male characters who traditionally confront the power of the feminine to give birth and they either destroy this power (Poe’s ‘‘The Fall of the House of Usher’’) or they attempt to appropriate this power for themselves (Shelley’s Frankenstein). Bigger actually attempts both moves in Native Son. Initially, Bigger is painfully aware of his mother’s disappointment and repudiation (‘‘ ‘Bigger, sometimes I wonder why I birthed you’ ’’ [11]), and upon arriving to work for the Daltons, Bigger quickly identifies Mrs. Dalton as a potential maternal figure whom he does not want to disappoint (‘‘He had a feeling toward her that was akin to that which he held toward his mother’’ [62]). But Bigger’s attention is quickly diverted by the presence of Mary, to whom he evidences an ambivalent attitude. She is ‘‘beautiful, slender, with an air that made him

feel that she did not hate him with the hate of other white people,’’ but, he reminds himself, ‘‘she was white and he hated her’’ (81). Mary, then, clearly embodies Bigger’s fantasies about rich white women as sexual partners. But Mary’s ‘‘accidental’’ murder hints strongly at displaced matricide, at least unconsciously. Until the blind Mrs. Dalton entered the room, Bigger’s intentions were sexual rather than murderous. But when Mrs. Dalton entered the room, Bigger is seized by ‘‘hysterical terror’’ so that he felt as if ‘‘he were falling from a great height in a dream’’ (84). This dream-like and very gothic atmosphere reinforces the notion that Bigger’s actions are motivated less by his conscious mind than by his unconscious. In his attempts to silence Mary’s mumbling, Bigger accidentally smothers her, but on another level there is much more significance to his actions. As he later explains to Max, ‘‘ ‘I couldn’t do nothing when I turned around and saw that woman [Mrs. Dalton] coming to that bed. Honest to God, I didn’t know what I was doing.’ ’’ Yet when Max presses Bigger about whether he was conscious or not, Bigger replies, ‘‘ ‘I knew what I was doing, all right. But I couldn’t help it’ ’’ (325–26). This ‘‘other man’’ who possesses Bigger is his gothic double or doppelganger who perceives Mrs. Dalton as a spectre of his own disapproving and castrating mother. It is Mrs. Dalton who is the ghostly and very gothic ‘‘white blur floating toward him’’ that intimidates ‘‘him to the core’’ (85). Bigger’s perception of Mrs. Dalton as a ‘‘white blur’’ reminds the reader of Black Boy of the threatening maternal udders that produce irrational fear in the hero. But this time the hero was a surrogate object on which he can avenge the maternal betrayal. After killing Mary, it is significant that Bigger feels as if ‘‘he had been in the grip of a weird spell and was now free’’ (86). Poe’s heroes frequently feel that way just after killing someone (‘‘The Tell-Tale Heart’’). But Bessie functions as a gothic double to Mary just as Mrs. Dalton acts as a double to Bigger’s own mother. Bigger is, in fact, never totally free of the maternal figures that surround him. His 155

Gourfain, Joyce relationship with Bessie is also inadequate and fails to provide him with the emotional support he needs. She functions throughout their interactions as another female who uses her sexuality to make demands. Her role as a surrogate-mother is made clear when she warms milk for Bigger, and he promptly consumes three glasses after confessing Mary’s murder. Bigger, of course, murders Bessie and goes to his execution convinced that neither Mary nor Bessie were ‘‘real to him, not human beings’’ (108). Indeed, they were not human so much as they were substitute objects for the real target of the hero’s rage, the mother. Such a pattern is prevalent throughout gothic fiction, and sounds eerily like Victor Frankenstein’s creature or the ramblings of Count Dracula. As Bigger assures Max, ‘‘ ‘I ain’t worried none about them women I killed. For a little while I was free. I was doing something. It was wrong, but I was feeling all right.’ ’’ He further declares that ‘‘ ‘What I killed for must’ve been good. . . . When a man kills, it’s for something’ ’’ (328–29). Ironically, Bigger, like Lewis’s hero-monk Ambrosio, could only find the very brief fulfillment that he did find in his life by destroying two women who accidentally were identified with his mother. Diane Long Hoeveler Selected Bibliography: Baldwin, James. ‘‘Alas, Poor Richard,’’ in Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dial, 1961. Bodziock, Joseph. ‘‘Richard Wright and AfroAmerican Gothic.’’ In Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. edited by C. James Trotman. New York: Garland, 1988, pp 27–42. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, trans. Isabel Barzun. New York: Morrow, 1973. Smethurst, James. ‘‘Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son.’’ African American Review 35, Spring 2001, 29–40. Wertham, Frederic. Dark Legend. New York: Doubleday, 1949. Wertham, Frederic. ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son.’’ Journal of Clinical Psychotherapy, 6, 1944, 111–15. Williams, Anne. The Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1995. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1945. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ in Native Son. Wright, Richard. ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow,’’ in Eight Men. Cleveland, 156

Ohio: World, 1961. Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940; rpt. New York: Harper, 1966.

GOURFAIN, JOYCE Wright met Joyce Gourfain when the two were members of the John Reed Club in Chicago in 1934. She was a writer and a painter who was a member of the Communist Party. Wright formed a close friendship with her and her husband, Ed and visited them often in their Hyde Park house on Kimbark Street near the University of Chicago. Along with Abraham Chapman, Jane Newton, Nelson Algren, Abe Aaron, and Bill Jordan, the Gourfains became part of what Margaret Walker has called a ‘‘little bohemia’’ (Walker 78) of radical leftists. Wright would often go to the Gourfain house in the afternoon where he and Joyce would discuss their work in particular and literature in general. She examined drafts of ‘‘Down by the Riverside,’’ a story which would be included in Uncle Tom’s Children. It was Joyce Gourfain who loaned Wright a copy of Henry James’s The Art of the Novel, a book which had a strong influence on his artistic development as a fiction writer and which he would come to consider as his writer’s ‘‘bible’’ (Walker 75). Wright often would borrow clothing from Ed Gourfain, and he was dressed in a suit loaned from him when he left Chicago and went to New York in 1937. Wright kept up his friendship with the Gourfains while living in New York. He and Margaret Walker visited them in 1938 when Wright briefly returned to Chicago to do research for Native Son. Hazel Rowley speculates that Joyce Gourfain may have been one of the models for Mary Dalton and points out that she was deeply offended with the way in which white women were portrayed in Native Son. She also claims that ‘‘Wright’s first affair with a white woman was almost certainly with Joyce Gourfain’’ (Rowley 92). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow,

The Great Depression 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION A period of world-wide economic catastrophe initiated by the American Stock Market crash in 1929 and lasting until the onset of World War II. During this period, the gross national product in America was reduced by 50 percent, thousands of banks and businesses failed, and widespread unemployment plagued all parts of the nation. To make matters worse, a period of prolonged drought in the American Midwest and South created agricultural disasters on an unprecedented scale. Next to the Civil War, the Great Depression was the greatest cultural crisis in American history. Although all segments of the American population suffered greatly during this time, African Americans faced particularly severe hardships. Last hired and first fired, they experienced massive unemployment in both the northern city and the southern farm. During the 1930s, the number of black tenant farmers and sharecroppers were reduced by over 200,000. Industrial workers were either laid off or replaced by whites. By 1932, 56 percent of American blacks were unemployed. Chicago was particularly hard hit by the Depression, especially in the ‘‘Black Belt.’’ By 1930, all banks in the South Side had closed, and unemployment for Chicago’s blacks was three times higher than it was for whites. Wright, who had gone to Chicago with his family in 1927 to escape southern poverty and racism, experienced first-hand some of the worst difficulties suffered by blacks in the Depression, and this had a profound effect on his major work, particularly Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and American Hunger. The sole support for much of the early years of the Depression for his mother, aunt, and brother, Wright had achieved high scores on the qualifying exams for the Chicago Post Office and had hopes of securing steady work but was laid off after the stock market crash of 1929 and thereafter had to cobble

together a living with sporadic work at the post office; very limited help from welfare; and a series of menial jobs such as sweeping streets, digging ditches, and janitorial work at Michael Reese Hospital. This provided barely enough money for him and his family to eke out a meager existence while living in a series of South Side kitchenettes not so very different from the impoverished apartment endured by the Thomas family in Native Son. Despite these hardships, Wright underwent enormous growth during the Depression both as a person and artist. The ambitious program of reading begun in Memphis continued vigorously as Wright studied a wide range of American and European writers, including James, Stein, Faulkner, Eliot, Dostoevsky, Dreiser, Poe, Ibsen, and Zola. He also made strong political commitments which would help to shape his work, joining the John Reed Club in 1933 and the Communist Party in 1934. From 1934 onward, he published a substantial amount of poetry and essays in leftist journals such as Left Front, Anvil, New Masses, and New Challenge. He also served as literary advisor in the mid-1930s to the Negro Federal Theatre of Chicago. During this period, Wright developed a number of important literary friendships with Nelson Algren, James T. Farrell, and Jack Conroy while becoming a leading member of the South Side Writers Group consisting of a number of young African-American writers such as Margaret Walker, Theodore Ward, Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson and Horace Cayton. (This latter group was largely responsible for what is now known as ‘‘The Chicago Renaissance’’ which introduced important new directions in AfricanAmerican literature.) After moving to Harlem in 1937, Wright became the Harlem editor of the Daily Worker and developed close friendships with novelist Ralph Ellison, editor Edward Aswell, and agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. All of this activity resulted in a remarkable literary harvest for Wright. He published an important poem, ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ in 1935, Uncle Tom’s Children, in 1938 and Native 157

The Great Migration Son in 1940. In addition, he completed several important prose pieces of literary theory and cultural criticism such as ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ (1937) and ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ (1937). By the time the Great Depression had been brought to its conclusion by the onset of World War II, Wright had become an important writer who transformed American and AfricanAmerican literatures. Coming of age in a time of enormous cultural crisis, he produced work of enduring literary merit and, in the words of Irving Howe, changed ‘‘American culture . . . forever.’’ Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Butler, Robert. Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero.. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

THE GREAT MIGRATION The epic movement of black people from the rural South to the urban North in the first half of the twentieth century. Most historians describe the Great Migration as a pivotal event in AfricanAmerican history. August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, for example, argue that After the Civil War and Emancipation, the major watershed in American black history was the Great Migration to northern cities that began during the First World War. According to the census of 1910, American black people were overwhelmingly rural and southern; approximately three our of four lived in rural areas and nine out of ten lived in the South. A half century later, Negroes were mainly an urban population, almost three-fourths of them being city dwellers. The changes in the texture of Negro life have been enormous. (213)

Driven physically out of the South by agricultural disasters brought on by the boll weevil epidemic, soil depletion, and massive flooding, and also alienated from southern culture by its systems of segregation and sharecropping, blacks flooded

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northern cities in search of a better life. Between 1900 and 1910, the black population of New York grew by 51 percent and the black population of Chicago expanded by 30 percent. The years surrounding World War I witnessed an especially dramatic increase in the number of black people living in northern cities for the war greatly stimulated war industries, creating an enormous need for both skilled and unskilled labor. Between 1910 and 1919, Chicago’s African-American population more than doubled and it continued to grow throughout the 1920s. Cleveland’s black community grew from 8,000 in 1910 to 34,000 in 1919, and cities such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston also witnessed dramatic rises in their black populations. Even though the Great Depression took away much of the economic lure of the northern city, the migration of blacks northward continued, although at a slower rate. World War II greatly accelerated black migration as African Americans recoiled once again from southern injustice and were strongly attracted by war time jobs in American cities, both in the North and in the West. The immediate result of the Great Migration was a bitter disappointment for black people because their rapid infusion into northern cities soon produced teeming ghettos such as the one depicted in Native Son. Rather than being integrated with the mainstream of American life, where they could get their fair share of the tremendous prosperity brought on by war industries and postwar expansion, blacks found themselves once again segregated and treated as second-class citizens. This segregating was done in a number of ways. On a personal level, blacks were kept out of white neighborhoods by violence directed at them in the form of beatings, stonings, and bombing of their homes. White home owners also formed so-called neighborhood improvement associations for the purpose of excluding blacks, and real estate agencies like that owned by Mr. Dalton in Native Son developed restrictive covenants that prevented blacks from renting and buying homes in all-white sections of the city.

Green, Paul Richard Wright’s life coincided directly with the Great Migration, and he experienced both its American promises and its bitter disappointments. To make matters even worse, he moved to Chicago in 1927, just two years prior to the onset of the Great Depression when circumstances in American cities became particularly harsh for African Americans. Although unemployment rates during the depression were high for all Americans, they were especially high for black people. By 1933, between 25 percent and 40 percent of blacks in major urban centers were on public assistance, a mode of life reducing them to the marginal subsistence level which Wright and his family endured and which is so powerfully represented in Native Son and American Hunger. By 1934, fully 38 percent of black workers were unemployed and had few prospects of jobs. Wright clearly saw the Great Migration as the crucial fact of twentieth-century AfricanAmerican history and an important part of his own life. He personally endured the harsh realities of the urban ghetto as he and his family were forced to live in a number of overpriced and under-serviced ‘‘kitchenettes’’ when they lived in Chicago. And after Wright had achieved financial and artistic success, he was denied access to decent housing because of his skin color. In 12 Million Black Voices, he emphasizes how black people were betrayed when they sought a better life in the northern city. While in the South they were exploited by the ‘‘Lords of the Land,’’ they were equally victimized by the ‘‘Bosses of The Buildings’’ (24) in cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago. Wright stresses in 12 Million Black Voices that the urban lives of twentieth-century blacks were further complicated by the fact that the medieval conditions they had endured in the South had made them ill-prepared to cope with the difficulties of life in the modern metropolis. As he reveals in ‘‘Death on City Pavements:’’ Perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city; we were barely born as a folk when we headed for the tall

and sprawling centers of steel and stone . . . . And how were we to know that, the moment we landless millions of the land—we men who were struggling to be born—set our awkward feet upon the pavements of the city, life would begin to exact its heavy toll in death? (93)

This ‘‘heavy toll in death’’ is powerfully described in Wright’s urban fiction such as Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and Lawd Today! Wright was the first American writer to describe the black ghetto in a carefully detailed and unflinchingly honest way. These works provide compelling evidence that the Great Migration, far from ending up in a ‘‘promised land’’ which would fulfill the American dream, resulted in what Wright described as ‘‘nightmare in history’’ (12 Million Black Voices 27). Selected Bibliography: Grant, Robert B. The Black Man Comes to the City: A Documentary Account from The Great Migration to The Great Depression, 1915– 1930. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1972. Lehman, Nicholas. The Promised Land. New York: Random House, 1991. Meier, August and Elliott Rudwick. From Plantation to Ghetto. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970. Rogers, Lawrence. Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration Novel. Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002.

GREEN, PAUL (17 March 1894– 4 May 1981) Born on a cotton farm in Hartnett County, North Carolina, Green was deeply rooted in southern rural culture and wrote many plays about the problems faced by poor working people, both black and white. He won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with In Abraham’s Bosom which featured an all black cast and focused on a black man who was shot by a mob when he attempted to open a school in rural North Carolina. During the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote a series of one-act folk plays such as The Lord’s Will (1925), Unto Such Glory (1928), and Hymn to the Rising Sun (1936) which explored the sufferings and heroic possibilities of rural southerners. 159

Green, Paul Green is best known today for inventing a unique form of American theatre known as ‘‘symphonic drama’’ which incorporated dance, music, pantomime, and acrobatics. These plays centered on subjects of historical importance and often were staged outdoors. The Lost Colony (1937), for example, celebrated the 350th anniversary of Roanoke colony and was once performed on the site of that failed colony. Green wrote and produced a number of other symphonic dramas such as The Highland Call (1939), Wilderness Road (1955), The Founders (1957), and Lone Star (1977). Johnny Johnson: The Biography of a Common Man (1937). He provided Kurt Weill with his first opportunity to work in America. Although Green now occupies a fairly obscure place in American drama and his plays are rarely performed or taught, in his time he was considered an important part of the ‘‘southern literary renaissance,’’ and during the 1920s, his work was considered by many as a second only to the plays of Eugene O’Neill. Several of his plays were successfully produced on Broadway, and others were staged by significant left-wing companies such as Lee Strasburg’s Group Theatre. Green also was successful as a Hollywood scriptwriter and several of his plays were made into successful films featuring prominent stars such as Will Rogers, Bette Davis, and Janet Gaynor. Richard Wright collaborated with Green on the stage version of Native Son which was performed by the Mercury Theatre in New York on March 24, 1941. The two men were drawn together in a number of ways. Both were southerners who were deeply critical of southern segregation and racial discrimination and both were strongly committed to a wide variety of leftist causes. Green, for example, was an opponent of capital punishment and was one of the first white southern writers to write sympathetically about the plight of black southerners. Wright was also impressed with the prominent roles given to black actors in Green’s plays and tried to stage Green’s Hymn to the Rising Sun in Chicago in 1936. (The play stridently protested the conditions on

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black chain gangs and never was performed because the director and actors objected to its frank depiction of racial injustice and violence.) When John Houseman and Orson Welles contacted Wright in 1940 about creating a stage version of Native Son, Wright expressed keen interest in the project but realized he lacked the experience in theatre necessary to complete the work successfully. So he agreed to collaborate with Green, a playwright he admired and had known briefly in Chicago when they tried to stage Hymn to the Rising Sun. Green was eager to adapt Native Son for the theatre since the novel touched down so powerfully on his own interest in the problems of black Americans. He had been deeply impressed with Wright’s novel, comparing it favorably to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and characterizing it in one of his journal entries as ‘‘the most vivid writing I’ve seen by any Negro in America’’ (Rowley 213). Wright and Green spent five weeks in the summer of 1940 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Green taught philosophy and drama at the University of North Carolina. Although Chapel Hill’s strict patterns of segregation created some very difficult working and living conditions for Wright, he was initially able to work smoothly with Green. But the two eventually came into conflict over a number of important matters. Green, whose political sympathies were generally leftist but fell well short of Wright’s radicalism, was extremely uncomfortable with the novel’s portrayal of communist ideology and stipulated in his contract that he had the right to be quite critical of Max and Jan. Green, whose work usually stressed the heroic assertion of free will in even the most difficult of environments, was also suspicious of Wright’s determinism. He wanted the play to end with Bigger becoming a tragic hero who achieved a spiritual victory in the face of death. Wright strongly resisted this change, insisting that the play conclude with Bigger being trapped by environment. Green also wanted to soften Bigger’s character, making him ‘‘more likable’’ (Rowley 221) and

Greenwich Village therefore more acceptable to the predominately white audience who would be likely to see the play. He thus refused to dramatize the scene in which Bigger kills Mary, replacing it instead with a dream sequence where Bigger recalls the event through the fog of subconscious memory. Green also creates a less violent Bigger by having Bessie die at the hands of the police. Finally, Green wanted to incorporate in the play many of the experimental techniques he had developed in his symphonic dramas, using music, dance, and pantomime to create subtle and evocative emotional effects. Wright became increasingly uncomfortable with all of these stylistic and substantive revisions, insisting that the play remain true to the novel he wrote. At the heart of Wright’s quarrel with Green were the vastly different ways in which both men viewed Bigger’s character. Wright made their differences clear in a brief one-act play entitled ‘‘The Problem of the Hero.’’ In this unpublished work, Wright contrasts Green’s image of Bigger as ‘‘sensitive, misguided, and puzzled about life in general’’ with his own much more disturbing view of his character as ‘‘full of hate, fear, and cunning’’ (Rowley 222). While the white playwright wanted to portray Bigger as a Christ figure in order to dramatize ‘‘universal’’ truths about man’s ability to achieve spiritual transcendence over environment, Wright wanted his work to be ‘‘true to Negro life’’ (Rowley 223) by presenting Bigger unsentimentally as a black man being victimized by an overwhelming environment. These sharp disagreements between Wright and Green proved irreconcilable and eventually produced two very different plays. Houseman and Welles, who from the start were suspicious of Green, sided with Wright and produced a play which was essentially consistent with the novel, using naturalistic techniques to make a powerful protest against the racist environment which stunts Bigger’s growth and finally executes him. The performed play thus ends with Bigger clutching the bars of his prison cell as he angrily glares at the audience. The printed version published by Harper and Brothers, however, honors Green’s

intentions, employing a wide variety of experimental techniques to portray Bigger in heroic terms. Houseman and Welles were so offended by the book that they insisted that their names and the name of the Mercury Theatre be removed from the dust jacket. Green remained equally unhappy with the performed play, regarding it as ‘‘a bastard’’ which was ‘‘mutilated’’ (Rowley 246). Wright’s troubled collaboration with Green, therefore, is another vivid example of the painful difficulties he experienced when his work was filtered through a white consciousness nervous about his bold and honest vision of AfricanAmerican life. Green, like the Book-of-theMonth Club editors who wanted substantial textual revisions of Native Son and Black Boy, was unable to understand Wright’s world and the techniques he needed to make that world compelling in art. As a result, the stage version of Native Son was, at best, a modest success and soon fell into obscurity. The printed version of the play which Green constructed remains a curious travesty. Selected Bibliography: Houseman, John. Unfinished Business: A Memoir. London: Chatto and Windus, 1986. Houseman, John. ‘‘Native Son on Stage.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

GREENWICH VILLAGE Greenwich Village is a largely residential area on the west side of downtown (southern) Manhattan in New York City. The neighborhood is roughly bounded by Broadway on the east, the Hudson River on the west, Houston Street on the south, and 14th Street on the north. The neighborhoods surrounding it are the East Village to the east, SoHo to the south, and Chelsea to the north. (Some consider the East Village to be the eastern part of Greenwich Village proper, and sometimes the area to the west of Broadway is known as the West Village.) 161

Greenwood, Mississippi Since the early twentieth century, Greenwich Village has been known as the major center of bohemian culture in the United States. An enclave of avant garde writers, painters, political nonconformists, and jazz musicians, it became famous for the progressive ideas of its inhabitants as well as their alternative lifestyles. Its more famous inhabitants include artists Edward Hopper and Marcel Du Champ, political radicals John Reed and Emma Goldman, musicians Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gillespie, and a wide range of writers such as Eugene O’Neill, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs. Its many art galleries, bookstores, and small presses have made it an important cultural site in New York. When Wright left Chicago in 1937 to go to New York in order to better pursue his career as a writer, he spent his first night at a friend’s apartment in ‘‘the Village.’’ After his marriage to Ellen Poplar and the birth of their daughter Julia, the Wrights moved from Brooklyn and bought a three-story townhouse in ‘‘the Village’’ on 13 Charles Street in late 1945. After a visit to France, they occupied the Charles Street house in January 1947 in a neighborhood not far where friends Constance Webb and St. Clair Drake lived. Michel Fabre explained the reasons for the Wrights’ move to Greenwich Village as a desire to find an atmosphere ‘‘more stimulating to a writer’’ and a hope that they would find ‘‘less hostility toward mixed couples’’ (Fabre 275) in ‘‘the Village’s’’ apparently more tolerant, cosmopolitan atmosphere. They also felt that living there would enable Julia to attend better schools. They were, however, bitterly disappointed with ‘‘the Village’s’’ actual treatment of black people. From the beginning, the Wrights were victims of racial discrimination as they discovered that New York banks and realtors would not sell village property to blacks. To secure their $18,000 townhouse on Charles Street, they had to devise a dummy corporation called the Richlieu Company which would arrange for the sale without identifying Wright. When their neighbors discovered that

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Wright was black, they offered to buy back the property for $20,000. But when this offer was refused, they made life miserable for Wright on a daily basis by constantly referring to him as a ‘‘boy’’ or a ‘‘nigger.’’ When Wright and his wife and daughter walked the streets, they were constantly stared at. Wright and Constance Webb were once insulted in a village restaurant when they were served cups of coffee loaded with salt, and Wright had to have his hair cut in Harlem because barbers in Greenwich Village refused his patronage. And in the spring of 1947, roving gangs of white hoodlums began throwing black people out of village restaurants and ‘‘molesting interracial families’’ (Fabre 312). As was often the case in Wright’s life, his move to a new place in search of a better life only led to his discovering new forms of racial discrimination. Greatly troubled by the way they were treated in Greenwich Village and fearing that the racism they experienced there would permanently scar their daughter, the Wrights sold their Charles Street house in May 1947 and moved to Paris for what they described then as an ‘‘indefinite’’ stay. They never returned to take up residence in the United States. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

GREENWOOD, MISSISSIPPI A small city in Leflore County, Mississippi at the eastern edge of the Mississippi Delta, it is approximately 96 miles north of Jackson, Mississippi and 130 miles south of Memphis, Tennessee. Its historic development was tied to the Delta’s cotton industry, and at one time it was known as the ‘‘Cotton Capital of the World.’’ It served as a banking center for plantation owners and had the largest cotton exchange in the world. It also functioned as an important shipping port to New Orleans and Memphis. Greenwood and its immediate surroundings was the birth place of many outstanding African-American blues

Greenwood, Mississippi artists, including Robert Johnson, Furry Lewis, Mississippi John Hurt, B. B. King, and Herbert Sumlin. It is also several miles south of Money, Mississippi where Emmett Till was murdered in August 1955. After Wright’s mother suffered a paralyzing stroke when the family lived in West Helena, Arkansas in 1919, his brother Leon was sent to live with his Aunt Maggie Wilson in Detroit while he was sent to live with his Uncle Clark and Aunt Jody in Greenwood. Greenwood at that time was a town of 7,000 people, a third of whom were black. Like all places in Mississippi, it was rigidly segregated and had a history of racial violence. When his mother once had to be treated at Greenwood’s white hospital, she had to conceal her skin color by being bandaged from head to toe (Fabre 31). Wright’s Uncle Clark Wilson ran a successful carpentry business and his wife also worked so Wright enjoyed a physically comfortable and economically stable life when he lived with them in Greenwood. For the first time in many years, he ate well and regularly attended school. But he was devastated by his mother’s illness and feared she would die. To make matters worse, he found his aunt and uncle to be emotionally cold people who did not understand his emotional plight and made constant demands on him to work harder at odd jobs and at school. In Black Boy, he describes his aunt as a ‘‘neat, silent mulatto

girl’’ who had a ‘‘serious reserved manner’’ (Wright 104). He also found his Uncle Clark to be an emotionally distant person who treated him as if he were an adult and placed excessive demands on him. Although Wright enjoyed the chance to go to school in Greenwood, he felt like an outsider in the ‘‘four-room bungalow’’ (Wright 104) he shared with his aunt and uncle. His anxieties deepened when he discovered that the bed he was sleeping in was the same bed a young boy had earlier died in. This produced repeated nightmares for Wright, and he eventually developed the habit of sleepwalking. Michel Fabre has argued that Wright’s distress in Greenwood was so great that it put him on ‘‘the verge of a nervous breakdown’’ (Fabre 29). Wright was greatly relieved when his mother’s condition improved to the point where he was allowed to return to her in his grandmother’s home in Jackson. As he stressed in Black Boy, ‘‘I always felt a certain warmth with my mother, even when we lived in squalor’’ (Wright 104), and he always looked back at the time he spent with his uncle and aunt in Greenwood as a very painful point in his life. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

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H HAIKU In the last eighteen months of his life Wright wrote over four thousand haiku. Selecting 817 out of the haiku, he prepared a manuscript entitled ‘‘This Other World: Projections in the Haiku Manner.’’ The manuscript was published in 1996 as Haiku: This Other World. In the 1950s, Wright liked to work in the garden on his Normandy farm, an activity that supplied many themes for his haiku. Of his other experiences in this period, his travels to the newly independent Ghana are also reflected in his haiku. The African philosophy of life Wright witnessed among the Ashanti, the ‘‘primal outlook upon life,’’ as he called it, served as an inspiration for his poetic sensibility (Black Power 266). In 1959, he was introduced to haiku by Sinclair Beiles, a young South African poet who loved its form. Beiles was living in Paris and associating with other poets of the ‘‘Beat generation’’ such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and Gary Snyder. Beiles’s and the Beat poets’ interest in Zen led Wright to the knowledge of haiku. Because the Beat Hotel was in the Latin Quarter and Wright lived very close to the hotel, Wright often frequented the hotel bar. Wright would have been interested in Zen as were some of the Beat poets. He also must have known haiku

through his conversations with Beiles. Later in the 1960s, after Wright’s death, Ginsberg and Snyder, for example, became so fascinated with Zen and Zazen, a kneeling meditation, that they studied in earnest Zen philosophy and practice with priests in celebrated medieval monasteries in Japan. On the other hand, Wright borrowed, from Sinclair Beiles, R. H. Blyth’s four volumes on the art and history of haiku and its relationship to Zen philosophy and settled down to rediscover his old dream of oneness with all life. By March 1960, he was so captivated by the beauty of haiku that he was already in the midst of composing what was to turn out to be over four thousand separate haiku. The genesis of Wright’s poetic sensibility can be glimpsed in his ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’’ even though its theory is Marxist. An AfricanAmerican writer’s perspective, Wright states, ‘‘is that part of a poem, novel, or play which a writer never puts directly upon paper. It is that fixed point in intellectual space where a writer stands to view the struggles, hopes, and sufferings of his people’’ (‘‘Blueprint’’ 45). Wright establishes this vantage point in the autobiographical prose of Black Boy, yet he also consciously creates a poetic vision of nature through and against which racial conflict is depicted. The poetic passages in Black

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Haiku Boy demonstrate Wright’s incipient interest in the exaltation of nature and show the congeniality of images from nature to his sensibility. When Wright studied Blyth’s four volumes on haiku, he was struck with a strong affinity between the worldview that underlies haiku and the African ‘‘primal outlook upon life’’ that buttresses Ashanti culture. Unlike western romantic poetry and even the earlier Japanese poetry called waka, haiku, as Blyth observes, ‘‘is as near to life and nature as possible, as far from literature and fine writing as may be, so that the asceticism is art and the art is asceticism’’ (Blyth 1). Blyth’s definition of haiku as an ascetic art means that classic haiku by such masters as Basho, Buson, and Issa, which Wright emulated, strictly concern objects and phenomena in nature. In composing a haiku the poet must, at first, observe an object or phenomenon in nature from a perspective devoid of thoughts and feelings. Only after the poet attains that stance and vision will the poet be able to achieve a harmonious union with nature. The haiku poet’s perspective without egotism bears a strong resemblance to the African’s view of nature and self. In African life, Wright saw a closer relationship between human beings and nature than that between human beings and their social and political environment. Africa evokes in one ‘‘a total attitude toward life, calling into question the basic assumptions of existence’’ (Black Power 159). Wright was, moreover, fascinated by the African reverence for the nonhuman living, a primal attitude that corresponds to the haiku poet’s awe of nature. For Wright, not only do the African and the haiku poet share an intuitive, selfless worldview, they have the common belief that humankind does not occupy the central place in the world. In studying Blyth’s analysis and reading of classic haiku, Wright learned that haiku masters were able to present in direct statement the paradox of union with nature, expressing the desire to be a part of nature while simultaneously maintaining their separate identity. Born and trained in western culture and tradition, Wright as an artist

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must have struggled to develop such a characteristic in his haiku. Classic haiku call for simplicity of language, thought, and image, a lack of complication often revealed in the spontaneous joy of union with nature. The joy, Blyth points out, comes from ‘‘the (apparent) re-union of ourselves with things,’’ our being among others (Blyth 9). Austerity on the part of the poet is not only a lack of intellectualization; it is almost a wordlessness, a condition in which words are used not to externalize the poet’s state of feeling, but to ‘‘clear away something that seems to stand between’’ the poet and things in the world. Because things in the world are not actually separate from the poet, they ‘‘are then perceived by self-knowledge’’ (Blyth 176). Classic haiku, as Wright learned, remove as many words as possible, stressing nonintellectuality, for thought must depend upon, and not substitute for, intuition. Another major characteristic of haiku Wright learned is a love of nature that is inseparable from the ordinary. For Blyth, this characteristic is explained in terms of selflessness, meaning that the poet has identified with nature. The loss of the poet’s individuality involves a generalized melancholy or loneliness as an underlying rhythm. It represents the state of Zen, of ‘‘absolute spiritual poverty in which, having nothing, we possess all’’ (Blyth 162). In Zen-inspired haiku, the material or the concrete is emphasized without the expression of any general principles of abstract reasoning. Animate and inanimate lose their differences so that one might say haiku are not about human beings but about things. Zen teaches, as Blyth observes, that the ordinary thing and the love of nature are reduced to a detached love of life as it is, without idealistic, moralistic, or ethical attachments. Things are equal to human beings; both exist through and because of each other. Wright’s haiku in their portrayal of humankind’s association with nature often convey a kind of enlightenment, a new way of looking at human beings and nature. ‘‘A Wilting Jonquil’’ (720) teaches the poet a lesson that natural things out of context cannot exhibit their beauty. In ‘‘Lines

Hammond, John of Winter Rain’’ (722), the poet learns that sometimes only when an interaction between human beings and nature occurs can natural beauty be savored. While haiku poets often tried to suppress subjectivity in depicting nature, some of Wright’s haiku bring the poet to the fore. While haiku 720, ‘‘A Wilting Jonquil,’’ focuses on an object, haiku 722, ‘‘Lines of Winter Rain,’’ insists on the importance of ‘‘my lighted window.’’ None of the classic haiku Wright emulates express the poet’s thoughts or feelings. The first haiku in Wright’s Haiku: This Other World suppresses subjectivity by depicting the red sun that erases his name. And yet the poet is strongly present, even by negation. The same is true of some of his other haiku, such as haiku 809, ‘‘Why did this spring wood / Grows so silent when I came? / What was happening?’’ As Wright’s modernist haiku demonstrate, subjectivity in such haiku is expressed through the use of a personal pronoun, and the subject’s desire is evoked in an image that reflects subjectivity. Subjectivity and desire, its dominant construct, are both expressed through pronominal language rather than through an image in nature that embodies the real or the unconscious. Because Wright wrote haiku under the influences of classic Japanese haiku poets in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a great majority of his haiku, perhaps eight out of ten, can be categorized as traditional haiku, in which an image of nature is the focus of the poem and subjectivity is absent. Wright saw the images of nature he created in his haiku as expressing the ‘‘primal outlook upon life’’ he acquired in Africa. As he traveled to Ghana in 1953 to write Black Power, a postmodern and postcolonial nonfiction, he was deeply impressed with the African worldview that human beings are not at the center of the universe, a worldview that corresponds with that of Zen. Ashanti culture and belief, in particular, convinced Wright that the world of nature is preeminent over the subjective vision of that world. In writing traditionalist haiku, Wright adopted a poetic form in which subjectivity, egotism, and desire stand in the way of seeking truth. Not only

do most of his haiku thrive on poignant images of nature, they admonish the reader that only by paying nature the utmost attention can human beings truly see themselves. Yoshinobu Hakutani Selected Bibliography: Blyth, R. H. Haiku: Eastern Culture, 1, 1949. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1981. Blyth, R. H. A History of Haiku, 2 vols. Tokyo: Hokuseido, 1963. Wright, Richard. Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper, 1954. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing.’’ Richard Wright Reader. edited by Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper, 39–49, 1978. Wright, Ellen and Michel Fabre, eds. Haiku: This Other World. edited by, with Notes and Afterword, Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998. Rpt. New York: Random House, 2000.

HAMMOND, JOHN (15 December 1910– 10 July 1987) Musician, talent scout, producer, writer, and critic, John Hammond was instrumental in integrating the American music business. He was responsible for discovering Benny Goodman, Robert Johnson, Count Basie, and Aretha Franklin, and he brought Bessie Smith and Fletcher Henderson into national attention. It was he who convinced Benny Goodman to racially integrate his orchestra by adding Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton, thus initiating a process whereby the color barrier began to break down and most major orchestras started to hire black musicians. In the late 1930s, he helped to found the first integrated night club, Cafe´ Society, and he also organized the ‘‘Spirituals to Swing Concert’’ in New York which brought a wide range of African-American music into the consciousness of white America. Hammond was also a life-time national board member of the NAACP, committing himself strongly over many years to supporting their programs. He was born into a wealthy New York family and from an early age was trained in classical music, performing from the age of four on the piano. In 1927, he entered Yale University where 167

Harlem he studied violin and viola. But from his midteens onward, he became fascinated with African-American blues and jazz, going to Harlem where he would hear blues artists like Bessie Smith perform at the Alhambra Theatre and jazz greats Chick Webb and Fletcher Henderson play at the Savoy Ballroom. He became deeply involved in the study of black music, and as a record producer, he was responsible for many black musicians signing contracts with major record companies, thus bringing them into the national spotlight. Richard Wright came to know Hammond well when they lived in New York during the late 1930s and early 1940s. In 1941, Hammond requested Wright to compose a preface to Josh White’s album, Southern Exposure, which included three songs protesting segregation in the South. He also produced in that year a recording of Wright’s blues tribute to Joe Louis, ‘‘King Joe,’’ which featured Paul Robeson singing to the accompaniment of Count Basie’s orchestra. The record sold 40,000 copies. Wright and Hammond helped to win a pardon for Clinton Brewer in 1941 who had been imprisoned for 19 years for the murder of a woman who had refused his offer of marriage. After the governor of New Jersey pardoned Brewer, Hammond arranged for him to work for Count Basie’s orchestra and also produced Basie’s recording of Brewer’s jazz composition, ‘‘Stampede in G Minor.’’ Although Hammond predicted a ‘‘splendid career’’ (Rowley 257) for Brewer, he was stunned when Brewer was returned to prison a few months after his release for killing another woman who refused his offer of marriage, thus re-enacting his earlier crime. Hammond accompanied Wright and Horace Cayton to Houston in June 1941 for the annual NAACP convention where Wright was awarded the Spingarn Medal. Although Wright had planned to give a speech vigorously protesting American involvement in the war in Europe, pressure exerted on him by Communist Party officials forced him to change the speech, focusing instead

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on his objections to the racial policies of the Roosevelt administration. Hammond noted this change and shared Wright’s disapproval of the way he was treated by communist officials. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

HARLEM That part of New York known as Harlem includes the area of Manhattan north of 96th street, and it joins the narrow northern handle of Manhattan known as Washington Heights. The area dates back to early Dutch settlement in the 1650s and became farmland and later a place of country estates in the first half of the nineteenth century. When New York merged with Harlem after the Civil War, it became the home of middle-class whites who lived in elegant rows of brownstone townhouses. The area started to become a black enclave between 1905 and 1920 as whites moved to other parts of the city and thousands of African Americans went to New York as part of the ‘‘Great Migration’’ of blacks from the rural South to the urban North. By 1920, more than a quarter of a million black people lived in Harlem. During the 1920s, Harlem became the artistic, political and cultural capital in a period known as the ‘‘Harlem Renaissance.’’ As Alain Locke has observed, the mass movement of blacks to the northern cities produced an important psychological transformation of black people as they moved from ‘‘medieval’’ circumstances to ‘‘modern’’ America (Locke 576). As he observed in ‘‘The New Negro,’’ ‘‘In the very process of being transplanted, the Negro is being transformed’’ (Locke 576). This transformation was vividly displayed in twenties Harlem as AfricanAmerican artistic and political culture underwent an extraordinary rebirth. Harlem became the center for writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston who created a new literature stressing black pride and the rediscovery of African-American folk forms. Harlem in the 1920s also competed with Chicago

Harlem as the center of black American music as musicians such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Fletcher Henderson created a new kind of jazz. Painters such as Aaron Douglass and sculptors like Richmond Barthe´ experimented with new creative forms in their Harlem studios. Harlem in the 1920s, moreover, became a political center of black America as the Urban League and the NAACP established their national offices there, laying the groundwork for African-American reform movements from the 1930s to the 1960s. More radical organizations such as Marcus Garvey’s ‘‘Back to Africa’’ movement and the Communist Party of America also played important roles in Harlem’s political life in the twenties. But when Wright began his ten-year stay in New York in 1937, one of the very worst years of the Great Depression, Harlem had long since lost the hopeful spirit of the renaissance and had become one of America’s most problem-stricken racial ghettoes. It had greatly deteriorated physically, was grossly overcrowded, and suffered from an extremely high unemployment rate. It did not have a single public high school, and most of its stores, restaurants, nightclubs, and bars were owned by whites who lived in other parts of the city and practiced discriminatory hiring practices. The police force in Harlem consisted mainly of white officers and police brutality was a chronic problem. All of these problems contributed to a serious racial riot in 1935 and would eventually lead to the ‘‘Harlem Riot of 1943,’’ the largest racial disturbance in American history up to that point. When Wright arrived in New York in May 1937, he lived briefly in Harlem in a furnished room in the Douglass Hotel at 809 St. Nicholas Avenue. He then went to live with Herbert and Jane Newton, friends from Chicago, who rented rooms to Wright in their Brooklyn apartments. In May 1939 Wright returned to the Douglass Hotel where he completed Native Son on June 10, 1939. However, for most of Wright’s ten years in New York, he did not live in Harlem but in various locations in Brooklyn and Greenwich Village. In a journal entry dated January

1945, Wright observed, ‘‘Why should I live in a black belt area and be cheated like all other Negroes are cheated? Why can I not live where there are good schools for Julia, and stores that carry good food at reasonable prices; why should I live in a black belt and pay a premium for being born black? I’ll be damned if I do it!’’ (Rowley 297). Wright, however, deeply immersed himself in Harlem life in his job as the Harlem editor of the communist newspaper, the Daily Worker. From June 6 to December 26, 1937 he wrote more than forty signed articles in the Daily Worker, most of them focusing on Harlem’s social problems and the many demonstrations, boycotts, and party meetings designed to solve those problems. In the next three years he wrote hundreds of articles on Harlem’s cultural life, and this work enabled him to carry out extensive research on black urban life which would prove useful as he wrote Native Son, 12 Million Black Voices, and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ Wright also did careful research on Harlem’s history when he worked on two WPA-sponsored books. As a member of the Federal Writers’ Project, he wrote the Harlem section for New York Panorama and he also wrote the chapter on Harlem for The New York City Guide. Wright carefully observed the large-scale riot which erupted in Harlem on August 1, 1943 when a black soldier was wounded by a white police officer after he protested the arrest of an African-American woman in the Braddock Hotel. After rumors circulated that the soldier had been killed, widespread arson, looting and shooting spread throughout the ghetto, resulting in the deaths of six people, the wounding of sixty others, and the destruction of millions of dollars of property. In an August 15, 1943 interview in PM magazine, Wright argued that the riot was caused by an explosion of anger which had been building up for years as a result of chronic unemployment and racial discrimination. He proposed that a program of economic aid be developed for America’s ghettoes and also called for the integration of the armed forces. The following month he helped 169

Harper’s Magazine organize the Citizens’ Emergency Conference for Interracial Unity at Hunter College, a conference designed to discuss the root causes of the riot. Throughout his years in New York, Wright was active in a number of other projects designed to improve life in Harlem. He helped to found the Harlem Suitcase Theatre in 1939, a community theatre which performed plays written by African-American writers. He also collaborated with psychiatrist Frederic Wertham in 1946 to create the Lafargue Clinic which provided free psychiatric services for Harlem’s troubled youth. And he was very active in supporting the Wiltwyck School, a residential program in the Catskills for juvenile delinquents, a program that served many youths from Harlem. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Locke, Alain. ‘‘The New Negro.’’ In Black Writers of America, edited by Keneth Kinnamon and Richard Barksdale. New York: MacMillan, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times, New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

HARPER’S MAGAZINE The second oldest monthly magazine in America, it was founded in New York in June 1850 by the book publishing firm of Harper and Brothers. It is a general interest magazine focusing on literature, politics, culture, and the arts. Notable contributors over the years include Henry James, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Jack London, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and, more recently, John Updike and Hunter S. Thompson. Without being committed to any specific political position, it has had a generally progressive stance in the twentieth century. Wright became familiar with this magazine in Memphis when he bought used copies of it along with American Mercury and The Atlantic Monthly. As Michel Fabre has noted, all three were ‘‘enlightened and liberal’’ magazines which were ‘‘publishing the best writers of the period’’ (Fabre 64). Such reading drew Wright’s attention

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to the main social and political issues of the times while also introducing him to the fiction of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, Stephen Crane, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Emile Zola. This reading gave him much-needed access to a liberatingly modem world well beyond the Deep South which he had come to regard as a mental prison and an emotional hell. As Wright revealed in Black Boy/ American Hunger, he was able to discover through books and magazines like Harper’s ‘‘new avenues of feeling and seeing’’ as well as ‘‘new knowledge’’ which helped him to ‘‘build a new life’’ (Wright 296–97). Wright unsuccessfully tried to place ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ in Harper’s in 1938 but was able to publish the story in the May 1938 issue of New Masses and later included it as the final piece in the 1940 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children. But he was able to place ‘‘What You Know Won’t Hurt You’’ in the December 1942 issue of Harper’s. This story described an event from Wright’s days of working as an orderly at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago when a fight broke out between two co-workers who then upset the cages holding laboratory animals. The animals escaped their cages and then were returned randomly to cages to which they did not belong, thus invalidating the experiments premised upon them. Wright viewed the experience as an epiphany of how African Americans were imprisoned by artificially constructed social roles and how theories which white social scientists developed about blacks were invalid. Wright published one other story in a magazine related to Harper’s which featured in its January 1940 issue ‘‘Almos’ A Man.’’ This was a revised version of two chapters of a novel Wright never completed, ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn.’’ The story focuses on a young black man, Dave Saunders, who buys a gun thinking it will empower him as a man. But when he uses it in target practice, he accidentally kills a mule owned by his boss who then uses the incident to enslave him economically by exacting an exorbitant price to compensate for the loss of his mule. The story ends with Dave running away,

Harrington, Ollie hopping a train headed to the North where he hopes he can fulfill his dream of becoming a man. (This story later appeared in modified form in Eight Men, published a year after Wright’s death.) Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

HARRINGTON, OLLIE (14 FEBRUARY 1912–3 NOVEMBER 1995) A cartoonist and journalist who saw his work as a means of fighting racism and injustice, Harrington was born in New York to biracial parents. His father was an African-American porter who emigrated to New York from North Carolina, and his mother was a white woman who came to the United States as a young woman from Austria-Hungary. Harrington’s family life was stressful because of his parents’ chronic money problems and the difficulties brought on by an interracial marriage in a time when such unions were met with great hostility from both white and black people. Harrington was drawn to making cartoons partly as a way of seeking emotional shelter from his turbulent home life. In 1932, he joined the Harlem Newspaper Club and got to know reporters Ted Poston, Henry Lee Moon, and Roi Ottley who would later assume important roles in black journalism. He also became close friends with artist Romare Bearden. He became a freelance cartoonist whose work appeared often in the Amsterdam News, and he attended art classes with Bearden at New York University. In 1935, he developed a cartoon strip for the Amsterdam News centering on a black man named Bootsie who, like Langston Hughes’s Jesse B. Semple, was a comic figure who could expose American racial injustice in powerfully ironic ways. The comic strip ran for thirty-five years, being syndicated in several AfricanAmerican newspapers, including the Pittsburgh Courier.

During the 1930s, Harrington developed strong political interests, and, although he never became a member of the Communist Party, he was extremely sympathetic to the goals and strategies of the CPUSA, regarding it as one of the few organizations which would support racial reform during the depression. He became close friends with important black communists such as Benjamin Davis and Marvel Cooke. He received a degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in 1940 and became art editor for the Harlem newspaper, People’s Voice, in 1942. He was a war correspondent in Europe during World War II and after the war worked briefly in the United States for the NAACP while becoming actively involved in leftist organizations such as the American Labor Party. In 1950, he became art editor of Freedom, a monthly newspaper founded by Paul Robeson and Louis Burnham. He exiled himself in France in the early 1950s after the FBI opened a file on him, and several of his friends, including Robeson and Hughes, were persecuted as part of the ‘‘red scare’’ which was sweeping through Cold War America. He became an important member of the black expatriate community centering around the Cafe´ Tournon in Paris, becoming close friends with Richard Wright and Chester Himes. Saddened by the death of Wright in 1960 and disturbed about the political intrigue in Paris during the Algerian War, he moved to East Berlin in 1961 and, except for occasional trips to England and the United States, remained there for the remainder of his life. While in Berlin, he became an editorial cartoonist for both the Daily Worker and People’s Weekly World. There are many parallels between Wright’s and Harrington’s lives. Both experienced great emotional turmoil in their family lives and turned to art as a way of achieving emotional relief and intellectual order. Both men were also strongly drawn to the politics of the radical left during the 1930s and remained sharply critical of American capitalism, racism, and imperialism throughout their lives. Wright and Harrington eventually became so alienated from American culture 171

‘‘Hearst Headline Blues’’ that they exiled themselves in Europe and never returned to their native land on a permanent basis. Wright knew Harrington in New York in the late 1930s as both were involved with the Daily Worker and the WPA. They maintained their friendship during World War II when Harrington was a war correspondent in France and Harrington was one of the first people to recommend Paris to Wright as a place where he would be treated as a man and a writer and not a ‘‘nigger’’ (Fabre 298). When the two became part of the group of black intellectuals, writers, and musicians centering around the Cafe´ Tournon, Harrington was clearly Wright’s closest friend, and, although they did have a few quarrels, they remained trusted friends for the remainder of Wright’s life. As Margaret Walker has pointed out, Harrington was ‘‘Wright’s closest friend in Europe’’ (Walker 184), and, as Michel Fabre has stressed, Harrington was Wright’s ‘‘best friend in Paris’’ (Fabre 510). Indeed, one of the few sympathetically drawn characters in ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ Ned Harrison, is modeled after Harrington. Harrington was deeply shaken by Wright’s death and believed it was not from natural causes. As he revealed to Ellen Wright shortly after the funeral, and as he later maintained in published and oral testimony, he had strong suspicions that Wright had been ‘‘done in’’ by the FBI. These suspicions prompted him to leave Paris in 1961 and relocate in East Berlin. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Inge, Thomas, ed. Why I Left America and Other Essays. New York: Random House, 1993. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘HEARST HEADLINE BLUES’’ This poem was one of six poems which Wright placed in New Masses in the 1930s, appearing in its May 12, 1936 issue.

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It is a collage of headlines taken from various Hearst newspapers which are juxtaposed in pairs to produce harshly ironic effects. Thus, the first line is from an article which claims that communists are troublemakers because they ‘‘Foment Revolution’’ and the second line contradicts this by providing a grisly fact which suggests that revolution is a necessary consequence of injustice and needs no ‘‘fomenting’’: ‘‘Lynch Negro Who Wouldn’t Say Mister.’’ All of the poem’s paired lines produce similar jarring ironies. For example, ‘‘Roosevelt Says the Worst Is Over’’ implies that the economic problems of the depression are being solved, but the next line gives powerful evidence to the contrary: ‘‘Longshoremen; Two Are Shot.’’ The final two lines contain the poem’s most pointed irony as ‘‘Attorney Dodd Uncovers Facts’’ is counterpointed with ‘‘The Right Reverend O’Connell Urges Prayer.’’ The net effect of the entire poem is to uncover shocking facts such as lynching, starvation, murder, rape, and wrongful imprisonment which ‘‘prayer’’ can do little to change. Rather, the poem suggests that the only way to deal effectively with the disintegrating society which the headlines describe is to bring about the ‘‘Revolution’’ referred to in the opening line. Wright had experimented with collage in ‘‘Transcontinental,’’ a poem published in the previous year in New Masses. And he was intrigued by the way John Dos Passos had used actual and fictitious headlines in the ‘‘Newsreel’’ sections of U. S. A. to endow his fiction with the authority of actual experience. While he was writing ‘‘Hearst Headline Blues,’’ he was also engaged in the composition of ‘‘Cesspool’’ (posthumously published as Lawd Today!) which used radio reports and newspaper headlines to connect the personal story of his central character to a larger cultural narrative. And in Native Son he inserted actual news stories and headlines from the Chicago Tribune and Jackson, Mississippi Clarion Ledger as a way of authenticating his fictional narrative and thus answer the charges that he was exaggerating Bigger’s story.

Heidegger, Martin ‘‘Hearst Headline Blues,’’ like many of the apprentice poems Wright wrote in the 1930s, gave him an opportunity to experiment in miniature form with literary techniques he would later expand and refine in his fiction. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH (1770–1831) A German idealist philosopher of the early nineteenth century, he believed that mind or spirit, rather than material reality, was ultimately real and that history was constantly evolving in a dialectical process which would culminate in absolute wholeness. The dialectical process for Hegel began with an original idea or ‘‘thesis’’ which then was placed in conflict with its opposite or ‘‘antithesis’’ which then led to a new idea or ‘‘synthesis.’’ But the synthesis broke down when confronted by a new antithesis, thus starting the process over again. Hegel therefore believed that until history could at some distant point in the future realize the absolute, life was a process of continuous change generating fresh ideas and new forms of reality. Hegel’s principal works include The Phenomenology of Mind (1807), The Science of Logic (1812), The Philosophy of Right (1821), and The Philosophy of Religion (1832). Karl Marx was greatly influenced by Hegel’s notions of history as the unfolding of a dialectical process but substituted material forces for mind and spirit as the principle which drives history. For Marx, economics and politics control history, and, instead of history ultimately reaching a point of spiritual unity, it will finally reach a point of political unity, the classless society. Wright was probably led to Hegel through his interest in Marx. According to Margaret Walker, Wright began reading Hegel ‘‘as far back as the thirties’’ (236) when he was a member of the Communist Party and was a serious student of Marx. Even after he had left the party in 1942,

Wright continued to be fascinated by Hegel’s philosophy, particularly his belief that life was an evolving dialectical process. In Black Boy/American Hunger, for example, Wright pictures his own life as an ongoing process of change, moving through a variety of physical locations and a broad range of philosophical and political commitments. As Michel Fabre has pointed out, Wright’s protean life was an ‘‘unfinished quest,’’ an endless process of existential becoming in which ‘‘thesis’’ would meet ‘‘antithesis’’ but never resolve itself into a lasting ‘‘synthesis.’’ See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘The Quest for Pure Motion in Richard Wright’s Black Boy,’’ MELUS 10 (Fall 1983), 5–17. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

HEIDEGGER, MARTIN (26 September 1889–26 May 1976) German philosopher Martin Heidegger occupies a unique position in the history of philosophy. While he is widely regarded as one of the most original and innovative philosophers of the twentieth century, he is also ‘‘the most politically and morally compromised’’ because of his support of ‘‘National Socialist’’ (Nazi) policies and his refusal after World War II to distance himself from his views and actions (Bowie 1990). Building on the theories of his teacher Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938), the father of phenomenology, Heidegger investigated the meaning of Being (‘‘Sein’’) in his writings. He published his findings in Sein und Zeit (1927) (Being and Time, 1962), possibly ‘‘the most single most important philosophical work of the twentieth century . . . affecting not only philosophers but also artists and scientists’’ (Bowie 204). Even though much of Heidegger’s writing was considered almost impenetrable— some characterized it as ‘‘gibberish’’—such concepts as ‘‘being-in-the world,’’ ‘‘nothingness,’’ ‘‘human finitude,’’ ‘‘authenticity,’’ and ‘‘dread’’ were borrowed and developed by such French 173

Hemingway, Ernest existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Heidegger, however, rejected an existentialist reading of his work in his ‘‘Brief u¨ber den Humanismus’’ (1947) and his ‘‘Letter on Humanism’’ (1962). Richard Wright first encountered Heidegger’s writings in 1944 when he asked his friend Dorothy Norman ‘‘to instruct him on existentialism and the writings of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, whom she had read’’ (Fabre 299). After reading these authors and the French existentialists, Wright declared: ‘‘They are writing of things that I have been thinking, writing and feeling all of my life’’ (Webb 279). In The Outsider (1953), which is frequently referred to as Wright’s ‘‘existentialist novel,’’ Cross Damon, the protagonist, is accused of murder and the unusual reading materials uncovered in his room during the investigation make him guilty in the eyes of Ely Houston, the district attorney: ‘‘I wired Chicago to send me a list of the titles of the books you’d left behind in your room and when they wired back a long list I was delighted. . . . That was the first real clue. Your Nietzsche, your Hegel, your Jaspers, your Heidegger, your Husserl, your Kierkegaard, and your Dostoevski were the clues. . . . I said to myself that we were dealing with a man who had wallowed in guilty thought’’ (421). Most critics who have commented on this reference to Heidegger or on his influence have seen them primarily as indications of Wright’s interest in existentialism. Margaret Walker writes about The Outsider: ‘‘It was the result of nearly seven years of thoughtful consideration and reading of the basic tenets of existentialism and his understanding of such exponents as Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Karl Jaspers, and Camus’’ (235). Michel Fabre states in his discussion of the novel that Wright’s ‘‘reading in the existentialists (Kierkegaard, Husserl and especially Heidegger, rather than Camus and Sartre) had shown him that this exile that he had blamed primarily upon his color was, in fact, the fate of everyone, that problems are never solved except through

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action and that the individual is responsible for creating his own values’’ (374). Amritjit Singh writes about the novel’s protagonist: ‘‘Cross was free to act but he could not exchange his existence of another. As Martin Heidegger puts it, man is thrown into this situation. By changing one’s name or exchanging one’s situation, this ‘‘thrown-ness’’ (Geworfenheit) cannot be obliterated. And nowhere is this ambiguity of freedom better dramatized than in the action of The Outsider’’ (125). Considering the fact that Heidegger himself rejected an existentialist reading of his philosophical system, one must be careful not to automatically equate Wright’s interest in Heidegger with his interest in existentialism. Paul Gilroy cautions: ‘‘Wright’s relationship to the work of Heidegger, Husserl, Kiekegaard, and Nietzsche was more complex than many critics seem to appreciate’’ (171). Heidegger’s influence on Wright’s thought and work thus still awaits and deserves thorough investigation. Karl L. Stenger Selected Bibliography: Andrew Bowie, Introduction to German Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2003. Michel Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Amritjit Singh, ‘‘Richard Wright’s The Outsider: Existentialist Exemplar or Critique?’’ In The Critical Response to Richard Wright, edited by Robert J. Butler. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1995, 123–129. Margaret Walker, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1988. Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

HEMINGWAY, ERNEST (21 July 1899– 2 July 1961) American fiction writer who is often identified with the ‘‘lost generation’’ of American artists and intellectuals who were bitterly disillusioned with World War I and did their best work as postwar exiles in Paris. Hemingway, like John

Hill, Herbert Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, saw the war as a sign of the collapse of western civilization and the beginning of a modern period characterized by violence, political instability, and the destruction of civilized values. Hemingway’s heroes are traumatized by their war experiences and try to recover meaning to life in a condition of radical alienation leading to the construction of a personal code of moral values. Hemingway’s best work was done in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s and includes In Our Time (1925), The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), Winner Take Nothing (1933), and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. Wright admired Hemingway’s writing and was influenced by his style, especially in the early phases of his career. In a 1938 essay, Wright observed ‘‘All of us young writers were influenced by Ernest Hemingway . . . We liked his simple, direct way in which he wrote . . . ’’ (Fabre 17). He was particularly drawn to Hemingway’s short stories, admiring their economy and their vivid rendering of violent action. Hemingway’s conception of the hero would also have been of interest to Wright since both writers often centered their works on alienated male figures who attained dignity by stoically encountering a social world which had stacked the cards against them. It was not surprising, therefore, that Wright frequently cited Hemingway as a writer whom he particularly admired and in a 1940 interview observed that he belonged to the same ‘‘literary generation’’ (Kinnamon, 32) that included Hemingway, Faulkner, and Steinbeck. Wright was significantly different from Hemingway in one important way, however. Except for For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s fiction is altogether non-political and his alienated protagonist sees the social world as something to avoid rather than reform. Wright, on the other hand, was intensely interested using his work to examine social problems and throughout much of his career was a politically engaged writer.

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

HERNDON, ANGELO See Angelo Herndon Case.

HILL, HERBERT (24 January 1924– 15 August 2004) For many years, the Labor Director of the NAACP, Hill played important roles in the civil rights movement, especially in the desegregation of labor unions which enabled black workers to more fully integrate the American labor market. He received his B.A. from New York University in 1945 and also studied at the New School for Social Research from 1946 to 1948. He was named Labor Director of the NAACP in 1951, a post he held until 1977 when he became a professor at the University of Wisconsin. Hill was also a serious student of AfricanAmerican literature and edited two important anthologies of black writing in the 1960s. Soon One Morning (1963) was a collection of essays, fiction, and poetry which featured the work of a wide variety of contemporary writers, including Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and LeRoi Jones. Anger and Beyond, a collection of essays focusing on the situation of black writing in the early sixties, was published three years later. It included work by Saunders Redding, Horace Cayton, LeRoi Jones, Harvey Swados, Robert Bone, and Ossie Davis. According to Constance Webb, Wright first met Hill in Brooklyn in 1943 when Hill was a visitor to Wright’s apartment on 89 Lefferts Place (Webb 397). Hill greatly admired Wright’s work, viewing him as a pioneering writer who changed the direction of African-American literature with his bold treatment of American racial problems. Hill visited Wright in Paris in the summer of 1960 and asked Wright to write the introduction

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Himes, Chester Bomar to his book on Negro writing from 1940 to 1962 which eventually became Soon One Morning. Wright agreed to do so but died before he could complete the essay. When Hill’s book appeared in 1963, it was dedicated to the memory of Wright and featured several episodes from ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ the novel which Wright was working on at the time of his death. In the Acknowledgments section of the book, Hill reveals that he got the idea for Soon One Morning ‘‘during long talks with Richard Wright in Paris in the summer of 1960’’ and praises Wright for being ‘‘a courageous man who was a legend in his own time’’ (Hill ix– x). In his introduction, Hill characterizes Native Son as a pivotal work in African-American literature because it spoke bitter truths about the racial problems in America that no previous writer had articulated and ‘‘reached a vast audience at home and abroad’’ (Hill 4). He also praised Wright for both bringing the tradition of protest literature to a culmination while transcending it through ‘‘literary artistic creativity’’ (Hill 5). Selected Bibliography: Hill, Herbert. Soon One Morning: New Writing by American Negores. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1963. Herbert, Hill. Black Labor and the American Legal System. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

HIMES, CHESTER BOMAR (29 July 1909–12 November 1984) African-American novelist whose writing career extended from the mid 1930s to the mid 1980s, a time of enormous social change and racial turmoil in the United States. His work is remarkable for the honesty, intensity, and artistic skill with which it represents such a pivotal and turbulent period. Central to his writing is an unusually bold treatment of interracial sex as well as a frank and graphic portrayal of the persistent violence that characterizes racial relationships in America. Himes mastered a wide range of fictional forms, including the short story, the protest novel, the detective novel, and the satiric novel. A 176

controversial figure throughout his career, he was, for the most part, underappreciated in America but was better received in Europe where he lived the last thirty-one years of his life. French critics, in particular, placed a high value on his work, regarding him as an important AfricanAmerican writer especially gifted in the realms of detective fiction and protest fiction. His best known work includes If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Lonely Crusade (1947), The Heat’s On (1966), Blind Man with a Pistol (1969), and Plan B (1983). Himes also wrote a brilliant twovolume autobiography, The Quality of Hurt (1972) and My Life of Absurdity (1976). Himes met Wright in 1945 at one of Langston Hughes’s parties in Harlem. Wright wrote a favorable review of If He Hollers Let Him Go, praising the book for its stark prose and toughminded portrayal of American racial problems. Wright and Himes became friends, and when Himes exiled himself to Paris in 1953, he joined a group of African-American expatriates which included Wright, James Baldwin, and Ollie Harrington. Himes is often placed by critics in ‘‘The Wright School’’ of writers. His early protest novels bear a striking resemblance to Native Son in terms of their harsh portrayal of the social environment and their frank treatment of interracial sex. His later detective fiction with its graphic violence and spare style also is strongly connected to Wright’s work. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘Chester Himes’’ in American Novelists since World War II, Third Series. Edited by James Giles and Wanda Giles. Washington, DC: Gale, 1994. Himes, Chester. The Quality of Hurt. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1972. Muller, Gilbert. Chester Himes. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.

HOSKINS, SILAS (?–1917) Margaret Walker has argued that ‘‘The psychic wound of white racism was the deepest mark the white South left imprinted on Richard Wright’’ and that ‘‘He would spend all his life seeking the true meaning of that psychic wound’’ (Walker 42).

Hoskins, Silas One of the most profoundly wounding events of Wright’s childhood was the murder of his uncle Silas Hoskins by whites in 1917. Wright, along with his mother and brother, went to live with his favorite aunt Maggie in Elaine, Arkansas in the summer of 1916. Maggie had recently married a Hoskins, a divorced man with two children, who had achieved substantial business success as the owner of a saloon and several rental houses serving the needs of black people working in Elaine’s prosperous lumber mills. The summer began in a very positive way for Wright who got along well with his new uncle whom he came to see as a father figure. Silas spent a great deal of time with the young Wright, giving him the attention he never received from his biological father. And for the first time in Wright’s life, he had nourishing food, good clothing, and a comfortable house, all of which was supplied by Silas’s thriving businesses. As Michel Fabre has observed, Wright ‘‘finally felt at home’’ (Fabre 21) after four years of poverty, hunger, and drifting brought on by his father’s abandonment of the family in 1913. All of this changed abruptly when his uncle Silas failed to return home from work later in the summer after having been murdered by whites who were jealous of his prosperity and wanted to take over his businesses. Wright’s family had to leave in the middle of the night to West Helena, Arkansas, fearing for their lives because the men who had murdered Silas Hoskins also bragged that they would kill the rest of his family. They spent several weeks hiding in a rented room in West Helena before moving back to Jackson, Mississippi where they took up residence with Wright’s grandmother, Margaret Bolton Wilson. This traumatic experience scarred Wright deeply. After briefly experiencing a stable and loving family life, he was plunged back into a fearridden and unstable existence. The uncle he had become so close with simply was taken from his family without any traces. No funeral was held, the murderers were never identified or brought to trial, his uncle’s property was lost, and no account of the episode was reported in the

newspapers. As far as the official records were concerned, it was as if Silas Hoskins had never existed. And to make matters even worse, the incident was never discussed by Wright’s family. When Wright asked his mother why they did not fight back against the people who murdered Silas, she slapped his face, and he never raised this issue again. When Wright examines his uncle’s death in Black Boy/American Hunger, he describes it as a painful baptism into the ways in which the white South treats black people: Uncle Silas had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking into that white-hot face of terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. (Wright 64)

From age nine onward, Wright was aware of living in an irrational world controlled by whites and that everything important to him could be taken from him at any moment. So long as he lived in the Deep South, his life would be wracked with a fear and impotence which reduced him to the kind of ‘‘silence’’ (Wright 65) which was imposed on him when he asked for an explanation of his uncle’s death. The lessons of this traumatic experience from Wright’s early childhood were reinforced in Wright’s adolescence when he discovered that Ray Robinson, the brother of one of his classmates at Smith Robertson Junior High School, had been castrated after he was discovered having sex with a white woman in a Jackson hotel where Wright worked. Once again the ‘‘white terror’’ had struck, and a black man simply disappeared. It is not surprising, therefore, ‘‘the horror of lynching’’ would ‘‘return again and again’’ (Rowley 12) in Wright’s work. His early poem, ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ describes a lynching in terrified detail. ‘‘Long Black Song’’ concludes with its central character, significantly named Silas, being burned alive by whites and ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ contains a graphic description of a lynching. 12 Million Black 177

House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) Voices has a horrifying photograph of a lynched man and The Long Dream centers on a young black man who expatriates himself to France when one of his friends meets Ray Robinson’s fate. The death of Silas Hoskins also shapes another aspect of Wright’s work. Just as Wright’s entire life was dramatically changed for the worse when his uncle is killed, Wright’s fiction is filled with similar episodes in which a character’s life is transformed by a single instant of violence. For example, Bigger Thomas’s doom is sealed when a moment of intended lovemaking in Mary Dalton’s bedroom suddenly turns into unintended death when Mrs. Dalton enters the room. Fred Daniels, the protagonist of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ similarly finds his life turned upside down when he descends into the sewers of New York. Cross Damon’s life is also transformed in a single moment when a train wreck enables him to assume a new identity and Erskine Fowler, the central character of Savage Holiday, finds that his conventional middle class life suddenly dissolves when he stabs a woman to death in a momentary fit of anger. Rite of Passage, in a similar way, pivots on a scene in which the hero’s apparently secure and loving family life is instantly destroyed when he is told that he is in fact an adopted child and will be transferred to another foster home by the New York City Welfare Department. Wright once observed that ‘‘all writing is a secret form of autobiography’’ (Rowley 410). Incidents like the lynching of his uncle Silas Hoskins deeply disturbed Wright, and, in a sense, his writing is an attempt to break the ‘‘silence’’ (Wright 64) which was imposed upon him when he tried to discuss and understand such episodes of terrible loss. See also Maggie Wilson. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

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HOUSE COMMITTEE ON UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES (HUAC) An investigative body of the American House of Representatives, it grew out of a special committee established in 1938 and chaired by Martin Dies. Its original charge was to examine GermanAmerican involvement in Nazi and Ku Klux Klan activity as well as to look into communists in Works Progress Administration programs, especially the Federal Theatre Project. It became a standing committee in 1946 and held a series of highly publicized hearings in the late 1940s and throughout most of the 1950s which were designed to ferret out communists from the entertainment industry and government. It was renamed the Committee on Internal Security in 1969 and was abolished in 1975. HUAC gained national prominence in 1947 when it began an extensive series of hearings investigating alleged communist propaganda in Hollywood films. Suspecting that important producers, directors, and actors were either members of the Communist Party or were fellow travelers, it interrogated over 40 people and named 19 men whom it regarded as communists. A group known as the ‘‘Hollywood Ten’’ refused to testify at these hearings, were found guilty of Contempt of Congress, and were sentenced to prison terms. This group included Lester Cole, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz, Ring Lardner, Jr., and John Howard Lawson. Other Hollywood figures such as Lee J. Cobb, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg cooperated with HUAC by informing on colleagues they knew had communist backgrounds and were thus able to continue working in Hollywood. HUAC over time developed a blacklist of more than 300 American writers, musicians, artists, and actors who were prevented from working in Hollywood film productions. The list included Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Lillian Hellman, Burl Ives, Arthur Miller, Dashiell Hammett, Paul Green, and Paul Robeson. Richard Wright was also put on HUAC’s blacklist, so when he made a film version of Native Son

Houseman, John in the late 1940s and early 1950s, most of it was shot in Argentina and he had extreme difficulty distributing it in the United States. He had, however, developed a strong dislike of HUAC long before this since he worked on the Federal Theatre Project and resented HUAC’s criticism of it in 1938 which resulted in the project’s demise. He personally knew and worked with blacklisted artists like Paul Robeson, Paul Green, Orson Welles, and John Howard Lawson whose lives were damaged and careers blighted by HUAC’s stupidity and intolerance. He had good reason, therefore, to be wary of HUAC because he knew that his art would be threatened if he was drawn into the McCarthyism which was sweeping through the United States. Such fears were confirmed in April 1953 when David Schine, a State Department investigator working for Senator McCarthy, visited Wright in his Paris apartment, grilled him about his past involvements with the John Reed Club, and advised him to prepare himself to be subpoenaed by HUAC. Wright was understandably troubled by this incident, fearing that his visa might be revoked and worried that his family would be submitted to considerable pain. After the meeting with Schine, he retorted to Chester Himes, ‘‘That stupid son of a bitch thinks he can threaten me. I’ll never testify. I’ve written everything I have to say about my Communist affiliations’’ (Himes 198–99). From the late 1930s onward, Wright was acutely aware that he and his colleagues were being targeted by the anti-communist hysteria which was growing in the United States and would reach a fever pitch in the HUAC hearings of the 1940s and 1950s. He was put under surveillance by the FBI in 1941 when 12 Million Black Voices aroused suspicions about his patriotism and an elaborate FBI file was kept on him for the rest of his life. He also strongly suspected that he was being watched by CIA officials in the late 1950s. His decisions to leave America in 1947 and remain in France until he died in 1960 were motivated in part by his desire to avoid the harshest

effects of American political intolerance during the Cold War. Like Ollie Harrington, Lester Cole, and Chester Himes, he felt that organizations like HUAC, which he often likened to repressive institutions in Stalin’s Russia, would damage his life and work if he remained in America. Selected Bibliography: Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1980. Himes, Chester. The Quality of Hurt. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1972.

HOUSEMAN, JOHN (22 September 1902– 31 October 1988) Actor, producer, scriptwriter, playwright, and stage director, he was born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest, Romania to upper-middle class parents. Educated at British boarding schools, he came to the United States at the age of thirty, taking up residence in New York City. He began his career in theatre as a translator of plays from French and German and then started a career of writing, directing, and producing plays. In 1936, he became director of the Federal Negro Theatre in Harlem where he produced a highly successful version of Shakespeare’s Macbeth with his friend Orson Welles directing an all-black cast. Set in nineteenth century Haiti, it was the first all-black production of Shakespeare in the United States and eventually was performed on Broadway and taken on a national tour. In 1937, Houseman and Welles established their own repertory company, Mercury Theatre, which drew national and international attention with experimental versions of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Shaw’s Heartbreak House, and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Houseman and Herman Mankiewicz wrote the script for Welles’s landmark film, Citizen Kane, although Houseman never received acknowledgement for his work in the film credits because of a quarrel with the volatile Welles. It was while working on Citizen Kane that Houseman read Native Son. He was deeply impressed with this novel and was struck by the possibility 179

Houseman, John of producing a stage version of it for Mercury Theatre. Wright first became aware of Houseman’s work in 1936 when he visited New York and saw the Federal Negro Theatre’s production of Macbeth. (Wright later tried to use Houseman’s theatre as a model for a Federal Negro Theatre which he tried to establish in Chicago.) So when Houseman contacted Wright in May 1940 about converting Native Son into a play, he became immediately interested, preferring to grant stage rights to Houseman instead of Ted Ward and Paul Robeson who also expressed interest in putting Wright’s novel on stage. In a letter of May 25, 1940, Houseman convinced Wright that serious theatre, unlike Hollywood films, was ‘‘still a free medium in which a serious artist can express himself directly and courageously to his audiences’’ (Rowley 205). The story of Native Son becoming a play is a strange and troubled tale. From the very beginning, Houseman had serious reservations about Paul Green, the man Wright chose as his collaborator in writing the script. He knew of the difficulties which producers and directors had with Green who often delayed productions with seemingly endless rewritings of scripts and his stubborn refusal to take advice from anyone. More significantly, Houseman sensed a strong incongruity between Green’s deeply religious sensibility and Wright’s outlook as a person committed to radically leftist ideology. To make matters worse, he saw Green’s attitude toward Wright as ‘‘insensitive, condescending, and intransigent’’ (Rowley 216). Although Green as a gentleman could be personally gracious to a young writer such as Wright, when it came to professional matters, he wanted the upper hand. Houseman’s fears about Wright’s collaboration with Green were certainly confirmed as the two writers eventually disagreed sharply about how Native Son should be transformed into a play. While Wright wanted the play to mirror his novel as closely as possible, Green was extremely uncomfortable with the book’s political vision

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and its bold portrayal of its central character. As Green wrote the script, he tried to downplay Wright’s political radicalism and he attempted to make Bigger a less threatening, more uplifting character as a tragic hero who grew spiritually through Christian suffering. Green further softened Bigger’s character by reducing his violent behavior and its shocking effects. He deleted Bigger’s murder of Bessie and portrayed the killing of Mary as a foggy dream sequence rather than giving it the direct and naturalistic treatment it received in the novel. Green also dispensed with Wright’s gritty realism by projecting many scenes surrealistically, employing music, dance, and expressionistic scenery to heighten emotional effects. Houseman strongly disapproved of Green’s distortions of Native Son and worked closely with Wright to construct an alternative script which would be much truer to the novel. They eliminated the religious motifs which Green infused into the play and presented Bigger’s character in a direct and harshly naturalistic manner, stressing how a brutally racist environment shapes his character and erodes his humanity. The rewritten play ends precisely as the novel concludes, with Bigger clutching the bars of his cell as he bitterly glares at the audience. Houseman also encouraged Wright not to dilute the political impact of the play, maintaining a stridently leftist indictment of American capitalism. The sharp disagreements between Wright and Green finally proved irreconcilable and resulted in two very different completed plays. The performed version which opened in New York on March 24, 1941 was the strongly naturalistic protest play which Houseman helped Wright to shape. But a printed version published by Harper and Brothers honored Green’s intentions, employing a wide variety of experimental techniques to portray Bigger as a kind of modern Christ figure. Houseman and Welles were so offended by the book that they insisted that their names and the name of Mercury Theatre be removed from its dust jacket. Green remained

‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ equally unhappy with the performed play, regarding it as ‘‘a bastard’’ which was ‘‘mutilated’’ (Rowley 246). However troubled Wright was by what Houseman called his ‘‘uneasy collaboration’’ (Houseman 91) with Green, he was deeply grateful to Houseman for his role in developing a script which was truer to Native Son. In a note to Houseman, Wright expressed ‘‘gratitude for the enormous help you gave to me with Native Son’’ and he ‘‘doubted gravely if Native Son would ever have seen the boards of Broadway’’ (Houseman 100) without Houseman’s help. Perhaps the reason why Houseman could work so effectively with Wright is that he had a much better understanding of Wright’s character than Green was able to develop. In his memoir, Unfinished Business, Houseman described Wright as a complexly divided person, whose ‘‘surprisingly mild-mannered’’ exterior hid a ‘‘deep, almost morbid violence that lay skin-deep below that gentle surface’’ (Houseman 230–31). Houseman’s sensitivity to Wright as a person played an important role in his understanding of Native Son and his ability to convert the novel into a powerful staged play. Selected Bibliography: Houseman, John. ‘‘Native Son on Stage.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Houseman, John. Unfinished Business: A Memoir. London: Chatto and Windus, 1986. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘HOW ‘BIGGER’ WAS BORN’’ The essay that eventually became a kind of Jamesian preface to Native Son has an interesting history. First presented as a lecture at Columbia University on March 12, 1940, ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ next appeared as an article in the June 1, 1940 issue of the Saturday Review of Literature. It then was published as a 39-page pamphlet by Harper and Brothers in 1940. Since that time, it has frequently appeared as either an afterword or

preface to paperback editions of the novel. Often anthologized in collections of American and African-American literature, it has become an indispensable guide to Native Son, one of the best discussions of its sources, art, and vision. Wright composed it because he anticipated the complaint that surfaced in reviews soon after the novel appeared on March 1, 1940. Reviewers such as David Cohn, Burton Rascoe, and David Daiches complained that Native Son provided an inaccurate portrayal of the racial situation in America and grew out of Wright’s exaggerated fears and misconceptions rather than accurately observed conditions. Cohn, for example, characterized the book as a ‘‘blinding and corrosive study of hate’’ which was not grounded in ‘‘fact’’ (Kinnamon 46) and obscured what he perceived to be an improved racial climate in America. Such a criticism of Wright’s novel would linger for many years and would appear most notably in James Baldwin’s two negative assessments in ‘‘Many Thousands Gone’’ and ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’’ which argue that Bigger Thomas is an unrealistic character, a symbolic projection of Wright’s personal anger and desire to use literature as a propagandistic lever for social and political change. Wright skillfully answers these criticisms by stressing in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ that his novel was rooted in his own lived experiences and that Bigger Thomas is indeed a representative figure, ‘‘an American product, a native son of this land’’ whose experiences are ‘‘a part of all Negroes and all whites’’ (Wright 450). To concretize his argument, Wright emphasizes that ‘‘The birth of Bigger Thomas goes back to my childhood’’ (Wright 434) when he knew at least five people who served as models for Bigger. Each of these young black men was forced to live in the Deep South’s racially unjust social environment which systematically deprived them of opportunity and relegated them to the place of second class citizens. When they asserted their humanity by rebelling and thus stepping out of their ‘‘place,’’ each paid an awful price. Bigger #1, whom Wright knew as a child in Jackson, Mississippi, was a 181

Howe Institute ‘‘bad’’ Negro who not only terrified his fellow blacks but lived his life as ‘‘a continuous challenge to others’’ (Wright 435). Although Wright suspected ‘‘that his end was violent’’ (Wright 435), he secretly admired this person but was afraid to emulate him. Bigger #2 directed his hostility toward whites by stealing from them and, predictably, ended up in prison. Bigger #3, who was labeled by whites as a ‘‘bad nigger’’ (Wright 435), was eventually shot to death by a white policeman. Bigger #4 rebelled so strongly against Jim Crow laws and was, like Bigger, frustrated by the fact that ‘‘The white folks won’t let us do nothing,’’ (Wright 436) that he ended up in an insane asylum. Bigger #5 was the most extreme violator of southern taboos, refusing to sit in the rear section of street cars assigned to Negroes and threatening whites with a knife when they tried to move him. Although few people whom Wright knew would imitate his behavior or outwardly express admiration for him, most blacks secretly felt ‘‘an intense flash of pride’’ (Wright 437) when told of his exploits. Wright knew many other Bigger Thomases as he grew up in some of the most violent and racist parts of Mississippi and Arkansas, and he understood that the system of white supremacy exacted a ‘‘terrible price’’ from these black rebels as ‘‘They were shot, hanged, maimed, and generally hounded until they were dead or their spirits broken’’ (437). Native Son was intended to tell their story. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ is not only a revealing source study for Wright’s masterwork but also a fascinating guide to its artful techniques. Wright stresses that he paid extremely careful attention to point of view, filtering the entire novel through Bigger’s consciousness to induce a ‘‘rich illusion of reality’’ (Wright 459) which would force the reader to experience Bigger’s life rather than remain at a distance and simply process information about Bigger and his environment. He also explains that the novel, which is often misread as a formless and raw ‘‘slice of life,’’ was carefully organized with an intricate motif structure. Like a musical composition, the

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whole book is telescoped in the opening scene which provides ‘‘the motif of the entire scheme of the book’’ in the form of images and themes which then resonate like ‘‘notes’’ (Wright 456) throughout the narrative. After Wright had completed the opening scene of entrapment and death, he ‘‘reworked the book’’ (Wright 460) carefully, deepening his portrayal of Bigger through a complex set of narrative and symbolic variations. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ is also a penetrating analysis of the problems of modern culture and a disturbing prophecy of what might happen if these problems are not effectively addressed. Seen in this context, Bigger is more than an American native son but is, indeed, a modern everyman. The world depicted in the novel goes well beyond Chicago’s Black Belt, becoming a symbol of the modern world which in 1940 was on the verge of collapse. On this level, Wright presents Bigger as a ‘‘modern personality’’ living in ‘‘a world whose metaphysical meanings had vanished’’ (Wright 446) and was perched dangerously on the abyss. Such a ‘‘dislocated society’’ was in danger of either the disintegration experienced by ‘‘old Russia’’ (Wright 446) or the slavery of totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany or fascist Italy. On the most ‘‘universal’’ (Wright 446) level, therefore, Wright envisioned Bigger’s personal narrative as reflecting the problems of a modern world in dire need of social and political transformation. Selected Bibliography: Cohn, David. ‘‘The Negro Novel: Richard Wright,’’ Atlantic Monthly (May 1940), 10 in Keneth Kinnamon (ed.). Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son. New York: Twayne, 1997. Daiches, David. ‘‘Review of Native Son.’’ Partisan Review (May–June 1940), 12. Rascoe, Burton. ‘‘Negro Novel and White Reviewers,’’ The American Mercury (August 1940): 495–98. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ in Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, 1993.

HOWE INSTITUTE Wright did not attend school until he was seven, enrolling at Howe Institute in the fall of 1915.

Howe, Irving This small private school in Memphis, Tennessee was the setting for a number of disturbing experiences for the young Wright. His father, who brought the family to Memphis from Natchez, had deserted them to live with another woman. Wright, his mother, and brother Leon encountered serious economic difficulties since Wright’s father refused to offer any kind of support to them. While Wright was a student at Howe, he had to go to court to observe the legal proceedings his mother had initiated as a way of forcing her husband to support her and the children. Wright watched in horror as the white judge would do little to make Nathan Wright live up to his responsibilities, allowing him to get by with the lame excuse that he was doing the best he could. Wright would always remember his father ‘‘grinning’’ and ‘‘laughing’’ (Wright 32) as he left the court while his mother was reduced to tears. Several months later, after Wright was forced to leave Howe and was sent to an orphanage because of his family’s financial difficulties, he would again encounter his father when he and his mother went to see him in his apartment so that they could obtain the money they needed to move away from Memphis. Here again, Wright saw his father as a cruelly indifferent figure who simply laughed at his plight. Nathan Wright, who was sitting with his lover before a bright fire that illuminated the room in a strange glow, offered only a nickel to Wright, chuckling as he did so. Wright would be haunted for many years by ‘‘the image of my father and the strange woman,’’ their faces ‘‘lit by dancing flames’’ (Wright 39–40) as they rebuffed him. Wright’s problems at Howe Institute are not difficult to understand, given the extreme psychological pressures brought on by his father’s indifference and his mother’s helplessness. He was withdrawn and very self-conscious about being poor, shabbily dressed, and chronically hungry. He made a few friends with boys who taught him four-letter words, but inside the classroom he drew into himself, being ‘‘frightened speechless’’ (Wright 28) when asked to recite. As he stressed in Black Boy, he became a loner who

was ‘‘paralyzed’’ (Wright 29) with fear. This established a pattern of alienation which would wax and wane throughout Wright’s entire life, culminating in his final years when he saw himself as an outsider, a stranger in an alien land. Wright’s mother soon became too ill to work, forcing him to miss school regularly so that he could take care of her. Eventually he dropped out of Howe Institute and was sent with his brother Leon to Settlement House, a Methodist orphanage in Memphis. The disturbing problems which Wright experienced at Howe would greatly worsen at Settlement House which became a Dickensian ordeal Wright never forgot and which deepened the psychological wounds he suffered at Howe. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

HOWE, IRVING (11 June 1920– 5 May 1993) An astute literary critic and cultural observer, Howe was a major force in twentieth-century American criticism. He was born in New York City, lived the majority of his life there, and is considered one of the most influential members of a group of New York intellectuals who emerged during the Great Depression and helped to transform the literary consciousness of post–World War II America. A staunch opponent of ‘‘New Criticism’’ which he considered sterile and selfindulgent, he advocated an approach to literature and art that was grounded in history and culture while serving the democratic function of clarifying a people’s fundamental values and aspirations. During the 1930s, he was active in radical leftist politics while a student at CCNY, becoming a member of the Communist Party. He contributed regularly to leftist journals such as Partisan Review. After World War II he co-founded Dissent, a forum for political and literary debate and wrote for Commentary and The Nation. In the 1950s he published three important literary 183

Hughes, Langston studies, Sherwood Anderson (1951), William Faulkner (1952), and Politics and the Novel (1957). He also wrote, with Lewis Coser, The American Communist Party (1957), the first history of that organization. During the 1960s, he published three surveys of modernist literature, A World More Attractive (1963), Literary Modernism (1967), and The Idea of the Modern in Literature and the Arts (1968). These books put forth a realist aesthetic and were deeply critical of modern writers who abandoned social concerns and cultivated an essentially individualistic vision of life. Richard Wright knew Howe in New York in the 1940s as the two were part of a community of leftist writers, intellectuals, and critics who saw literature as a way of exposing cultural problems and redefining democratic principles. He was an enthusiastic supporter of Wright’s early work such as Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and Black Boy, championing Wright as the premiere black writer in America. Although he was less admiring of Wright’s later work, particularly The Long Dream and Eight Men, he was one of the few critics who maintained faith in Wright during his exile in France, arguing that while his European exile was not wholly successful, it did not destroy his talent. Howe was especially strong in his praise for Native Son, seeing it as a seminal book which not only transformed American literature but also changed our understanding of race. In an essay entitled ‘‘Black Boys and Native Sons,’’ published in a 1963 issue of Dissent, Howe declared: The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever. No matter how much qualifying the book might later need, it made impossible a repetition of the old lies . . . Richard Wright brought out in the open, as no one had ever before, the hatred, the fear and violence that have crippled and may yet destroy our culture. (Howe 20)

Howe argued that Native Son had brought to a culmination the vital tradition of protest in black American literature and chided younger writers such as Baldwin and Ellison for abandoning that 184

tradition. He celebrated Wright’s novel for its ‘‘superbly aggressive tone,’’ its ‘‘apocalyptic’’ mood, and its ‘‘clenched militancy’’ while taking Baldwin and Ellison to task for writing books which were ‘‘literary to a fault’’ (Howe 21). He was particularly hard on Invisible Man, claiming it was ‘‘marred by the ideological delusions of the 1950s’’ (Howe 21) by recoiling into a socially irresponsible individualism. Howe provided a largely favorable review of The Long Dream in ‘‘Reality and Fictions,’’ published in the winter 1959 issue of Partisan Review. He admired the book’s realism, claiming that it still reflected the problems of contemporary America even though it was set in Mississippi in the early 1940s. He called the book ‘‘a nightmare of remembrance’’ (Howe 136) which reminded us that the segregated South had not changed significantly. Howe’s review of Eight Men, ‘‘Richard Wright, A Word of Farewell’’ is both a eulogy of Wright, who had died the previous year, and an assessment of his importance as a writer. He credited Wright for being the first African-American writer to tell the unvarnished truth about ‘‘the sufferings of his people’’ and ‘‘those inner feelings of anger and hatred which no white man could reach’’ (Howe 17). He claimed that Wright had ‘‘kept faith’’ with his people’s sufferings and that ‘‘The bitterness and rage that poured out of Wright’s books form one of the great American testaments’’ (Howe 18). He concluded that any fair-minded assessment of modern American literature must give Wright an ‘‘honored place’’ (Howe 18). Selected Bibliography: Howe, Irving. ‘‘Black Boys and Native Sons’’ Dissent (October 1963), 20–25. Howe, Irving. ‘‘Richard Wright, A Word of Farewell.’’ The New Republic 144 (February 13, 1961), 17–18.

HUGHES, LANGSTON (1 February 1902– 12 May 1967) Author in a wide variety of genres but best known as a poet, born in Joplin, Missouri and raised by his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas. Following a childhood during which he was abandoned by

Hughes, Langston his father and left for long periods by his mother, he spent his teen years in Lincoln, Illinois and Cleveland, Ohio. He went to Africa as a sailor aboard the West Hesseltine at age 21, and the next year visited Europe, but was back in Washington, DC in 1925, working as a busboy at the Wardman Park Hotel, where famed poet Vachel Lindsay read some of the poems that Hughes had placed next to his plate and gave him both public and private encouragement. His poem ‘‘The Weary Blues’’ had just won first prize in the Urban League’s Opportunity poetry contest and shortly thereafter Carl Van Vechten arranged for Hughes to have his first book of poems published by Knopf in the following year, 1926. That year, Amy Spingarn provided financial support for Hughes to attend Lincoln University, and Hughes published his famous rejoinder to George Schuyler’s ‘‘The Negro-Art Hokum,’’ the manifesto ‘‘The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,’’ in The Nation. Hughes’s second volume of poetry, Fine Clothes to the Jew, was published in 1927, the same year he met ‘‘Godmother’’ Charlotte Mason, who provided financial support for Hughes (and others) during this period. Her support continued through Hughes’s graduation from Lincoln in 1929 and his trip to Cuba in 1930, but the two had a falling out upon his return, and he and Mason parted ways. The parting was a blow to Hughes. Nonetheless, he published his novel Not Without Laughter and won the Harmon Award in 1930; two small volumes of poetry, Dear Lovely Death and The Negro Mother, in 1931; and a volume of poetry, Scottsboro Limited, and two children’s books, The Dream Keeper and Popo and Fifina, in 1932 while writing prose and poetry for The New Masses— the leftist bent of which was one of the causes of the rift between Hughes and Mason. Langston Hughes and Richard Wright were, of course, familiar with each other before they ever met. Hughes, as one of the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance, was a nationally known figure who had published nine books of poetry and fiction and had several plays produced before he met Wright in 1936. He had also been included

in important anthologies such as Alain Locke’s The New Negro and in journals such as the Crisis, Opportunity, The Nation, The Messenger, The New Masses, Poetry, Vanity Fair, and Fire!! as well as in important newspapers such as Amsterdam News and the Baltimore Afro-American. Though by the time of the stock market crash in 1929 the excitement of the Harlem Renaissance had largely subsided, Hughes was still a well-known writer whose first novel, first collection of short stories, three poetry collections, and a collaborative children’s book with Arna Bontemps were published in 1930–1934. As such, Hughes would have been to Wright a successful author and a good connection with whom to become acquainted. Since both Hughes and Wright were attracted to leftist politics in the early thirties—Wright was a Marxist and a communist, though not an overly doctrinaire member, and Hughes had visited the Scottsboro Boys in jail and toured the Soviet Union in 1932–1933 in addition to publishing in leftist journals, it seems only natural that the leading literary agent of leftist authors, Maxim Lieber, would have contact with them both. Lieber contacted Wright beginning in 1936, before the publication of Native Son. Rampersad suggests that Wright was one of Lieber’s authors, whereas Rowley asserts that Lieber only insulted Wright’s submissions. Wright was by this time a poet, journalist, and an intellectual who was invited to lecture around the country on various issues. In 1934, he lectured on Hughes’s writings in Indianapolis for the John Reed Club, and in the following year both Hughes and Wright urged the formation of the League of American Writers, associated with the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, in the New Masses. The two finally met in Chicago in 1936 and later that year served together on a discussion panel entitled ‘‘The Role of the Negro Writer and Artist on the Social Stage.’’ Both had an equal gift for telling tall tales in the AfricanAmerican tradition, deep interests in AfricanAmerican expressive culture reflected in blues and jazz, and firm commitments to politics and 185

Hughes, Langston social advancement that allowed them to get on very well. Wright was, at this time, contemplating organizing a poetry group, so Hughes, ever mindful of hooking up various acquaintances to their advantage and encouraging young writers, recommended the young Margaret Walker to Wright before the group was formed. Along these same lines, the following year Hughes offered Wright the opportunity to contribute to an anthology of revolutionary verse, supporting the fighters of the Spanish Civil War, being edited by Nancy Cunard and Pablo Neruda. When another young writer indicated an interest in Wright, Hughes wrote a letter on his behalf to Wright and helped begin the association between Wright and the young Ralph Ellison. Finally, 1937 also found Hughes signing an agreement to dramatize Wright’s ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ for the Harlem Suitcase Theater, which Hughes founded in 1938. Thus, within the first year of their acquaintance, Hughes had offered Wright both publishing and production opportunities and made him part of his own acquaintance network. Hughes and Wright both spoke again at the third American Writers’ Congress in New York in June 1939, on the occasion of which they took time to collaborate on a blues poem, ‘‘Red Clay Blues,’’ that was published in New Masses on August 1, 1939. The two also appeared with communist James Ford at the Festival of Negro Culture in Chicago that year as well, and during the various times that the two visited Chicago, they counted the Good Shepherd Community Center on South Parkway as a home base. Wright’s star was certainly rising by this point: his book of stories Uncle Tom’s Children was published in 1938, his first novel Lawd Today! had been written, though not published until 1963, and his manifesto ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’’ published in 1937 in New Challenge, took on the previous generation of African-American writers, Hughes included, laying the ground for his own work. In 1940, with the publication of Native Son, Wright’s explosive emergence into the national consciousness through his fiction changed the

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relationship between the two writers in subtle but important ways. Of course, the two appeared together on occasion still and showed up at some of the same social functions—both were honored at a reception thrown by Nelson Algren and Jack Conroy to launch the journal New Anvil in July 1940. Wright probably met Kwame Nkrumah, leader of the liberation struggles on the Gold Coast, through Langston. But now Wright, a younger writer who had not been on the scene as long as Hughes, was a literary sensation, and Hughes, ever sociable and friendly, could not help being jealous of Wright’s highly successful novel. Though he praised the novel in several quarters, privately he seemed somewhat satisfied that, as he understood it, many African Americans disliked Native Son and its negative portrayals of the race. It didn’t help that Hughes’s own autobiography, The Big Sea, for which he had high hopes, had disappointing sales, though Wright himself praised the book in The New Republic in 1940. Neither could Hughes quite accept the award of the Spingarn Medal in 1941 to Wright, a writer who had published nothing in the Crisis, while Hughes himself had been solicitous of their attention and on his best behavior politically. Wright seems to have genuinely admired Hughes, though not, Margaret Walker asserted, for his writing, which Wright found too optimistic and primitivistic, and Wright’s success was a minor but very real burr in Hughes’s saddle. In the meantime, Hughes began to challenge what he saw as negative portrayals of African Americans in Native Son, which he criticized in ‘‘The Need for Heroes’’ (Crisis 1941), and in Black Boy in an article entitled ‘‘It’s About Time,’’ which also criticizes If He Hollers Let Him Go by Chester Himes, a friend of Wright’s whose manuscript Hughes had taken to Knopf. When Wright published ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ in The Atlantic Monthly in 1944, his friends Margaret Goss and Ted Ward lamented its ideas and attitudes privately to Hughes, who nonetheless still

Hurston, Zora Neale had Wright on his guest list for a party that year honoring Loren and Juanita Miller For their parts, Wright and Ellison both felt that the quality of Hughes’s work was going downhill by the time of his work on Elmer Rice’s Street Scene in 1945–1947. Hughes’s output was voluminous and multi-generic and, in fact, was of an uneven quality as he tried his hand at drama, libretti, children’s books, newspaper columns, sketches, short stories, histories, autobiography, music, and poetry. Indeed, though Hughes’s masterful comic creation Jess B. Simple, who first appeared in 1943, gave Hughes a financial and critical success in the publication of Simple Speaks His Mind (1950) and Simple Takes a Wife, praised at the expense of Wright and James Baldwin in Masses and Mainstream in 1953, Hughes was feeling a bit eclipsed by Wright and Ellison by the mid-1950s. His deepening interest in ties with Africa date from this time, a time when Wright was publishing negative criticism of and expressing his own ambivalence about Africa in Black Power (1954). In 1953, Hughes appeared before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee to explain his connections to communist organizations. Wright himself was in Paris, but he was visited by David Schine who questioned Wright about his associations as well. Both Wright and Hughes, though, were still seen as dangerous leftist radicals whose books, Roy Cohn and David Schine felt, should be (and were) pulled off the shelves of the libraries of the United States Information Service in Britain, Germany, Austria, and France (along with Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Lillian Hellman, and others). Hughes, indeed, was pushing for a heightened racial awareness and consciousness in the late 1950s at a time when Wright, Himes, and Ellison were not taking up the call. Early in 1960, Hughes criticized the extremely negative portrayals of African Americans in the dramatization of The Long Dream, the last novel Wright published before he died, but his criticism of the work did not stop Hughes from visiting his ailing friend in Paris in November 1960, three days before

Wright died, a visit he described in an Ebony article entitled ‘‘Richard Wright’s Last Guest at Home.’’ Six years Wright’s elder, Hughes himself would live only seven years longer. Langston Hughes was an important influence on Wright, someone who encouraged Wright in his publication and connections with other important writers. Though Wright considered Hughes’s work was too simplistic and optimistic, the two shared an interest in African-American folklore, blues and jazz, a social commitment expressed through leftist political associations, an international dimension to their explorations of African Americans, and subject matter such as lynching and other modes of violence. If Hughes, in his optimism, idealized the common folks and often, though not always, dwelt on the beauty of African-American culture, Wright was more pessimistic, emphasizing the blight of American life upon African Americans and the ugliness and violence of their lives. Though they disagreed on the best path to take to social and political empowerment, they both shared an abiding commitment to foregrounding and exploring in a variety of genres issues important to African Americans. Steven C. Tracy Selected Bibliography: Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. 1: 1902–1941: I, Too, Sing America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

HURSTON, ZORA NEALE (7 January 1891–28 January 1960) African-American folklorist and writer associated with the Harlem Renaissance who celebrated the African-American culture of the rural South. Born January 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama, she died January 28, 1960, in Fort Pierce, Florida. Six years Wright’s senior, Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated allblack town in the United States. She attended 187

Hurston, Zora Neale Howard University and studied anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University after which she conducted field studies in folklore among African Americans in the South. Her publications during her lifetime include Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), her first novel; Mules and Men (1935), a study of folkways among the African-American population in Florida; Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a novel; Tell My Horse (1938), a blend of travel writing and anthropology based on her investigations of voodoo in Haiti; Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), a novel; Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), an autobiography; and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948), a novel. Despite a positive early critical reception, Hurston died essentially forgotten by the general public, but her work received posthumous acclaim by the end of the 20th century. Collections published posthumously include: Spunk: The Selected Stories (1985); Mule Bone, a Comedy of Negro Life (1991), written with Langston Hughes; The Complete Stories (1995); and Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of folktales from the South. As born-and-raised southern writers and sociological and anthropological investigators, Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston are frequently paired. Wright’s Pagan Spain and Hurston’s Mules and Men and Tell My Horse are comparable ethnographic inquiries into exotic cultures. In anthropological and sociological fields, they were both ahead of their times with their inclusion of personal narrative in travel writing, which is now a conventional part of ethnography. Their ‘‘participatory observation’’—a combination of personal stance, first-hand experience of the culture observed, and incorporation of conversations, experiences, and exotic detail—added narrative flow to the material and allowed a high degree of reader involvement. Their photographic activities also contributed to the field of visual anthropology. Wright and Hurston are often seen as antithetical, however, in their ideological views, as shown by their reviews of each other’s work, where,

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although they sometimes praise each other’s writing, their divergent views are bitterly apparent. In ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears,’’ which appeared in the October 5, 1937, issue of New Masses, Wright reviewed Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. He also reviewed Hurston’s ‘‘The Gilded Six-Bits’’ in ‘‘Foreword to Lest We Forget,’’ and ‘‘The Pet Nigger System’’ in ‘‘The Position of the Negro Artist and Intellectual in American Society.’’ The following year, Hurston reviewed Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children in the Saturday Review of Literature. In these reviews, Wright regrets Hurston’s lack of significant political commitment and her perpetuation of whitepleasing ‘‘minstrel show tradition of cliche´ s,’’ while Hurston deplores Wright’s negative, violent, hateful rendition of interracial relations in the South. To Wright, Hurston exemplifies the type of writers he condemned in ‘‘Blueprint.’’ As a Marxist concerned with social change, he saw the lack of bitterness in her novel as counterrevolutionary. By contrast, Wright’s communist message, as well as its lack of sympathy and pride in the race, offended Hurston while his rendition of the Negro dialect puzzled her. Their ideological divergence resides in their sociological and political approaches: while Wright tried to shift white America’s perceptions of blacks, Hurston tried to shift the black community’s perception of itself. While he was a communist protester, she believed in democracy and transformation. While he was interested in politics and wrote protest novels, she was a trained anthropologist, collector, and preserver of black folktale and myth, and her form of protest was a defiant affirmation of black values and lifestyle. While Wright’s novels are symbolic, sociopolitical, and impassioned, Hurston’s are emotional, romantic, personal, and sensory. While Wright grew up in an antagonistic white environment, Hurston was raised in a supportive, loving black community. These differences directly affected their work: while all is black in Their Eyes Were Watching God, for example, Uncle Tom’s Children centers on interracial dynamics. In the

Hurston, Zora Neale end, while Wright enjoyed fame, Hurston died penniless and unrecognized as a writer. Nevertheless, Hurston had a profound impact on many black authors using folk speech and beliefs in their stories, including Wright. Caroline Garnier Selected Bibliography: Henniger, Katherine. ‘‘Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and the Postcolonial

Gaze.’’ Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, 2003 Fall, 56 (4): 81–595. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Jordan, June. ‘‘On Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston. Notes Toward a Balancing of Love and Hatred.’’ Black World. August 1974: 4–8. Wright Richard. ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears.’’ New Masses 25, October 5, 1937: 22–25.

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I ‘‘I AM A RED SLOGAN’’ This 26-line poem, written in exuberant free verse, was published in the April 1935 issue of International Literature, a communist magazine published in Moscow which received worldwide circulation. (This important journal would later print Uncle Tom’s Children in Russian.) The poem reflects Wright’s early enthusiasm for party ideology and practice before he became disenchanted with communism in the late 1930s and early 1940s. The narrator imagines himself as a willing instrument of party dogma, a ‘‘flaming torch’’to illuminate the minds of oppressed people, an ‘‘axe’’ that ‘‘whacks to the heart of knotty problems,’’ and ‘‘a wave that sweeps to victory.’’ The poem alternates between political slogans in capitalized bold face print and italicized lines which describe the impact of such slogans. Thus ‘‘Death to Lynchers!’’ is followed by ‘‘I bloom in tired brains in sleep.’’ And ‘‘ALL POWER TO THE SOVIETS!’’ is preceded by ‘‘The crest of the wave that sweeps to victory.’’ In a few years Wright would become quite uncomfortable with the sentiments expressed in poems like ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan,’’ perceiving a widening gap between the political abstractions he was told to preach by party officials and his own concrete perceptions as an AfricanAmerican writer. Even before he left Chicago in

1937 for New York where he would become the Harlem editor for the Daily Worker, he had grown resentful of complaints that he was too concerned with his writing and not sufficiently committed to political organizing. Wright’s unhappiness with communism deepened in 1941 when he became disillusioned by decisions made in Moscow to deemphasize the struggle for racial equality in America as a way of promoting harmony between the Soviet Union and the United States which would soon become allies in the war against Nazi Germany. By 1942, Wright officially broke with the Communist Party in an effort to maintain his independence and integrity as an African-American writer. As he would later remark in American Hunger, communism ironically took on many of the repressive features of southern life again which he had earlier rebelled: ‘‘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’’ (Wright 119). Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1952. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. 191

‘‘I Choose Exile’’

‘‘I CHOOSE EXILE’’ An essay which Wright wrote for Ebony in 1950 but was never published because the magazine’s conservative director, John H. Johnson, objected to its sharp criticism of American culture and its bleak portrayal of African-American life in Chicago’s South Side. Wright agreed in August 1949 to write three pieces for Ebony on the following subjects: his impressions of changes in the South Side since he had left it in 1937, a description of his life in Paris, and an account of the filming of Native Son in Argentina and Chicago. Wright’s description of the conversion of Native Son into a movie was entitled ‘‘Richard Wright Explains Ideas about Movie Making’’ and was published in Ebony’s January 1951 issue. His assessment of black life in Chicago appeared in the December 1951 issue of Ebony, along with a sharp editorial rebuttal of Wright’s views by Johnson and editor Ben Burns who accused Wright of being one who ‘‘sacrificed truth on the altar of militancy’’ (Rowley 398). Johnson, whose magazine had an editorial policy of projecting an upbeat vision of racial, economic, and social progress, particularly objected to Wright describing the South Side as a teeming ghetto whose inhabitants were locked in a cycle of racial discrimination and political injustice. Johnson was even more critical of Wright’s essay about his life in Paris. Entitled ‘‘I Choose Exile,’’ it explained Wright’s reasons for leaving the United States and taking up permanent residence in France. Wright argued that he experienced in France the freedom, equality, and human dignity which was denied to him in his native land and that ‘‘there was more freedom in one square block of Paris than there was in the entire United States’’ (Walker 229). Johnson feared that his readers and advertisers would be offended by such ideas and that he might pay a steep economic price for publishing Wright’s essay, especially after the controversy created earlier by ‘‘The Shame of Chicago.’’ Moreover, he was acutely aware that in Cold War America such 192

sharp criticism of the Untied States by an excommunist might draw the ire of the FBI and House Un-American Activities Committee, both of which were beginning to deal out harsh punishments for people and organizations suspected of harboring anti-American sentiments. In any event, Johnson refused either to publish the piece or relinquish publishing rights to it when Wright offered to return the five-hundred dollar commission so that he could place his work elsewhere. Ben Burns, the editor with whom Wright worked, finally sold ‘‘I Choose Exile’’ illegally to Kent State University in 1969 without the permission of Ebony or the Wright estate. It remains unpublished to this day. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘I HAVE SEEN BLACK HANDS’’ Wright is reputed to have written this poem after spending a whole night reading Marxist literature when he was a member of the John Reed Club. But whether or not this story is true, the poem is thoroughly Marxist in vision, describing the way working class people are exploited by a capitalist system and concluding with a vision of revolution where white and black workers will rise up and establish a classless society. Wright wrote this poem shortly after joining the Chicago John Reed Club in 1933, and he read it at one of their meetings, along with two other poems, ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ and ‘‘A Red Love Note.’’ Fellow club members Abe Aaron and Bill Jordan responded enthusiastically to the three poems and urged Wright to publish them. ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ and ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ were accepted by Left Front, a regional leftist journal and appeared in its January–February 1935 issue. But ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ was published in a much more prestigious place, New Masses, a nationally prominent journal which featured the work of important American leftists, socialists,

‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ and communists. Appearing in the June 26, 1934 issue, it greatly encouraged the young Wright and made his work available for the first time to a national audience. The poem is written in a free-flowing open form suggestive of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, two poets whom Wright greatly admired at this point in his life. Its four stanzas are carefully divided to portray the phases of black life in America. The first section describes black children growing up with their ‘‘tiny black fingers’’ reaching ‘‘restlessly and hungrily for life.’’ This part of the poem is filled with lyrical images of innocent children at play with their ‘‘bats and gloves and marbles’’ while doting mothers offer them ‘‘ice cream cones and sugar cookies.’’ But the stanza concludes with two possibilities held out to these children, a fruitful life arising from education (‘‘pens and rulers . . . tablets and books’’) and a destructive existence on the margins of American culture (‘‘dice and cards and half-pint flasks’’). The second stanza envisions the Great Migration of black people to northern cities where they are ‘‘snagged and crushed’’ in the ‘‘fast-moving belts of machines’’ while ’’banks of bosses’’ exploit them. This despairing vision is carried over into the third stanza where African Americans are ‘‘held back’’ by ‘‘a thousand white hands’’ that ‘‘took them and tied them.’’ The poem reaches its thematic nadir with a description of the ultimate horror in Wright’s world, a lynching in which ‘‘tall flames . . . cooked and charred the black flesh.’’ Unlike most of Wright’s fiction which usually concludes with such images of racial suffering and personal disaster, the poem ends optimistically with Wright declaring ‘‘I am black’’ and envisioning black hands raised in ‘‘fists of revolt’’ and joined triumphantly with the hands of white workers who have also been deprived of the ‘‘American dream.’’ This vision of Marxist revolution uplifts the poet who finally sees a ‘‘new horizon,’’ suggesting a classless society which can deliver on the promises of American life described in the first stanza.

This powerful poem written at the very outset of Wright’s career contains in embryonic form some of the images and ideas which he would continue to explore in much of his subsequent writing. The vision of Marxist revolution would be developed in a story such as ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ and the apocalyptic vision which Boris Max shares with Bigger Thomas in Native Son. The poem’s horrific image of a lynching appears at many points in Wright’s career, for example in his poem ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ and his story ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home.’’ (Lynchings also appear in Black Boy/American Hunger and The Long Dream.) And Wright’s dividing of African-American history into an early rural phase in the South and a later urban phase in the North would subsequently be employed in two non-fictional books, 12 Million Black Voices and Black Boy/American Hunger. Publishing ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ had another unusual benefit for Wright because it helped to put him in contact with two important African-American writers who would establish long friendships with him and play significant roles in his career. When Langston Hughes read the poem in New Masses, a journal which published some of his own work, he made a point of meeting Wright when he visited Chicago in 1935. And when Ralph Ellison read ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ shortly after arriving in New York in 1936, he asked Hughes to introduce him to Wright. So Wright’s remarkable poem brought together three major African-American writers, initiating relationships which would be personally and professionally fruitful for all three men. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands.’’ In Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African-American Poetry, edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

‘‘I TRIED TO BE A COMMUNIST’’ An essay which Wright published originally in the August 1944 issue of Atlantic Monthly and 193

‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ which was later included in Richard Crossman’s 1950 book, The God That Failed, a selection of essays by Wright, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, and Stephen Spender which described their disaffection with the Communist Party. Wright’s essay explains both the reasons why he was attracted to the Communist Party and why he later felt compelled to leave it. He joined the party while living in Chicago in 1934 because he was impressed by its stance against racism and its commitment to world-wide social and political transformation. Wright described his involvement with communism as ‘‘the first total emotional commitment of my life’’ (Crossman 117) because it provided him with a new faith in social justice and a strong belief that Marxist revolution was a viable means of achieving a new world order. Moreover, Marxism and communism offered Wright an imaginatively compelling and emotionally satisfying alternative to the isolation he had felt since early childhood since it provided him with ‘‘a common vision that bound us all together,’’ a ‘‘state of kinship with others’’ (141) culminating eventually in a classless society. Like Silone, Koestler, Farrell, and many other intellectuals and artists of the 1930s, Wright eventually saw a large gap between what communism promised and what it actually delivered. While its ideals presented a vision of brotherhood and cooperation, his experience in the John Reed Club and other communist organizations confronted him with quite another experience of vicious infighting and fragmentation. And even though communist theory offered the prospect of a raceless society, in practice it often ignored important strategies for achieving racial justice in America in order to promote global agendas which Moscow placed higher priority on. The precise date when Wright left the Communist Party is difficult to determine because he simply withdrew over a period of time from its activities and campaigns rather than making an official resignation. Some scholars date his withdrawal from the party as early as 1937 while

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others date his withdrawal as late as 1942. Wright himself was not clear on this issue, telling Edward Aswell, his editor, that he left the party in 1942 while on another occasion telling editors at The New York Herald Tribune that he severed relations in 1940. By the time ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ was published in 1944, however, he clearly had broken definitively from communism, although he still maintained a faith in Marxism and socialism. Wright’s quarrel with the Communist Party, therefore, developed over a period of time and was rooted in a variety of issues. By 1937, when he left Chicago for New York, he was deeply troubled by the party’s interfering with his freedom as a writer, substituting their ideology for his own beliefs and experience as an AfricanAmerican novelist. He would later declare in American Hunger ‘‘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). He was also deeply suspicious of the party’s neglect of racial issues at home in favor of pursuing Moscow’s agenda abroad. In 1942, he severely criticized the Communist Party’s failure to endorse A. Phillip Randolph’s March on Washington, a protest against racial discrimination in American war industries and segregation in the armed forces. Wright was also disappointed by the critical reception which Native Son received in several leftist journals, criticizing the novel for not conforming strictly enough to party ideology. In any event, Wright felt liberated and relieved to be free of ideological restraints when he began a new phase of his career in the mid-1940s, the time when he produced two masterpieces, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ and Black Boy, works which are centered in existentialist concerns rather than leftist programs and ideals. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ becomes his most explicit and formal break with communism, freeing Wright ‘‘to stand alone’’ (Crossman 142) as he independently interpreted African-American experience. See also Marxism.

Indonesia Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam, 1965. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

ILLINOIS WRITERS PROJECT A Works Progress Administration (WPA)-sponsored project centered in Chicago during the Great Depression which employed over 200 workers in various forms of research focusing on Illinois history and culture. Wright joined the Illinois Writers Project as a supervisor in the spring of 1935. He got the job through Mary Wirth, his caseworker, who was the wife of Louis Wirth, the University of Chicago sociologist who headed up the Chicago division of the project. Wright concluded his work for the Illinois Writers Project in the summer of 1937 when he left Chicago to assume the position of Harlem correspondent for the Daily Worker in New York. Wright’s experience with this project was beneficial to him in several ways. First of all, his supervisor’s job paid him $130 per month, very good pay during the Depression, and this helped him to support himself and his family better than he was previously able to do. And, since his job required only 30 hours per week, it left him with time to pursue his own writing. The work itself was strongly connected to his interests as a writer since many of the research projects which were conducted centered on areas of black history and culture such as interviews of ex-slaves, studies of African-American folklore, and examinations of ghetto life. Wright did extensive research on black migration from the rural South to Chicago and wrote two detailed reports on this subject, ‘‘Ethnological Aspects of Chicago’s Black Belt’’ and ‘‘Bibliography on the Negro in Chicago.’’ But one of the most important benefits of Wright’s involvement in the Illinois Writers Project was its providing him with regular contact with like-minded people who formed a community of young writers who worked together,

socialized with each other, and discussed their writing constantly. Like the John Reed Club, the Communist Party, and the South Side Writers Group, the Illinois Writers Project helped Wright to overcome his isolation and be nourished personally and artistically by a network of people who shared his concerns and supported his work. Among the people with whom Wright worked on this project were Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Arna Bontemps, and Samuel Sillen, each of whom played important roles in Wright’s development as a writer. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

INDONESIA Wright went to Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955 to attend the Bandung Conference. An announcement was made in early January 1955 on the international conference to be held in April in Bandung, Indonesia by the free countries of the Third World, including Indonesia, India, Burma, and Ceylon. Wright immediately began to do some preliminary research on Indonesia and the conference by way of reading some books on East-West relations and using a series of prepared questions to interview a number of Dutch, Asians, and Indonesians. He obtained his visa from the Indonesia Consulate in early February. Wright left Paris on 10 April by air and arrived at the airport in Jakarta, Indonesia, on the afternoon of 12 April. Mochtar Lubis, editor of the Indonesia Raya, met Wright there and took him home to Tugu, situated on the cool hills a few miles outside the city. Wright moved into Jakarta proper and stayed with an Indonesian engineer. He hired a beja (pedicab), and spent an afternoon observing the city. The Bandung Conference took place from 18 to 24 April and Wright participated in it enthusiastically. After the conference, Wright checked out of the Hotel Van Hengel in Jakarta after staying for eight nights and checked in at another hotel 195

International Literature on 26 April to stay on in Indonesia until 4 May. Wright embarked at Harbor Priok in Jakarta aboard the ship Willem Ruys at 8:00 a.m. on 5 May. The boat’s final destination was Rotterdam in Holland and set sail at 11:00 a.m. for Naples from Harbor Priok. After Wright came back to Paris on 20 May, he wrote ‘‘Vers Bandung via Se´ville’’ [‘‘From Se´ville to Bandung’’], the story of his last few days in Spain and arrival in Indonesia. It was published in the July issue of Preuves. ‘‘Indonesian Notebook,’’ an excerpt from The Color Curtain, was published in the August issue of Encounter. When copyright deposit of The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference was made in the Library of Congress by the World Publishing on 26 March 1956, one of the first reactions to this report was Mochtar Lubis’s article, ‘‘Through Colored Glasses?’’ published in the March 1956 issue of Encounter. Then, ‘‘Letter to the Editor,’’ Wright’s reply to Lubis’s criticism, ‘‘Through Colored Glasses,’’ appeared in the April 1956 issue of Encounter which read, ‘‘No, I did not see Indonesia through ‘colored’ glasses nor did I feel it with a ‘religious’ skin. For the three weeks I stayed in Jakarta and Bandung, all the talk I heard was of race and religion . . . To me this seemed natural and inevitable’’ (qtd. in Fabre 425). Even after this exchange between Wright and Lubis, Wright wrote in the 18 December 1957 letter to his Dutch translator, Margrit de Sablonie`re, that he suspected that civil war would soon come in Indonesia despite his decision of unconditional support of the Third World peoples against the West. Toru Kiuchi Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain. New York: World Publishing, 1956.

INTERNATIONAL LITERATURE The monthly publication of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, it was published in the Soviet Union and circulated world-wide.

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When Wright attended his first meeting of the John Reed Club in 1933, he was given several back issues of International Literature along with copies of other leftist journals such as Left Front, Anvil, and Masses. While reading International Literature, he became acquainted with essays by Maxim Gorky and Andre´ Gide, writers he came to admire who would later exert influence on his own work. In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright stressed that his reading of these radically leftist journals left a deep and lasting impression on him: ‘‘The revolutionary words leaped from the printed page and struck me with tremendous force’’ (374). Although he was skeptical of the political speeches by communists which he had heard for several years in Washington Park, Wright regarded the essays by established writers in these official leftist journals as having touched deep chords within him and were part of the reasons why he joined the John Reed Club in 1933 and the Communist Party a year later. Important writers such as Gorky and Gide opened his eyes to a political movement which could provide him with ‘‘an organized search for the truth of the lives of the oppressed and isolated’’ which could lead to ‘‘the possibility of uniting scattered but kindred people into a whole’’ (373–74). Before long, Wright was publishing his own work in these journals which had awakened and encouraged his artistic ambitions. Between January 1934 and July 1935 he published three poems in The Left Front, two poems in The Anvil, and three poems in New Masses. He also placed one of his most important works, ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ in the July–August 1934 issue of Partisan Review. During this time, Wright placed three poems in International Literature. ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan’’ and ‘‘Ah Feel It in Mah Bones’’ appeared in that journal’s April 1935 issue. ‘‘Transcontinental,’’ a long Whitmanian poem about revolution spreading throughout the United States, was published in the January 1936 issue.

‘‘Introduction,’’ Black Metropolis (St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton) Although Wright would soon put poetry on his literary back burner so that he could concentrate on the fiction which would comprise his major work, the great importance of his publishing in a prestigious journal such as International Literature cannot be overestimated. Seeing his work in print in a journal which included the work of established writers such as Gide and Gorky and which received world-wide circulation, must have been a heady experience for the young Wright. It certainly gave him the confidence he needed to devote himself seriously to writing. And the political and social themes found in apprentice poems such as ‘‘Ah Feel It in Mah Bones’’ and ‘‘Transcontinental’’ would find richer, more complicated treatment in his major works such as Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Collins, 1993.

‘‘INTRODUCTION,’’ BLACK METROPOLIS (ST. CLAIR DRAKE AND HORACE CAYTON) Wright wrote a detailed introduction to the 1945 edition of St. Clair Drake’s and Horace Cayton’s Black Metropolis, a monumental sociological study of African-American life in Chicago. Cayton and Wright were close friends who were stimulated by each other’s work and collaborated on several projects. They met in 1933 at the University of Chicago through a mutual acquaintance, sociologist Louis Wirth, Cayton’s graduate advisor and the husband of the social worker for the Wright family, Mary Wirth. Wright credited Cayton’s research into ghetto life with providing him with important raw material which he used in 12 Million Black Voices. In his ‘‘Introduction’’ to Black Metropolis Wright regarded the book as ‘‘a landmark of research and scientific achievement’’ (xvii) and revealed that he felt ‘‘personally identified with the material in the book’’ (xvii) since its research into the migration from the South to Chicago

and its detailed analysis of ghetto life illuminated his own experiences as a black man who fled Mississippi to Chicago and, in the process, experienced the bitter disappointments of black urban life. Moreover, Wright draw a strong parallel in his introduction between the sociological vision contained in Black Metropolis and the way he represented black experience in his own literary work: If in reading my novel, Native Son, you doubted the reality of Bigger Thomas, then examine the delinquency rates cited in this book; if, in reading my autobiography, Black Boy, you doubted the picture of family life shown there, then study the figures on family disorganization given here. Black Metropolis describes the processes that mold Negro life as we know it today . . . After studying the social processes in this book, you can not expect Negro life to be other than what it is. (xx)

Wright’s introduction ranks Black Metropolis with classic sociological studies such as Louis Wirth’s The Ghetto, Frederick Thrasher’s The Gang, and E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in the United States as groundbreaking analyses of African-American life in the twentieth century. These books, all written by sociologists and anthropologists from the University of Chicago, not only provided Wright with ‘‘huge mountains of fact’’ but, more importantly, gave him his ‘‘first concrete vision of the forces that molded the urban Negro’s body and soul’’ (xviii). Wright stresses in his introduction to Black Metropolis, that the ‘‘Chicago School’’ of sociologists, no less than Chicago writers such as Theodore Dreiser and James T. Farrell, were critically important influences on his development as a writer and thinker. For Wright, Black Metropolis is centered in three essential points: (1) black/white relationships in Chicago, (2) the cultural life black people have established ‘‘under their separate subordinate status’’ (xix), and (3) the shaping of Chicago institutions by the racism which has marred the city’s history. He praises Drake and Cayton for writing a book whose purpose is ‘‘not to soothe’’ but to 197

‘‘Introduction,’’ In The Castle of My Skin (George Lamming) ‘‘reveal the facts of Negro life’’ (xxx) in such a way as to ‘‘make visible’’ (xxx) the systematic exploitation of blacks by a white power structure deeply rooted in a history of racial injustice. It is important to understand that Wright regarded the problems of Chicago as symptomatic of broader issues in America and throughout the world. The social, racial, and economic injustices documented so carefully in Black Metropolis reflect for Wright similar worldwide injustices which have caused disastrous wars, bloody revolutions, and harsh dictatorships during the twentieth century. Warning readers that ‘‘There is a problem facing us that is a bigger one than even that of the Negro, a problem of which the Negro problem is a small but a highly symbolically important part’’ (xxi), he draws parallels between the cultural disasters in Russia and Germany during the first half of the twentieth century and the difficulties facing America in 1945 if it does not square its humanistic ideals with its actual practices. Wright emphatically reminds his readers that ‘‘Hitler came out of a slum’’ and ‘‘Chicago could be the Vienna of American Fascism’’ (xx). In these ways, Wright ultimately describes the central purpose of Black Metropolis as remarkably similar to the purpose of his own literary work; that is, to make visible ‘‘a meaning in Negro life that whites do not see and do not want to see’’ (xviii). Drake and Cayton, like Wright, have ‘‘an astute concern, not only for the welfare of the Negro, but for the nation as a whole’’ (xxviii) because all three men regard America’s racial problems as the tip of an iceberg, a reflection of America’s failure to deliver on its democratic promises, thus endangering the country with the prospect of violent revolution. While Wright’s introduction poses the question ‘‘Can America change these conditions?’’ (xx), he was unable to provide any clear or reassuring answer to this question in 1945, a year when he was seriously considering leaving his homeland for what would become his long exile in Europe. Contemporary reactions to Wright’s introduction were largely positive, although Marxists such

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as Herbert Aptheker complained that Wright overemphasized the moral failings of American racism while downplaying its economic causes. Drake later became critical of Wright’s introduction and in his 1962 preface to the revised edition of Black Metropolis claimed that Wright was ‘‘overstating his case’’ by wielding a ‘‘verbal sledge hammer’’ and ‘‘twisting the literary stiletto’’ (Rowley 567). Wright was sensitive to Drake’s reservations about his work and, although he had planned to write a new introduction to the revised edition of Black Metropolis, he eventually abandoned the project. Selected Bibliography: Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright the Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘INTRODUCTION,’’ IN THE CASTLE OF MY SKIN (GEORGE LAMMING) At the urging of his editor at Harper’s, Edward Aswell, Wright wrote an introduction to George Lamming’s novel portraying the childhood and adolescence of a black person growing up in colonial West Indies. In it he expressed high praise for the author’s ‘‘charged and poetic prose’’ (Wright 219) and made strong connections between his own early life in the Deep South with Lamming’s description of his experience in British-controlled Barbados. He regarded both of their stories as representing a dramatic ‘‘change from folk life to the borders of the industrial world’’ (Wright 221). Wright envisioned their lives as ‘‘a symbolic repetition of the stories of millions of simple folk’’ who had been ‘‘catapulted . . . into the turbulence and anxiety of the twentieth century’’ (Wright 219). But he also made a crucial distinction between his own experiences in Mississippi and Lamming’s life in the West Indies. While Wright was part of the black minority which was dominated in all phases of its public life by a

‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ majority of white supremacists, producing in black southerners a ‘‘chronic grinding racial hatred’’ (Wright 220) of whites, the black majority of Lamming’s world was less damaged by the relatively small ruling minority and was able to develop a richer, more nourishing culture of their own. Lamming, therefore, could present his past in a much more lyrical and affirmative manner, using a ‘‘quietly melodious prose’’ (Wright 220) which stands in sharp contrast to Wright’s highly ironic, and often bitter, naturalistic style. Wright made one other important connection between himself and Lamming. As black people, they both were forced to confront the intricate problems caused by what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘‘the double consciousness.’’ Inhabiting whitecontrolled worlds, each had to come to terms with a self which was psychologically split: The Negro, though born in the Western world, is not quite of it; due to policies of racial exclusion, his is the story of two cultures, the dying culture in which he happens to be born, and the culture into which he is trying to enter . . . Such a story is, above all, a record of shifting, troubled feelings groping their way toward a future that frightens as much as it beckons. (Wright 220)

Wright in 1953 was deeply interested in the Pan African thinking advanced by his friend George Padmore because it offered him a way of finally resolving the problems of the painfully conflicted double consciousness which he saw revealed in his own life and the lives of writers such as George Lamming. The ‘‘new identity’’ (Wright 221) which both Wright and Lamming sought as Pan Africanists promised to unify them psychologically just as it would unify black people politically. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Introduction to George Lamming’s In the Castle of My Skin, in Richard Wright’s Books and Writers. by Fabre, Michel. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

‘‘ISLAND OF HALLUCINATIONS’’ Late in his career, Wright had intended to write a series of novels about Fishbelly Tucker, a black Mississippian who was forced to leave America and exile himself in France. The Long Dream, published by Doubleday in October 1958, was the first installment in the series, and ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ was projected as its sequel but was never published. Whereas The Long Dream focuses on the central character’s troubled life in the segregated South, which he envisions as a kind of ‘‘purgatory’’ (Wright 164), and concludes with him fleeing to France, ‘‘Island of Hallucinations centers on the new problems he encounters in Paris as a black expatriate. Wright began writing ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ shortly after The Long Dream was published. The book was written during a very difficult time in Wright’s life and reflects his growing anxieties and doubts. His marriage suffered serious strains after his wife had discovered a series of his affairs dating back to 1951 when he became involved with Marilyn Jackson during the filming of Native Son in Argentina. 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 had good reason to feel that he was being persecuted by the FBI and the CIA for beliefs he no longer held. And by 1958 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 as Wright was beginning work on ‘‘Island of Hallucinations.’’ George Padmore, whom he greatly admired and regarded as one of the few persons who understood and shared his views, died in 1959. Wright was also deeply shaken by the passing away of his Aunt Maggie in 1957 and his mother in 1959. To make all of these matters worse, Wright was experiencing serious doubts about his writing. Savage Holiday and The Long Dream had been

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‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ poorly received in America, and Wright had become increasingly sensitive about the opinions of American scholars and critics that his French exile had weakened his art. While writing ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ therefore, Wright saw himself at a critical point in his career and worried that his skills as a novelist were in decline. In a letter to Paul Reynolds, Jr. dated February 16, 1959, he revealed that he had serious ‘‘misgivings’’ about the novel and regarded it as a ‘‘crisis book’’ (Fabre 475) which, if unsuccessful, could end his career as a fiction writer. He considered ‘‘abandoning writing for a time’’ and finding ‘‘some other way to make a living’’ (Fabre 475). The final version of the manuscript which Wright sent to his new editor at Doubleday, Frank Seldes, had four basic sections. The first part was called ‘‘Phantoms’’ and described the racial nightmares of Fishbelly’s life in Mississippi. The second section portrayed his love affairs with various white women in Paris and was titled ‘‘False Faces.’’ The third portion, ‘‘Delayed Bombs,’’ detailed the Byzantine personal and political intrigues of African-American expatriates in Paris. The novel concluded with Fishbelly being deported after one of his friends betrays him by reporting him to French authorities as a dangerous revolutionary serving the communist agenda in western Europe. Throughout the entire novel, Wright makes it clear that Fishbelly’s quest for freedom, justice, and personal fulfillment in France is doomed to failure. While the white people in Paris are not quite as vicious as the Mississippi rednecks who want to lynch him, Fishbelly is never really able to trust many people or feel that he ‘‘belongs’’ in France. Cold War intrigues, which both the French and Americans are prone to, put his life at risk. The novel ends as it begins, with Fishbelly escaping a hostile environment and seeking a new life. Like Wright himself, his quest for freedom is unfinished. The novel can be read as a roman a` clef as Wright fills his narrative with characters who are modeled after people he actually knew and, for the most part, came to detest. As Wright revealed

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to Reynolds, ‘‘Everything in the ms. happened but I’ve twisted characters so people won’t recognize them’’ (Rowley 494). James Baldwin, who had a serious falling out with Wright in Paris after publishing two widely read articles which were deeply critical of Wright’s work, is represented as a black homosexual who is reduced to tears when he is sent to prison for stealing hotel sheets. William Gardner Smith and Chester Himes, two African-American novelists whom Wright grew to distrust and dislike, were also portrayed in very unflattering ways as self-promoting womanizers. Only Ollie Harrington, whom Hazel Rowley describes as ‘‘the only man Wright trusted’’ (Rowley 488) in Paris, is portrayed in a positive way. He is the model for Ned Harrison, the lone character in the novel who stands above the petty rivalries and political games which poison life in the expatriate enclave. The novel, in Rowley’s words, ‘‘paints a grim picture of the Paris world’’ which Wright, by 1958, ‘‘was eager to flee’’ (Rowley 494). Wright hoped that the book might revive his sagging reputation and provide him with much-needed financial resources, but he was deeply disappointed by the response to the manuscript which he got from his editor. Seldes insisted that Wright make substantial revisions in the 400-page manuscript, greatly reducing its size and moderating its strident tone. In June 1959 Wright and Seldes talked about these revisions, but Wright had little desire to make the required changes. He eventually dropped the project and turned his hand to the writing of several thousand haiku poems and the development of a radio play, ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like That.’’ When Wright died on November 28, 1960, the manuscript of ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ lay buried in Wright’s files. It remains unpublished in the Wright Collection in the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

J ‘‘THE JACKAL’’ An unpublished novella which Wright began in the winter of 1944, it eventually evolved into a short novel entitled Rite of Passage which was published in 1994. Wright began the work after completing Black Boy and the two books are closely related. Black Boy, subtitled A Record of Childhood and Youth, tells the story of how the segregated South systematically damages young black people and ‘‘The Jackal’’ tells an equally disturbing tale of how the lives of black youth are blighted by northern racism and de facto segregation. While writing ‘‘The Jackal,’’ Wright did extensive research on troubled young people in Harlem and was actively involved with two social projects which provided him with powerful first-hand knowledge of how the modern American city was destroying black lives. He helped Dr. Frederic Wertham establish the Lafargue Clinic which offered free psychiatric treatment for Harlem residents and, as a result of his work with the clinic, wrote two articles, ‘‘Psychiatry Comes to Harlem’’ and ‘‘Juvenile Delinquency Comes to Harlem.’’ Both essays reported on what Wright learned as he interviewed gang members who were treated by Wertham and his staff. Wright also became strongly involved with Wiltwyck School for Boys in Esopus, New York, a treatment

center for troubled youth from New York City. He interviewed Wiltwyck’s caseworkers and clients and continued to read widely in sociological and psychiatric studies of young black men engaged in criminal activity. He also kept an elaborate journal of his findings which he hoped to publish as a separate book, ‘‘Children of Harlem.’’ An April 1945 journal entry praises Wiltwyck School for its efforts to ‘‘rehabilitate broken boys, emotionally smashed boys who never had a chance’’ (Rampersad 136). His Wiltwyck journals focused on four case studies and the one referred to as ‘‘Boy A’’ became a model for the central character of Rite of Passage, Johnny Gibbs. In its original form, ‘‘The Jackal’’ centered on a gang of Negro boys who kidnap a black woman and are afraid to release her for fear that she will turn them into the police. ‘‘The Jackal’’ was abandoned and eventually became in the late 1950s a novella called ‘‘The Leader Man’’ which Wright wanted to include in a collection of his stories entitled ‘‘Ten Men.’’ The plot of ‘‘The Leader Man’’ is quite similar to the narrative which evolved into Rite of Passage. The protagonist, a fourteen-year-old boy named Johnny Gibbs, learns that the man and woman who raised him are not his real parents and that he is, in fact, a foster child and an orphan. When city welfare 201

Jackson, Mississippi authorities try to place him in another foster home, he runs away, joins a gang, and soon becomes its leader. Like so many of Wright’s protagonists, he becomes a marginal figure living on the existential edge. He inhabits cellars and abandoned buildings and randomly mugs and steals from people walking the streets of New York. The story ends with him tiring of gang life and longing to return to the life of love and security which he had previously enjoyed with the people he thought were his parents. Wright tried to place the story in Esquire, but it was rejected because of its length. He also attempted to include it in his final collection of short stories, but his agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., who regarded it as unfinished, persuaded him to strike it from the book. The manuscript lay in the Wright Collection at Yale University until it was published by Harper Collins in 1994. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘The Invisible Women of Wright’s Rite of Passage,’’ African American Review 27 (Winter 1994), 687–691. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Afterword.’’ Rite of Passage. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI Richard Wright spent a significant portion of his childhood and adolescence living in his Grandmother Wilson’s household on 1107 Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi. During that period, Jackson was what Hazel Rowley has described as ‘‘a country town with pretensions’’ (Rowley 9). It had a population of approximately 20,000 people and was largely a commercial and administrative center with very little industry. As Margaret Walker has stressed, it was carefully segregated, ‘‘sharply divided by race and class lines into separate neighborhoods’’ (Walker 31). Its ‘‘City Directory’’ in 1922 designated blacks with a lower case ‘‘c’’ after their names. Although African Americans in Jackson paid the same taxes as whites did, their streets were unpaved, unlit, and poorly drained. There was no high school in

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Jackson for black students until 1925 when Lanier High was opened. Wright’s first stay in Jackson was in the summer and autumn of 1916 when his family was forced to leave Memphis after his father had deserted them and his mother could not work because of severe illness. Michel Fabre has noted that the Wrights’ summer and fall of 1916 was a ‘‘glorious escape from their ordeal’’ (Fabre 17) in Memphis. Jackson’s tree-lined streets and spacious parks were a welcome relief from what Wright described in Black Boy as the ‘‘strange city’’ (Wright 11) of Memphis with its run-down neighborhoods and grey industrial buildings. His grandparents’ modest two-story home was clean and well kept, and Wright enjoyed a very warm relationship with his grandfather who took him fishing and doted on him. Lynch Street was not far removed from fields, swamps, and forests which Wright enjoyed exploring with his friends. Wright’s living with his grandparents at this time was later responsible for his writing ‘‘one of the few lyrical passages in Black Boy’’ (Fabre 18), where Wright described in a prose poem an Edenic world of peace and natural beauty. Wright’s second stay in Jackson, a seven-year period in his adolescence, was not so happy. After his family had to flee from Elaine, Arkansas when his Uncle Silas Hoskins was murdered by whites, Wright lived for a short time with his Uncle Clark and his wife in Greenwood, Mississippi, but he returned to Jackson to be with his mother. They spent the next seven years as members of Grandmother Wilson’s household on Lynch Street. By this time, his grandfather’s rheumatism had made it impossible for him to work, and the family suffered from severe economic hardship. Food was scarce, and Wright became ‘‘painfully conscious of living in his grandparents’ house as an ‘‘uninvited guest’’ (Rowley 16). He also had difficulty adjusting to the strict regimen which his grandmother had imposed upon the entire household. As a staunch Seventh Day Adventist, she forbade Wright to read ‘‘worldly’’ books, listen to secular music, or attend dances.

James, C. L. R. Everyone woke up early to say morning prayers and were not allowed to talk during meal times. All-night Saturday services were compulsory, and nobody could work from Friday sunset to Saturday sunset. Margaret Walker has argued that Wright’s grandmother and Aunt Addie were ‘‘religious fanatics’’ (Walker 33) who instilled in Wright a life-long antagonism toward formal religion. Shortly after becoming a member of his grandmother’s household, Wright was enrolled in a Seventh Day Adventist school and he rebelled so strongly against it that he transferred to Jim Hill Primary School, a public school located across the street from his grandmother’s home. He entered Jim Hill in the fifth grade, two years below his age group, but immediately excelled in his studies and was quickly promoted. He developed close friendships with Joe Brown, Essie Lee Ward, Lewis Anderson, and D. C. Blackburn. For the first time in his life, Wright was among friends who were serious students and had well defined goals for success. He began to develop a strong habit of reading, devouring pulp magazines, dime novels, and detective magazines. In the fall of 1923, he entered Smith Robertson Junior High School and published his first story ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’ in the Jackson Southern Register, a black weekly newspaper. He graduated as valedictorian on May 29, 1925, drawing the ire of school officials by delivering his own speech instead of the one prepared for him by the principal. He worked that summer as a bellhop at a local hotel and an usher at the Alamo Theatre. While a student at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson, he grew increasingly disturbed by the racial injustice and violence he observed in Jackson and made plans to live elsewhere. While working at a city hotel, he was shocked at the news that a black co-worker named Ray Robinson was castrated and run out of town when he was discovered having consensual sex with a white woman. Wright himself was nearly the victim of racial violence when bullied at work and later when given a ride by a group of drunken white youths who called

him a ‘‘nigger’’ (Wright 214) and threatened to beat him if he did not address them as ‘‘sir.’’ He was fired from several jobs by people who did not like his non-servile demeanor. When one of his friends, Griggs, warned him that he could be killed if he failed to accept his place as a southern Negro, he replied ‘‘I can’t be a slave’’ (Wright 218). By age 15, therefore, he resolved to leave Jackson and head to the North, ‘‘incessantly’’ (Rowley 30) talking about his plans to do so with Joe Brown. So Wright left Jackson for Memphis in November 1925 as part of his strategy to leave the South altogether and pursue a ‘‘new life’’ (Wright 296) in the North. He felt ‘‘walled in’’ (Wright 206) by his life in Jackson, trapped not only by white racism but also the harshly puritanical demands made upon him by his grandmother. He would return to Mississippi on only one occasion, stopping at Natchez in 1940 where he met briefly with his father as he made his way back from his honeymoon with Dhimah Meadman in Mexico. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

JAMES, C. L. R. (4 January 1901– 19 May 1989) He was a prominent black leftist who grew up in Trinidad and attended Queens Royal College in Port of Spain before emigrating to England in the early 1930s, where he wrote for the Manchester Guardian as a cricket reporter and became associated with a group of Marxists devoted to freeing the West Indies from colonial rule. He became a committed Trotskyist who worked with the Labor Party to reform the class system in Britain. During the Great Depression, he wrote a play about Toussaint L’Overture which was staged in London and starred Paul Robeson. In 1937, he published World Revolution, a history of the rise 203

James, Henry and fall of the Communist International. His 1938 book on the history of the Haitian revolution, The Black Jacobins remains the definitive book on that subject. James moved to the United States in 1938 and remained there for the next fourteen years. He helped to form the Workers Party, a radically Marxist labor organization. Several of his most important books were published while he lived in the Untied States, including Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, and Lenin (1948), American Civilization (1949), and Capitalism and World Revolution (1950). He was deported from the United States in 1952, ostensibly for overstaying his visa but really because government officials were uncomfortable with his political views. He spent the next six years in England and returned to Trinidad in 1958 where he edited The Nation for the People’s National Movement Party. Along with fellow Trinidadians, Eric Williams and George Padmore, he became strongly involved in the Pan-African Movement which was designed to create unity of African peoples and free them from colonial rule. He returned to the United States in 1968, teaching at the University of the District of Columbia. Spending his final years in England, he died in London in May 1989. According to Margaret Walker, Wright met James in 1938 shortly after he had come to the United States from Trinidad, thus beginning ‘‘a friendship that would last the next twenty-two years’’ (Walker 120). Both were deeply committed leftists who believed that radical changes needed to be made in American society if blacks and working-class whites were to be treated justly. It was through James that Wright met other black nationalists such as Williams and Padmore who broadened Wright’s racial vision by getting him involved with the Pan-African Movement. Wright introduced James to Constance Webb, a white actress and model who was also a staunch Trotskyist. Webb and James married and became close friends with the Wrights, often visiting them in their Brooklyn apartment on Middagh Street and later becoming their neighbors when the

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Wrights moved to their townhouse on Charles Street in Greenwich Village. When Richard and Ellen Wright moved to France in 1947, Webb and James were members of the send-off party. After her divorce from James, Webb continued to be a close friend of the Wrights, and she published the first biography of Wright in 1968, Richard Wright: A Biography. In the spring of 1944, Wright involved James in a discussion group, a ‘‘thinking coterie’’ (Fabre 268) which he hoped would produce a book on American racial relations. The group included James, J. Saunders Redding, Horace Cayton, St. Clair Drake, Melvin Tolson, Lawrence Reddick, and E. Franklin Frazier. Each member of the group was supposed to write an essay expressing the values and ideas which they held in common, and Wright would compose a concluding piece entitled ‘‘The Meaning of Negro Experience in America.’’ The project stalled when individual members of the group had difficulty finding common ground, and it was abandoned when Wright moved to France in 1947. Wright and James, along with Ralph Ellison and James T. Farrell, also tried to found a magazine in the mid-1940s which would analyze American racial problems in a broadly ‘‘non-partisan, nonpolitical’’ manner (Webb 220). Its working title was American Pages, but it never materialized because Wright was unable to secure adequate financial backing for the project. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

JAMES, HENRY (15 April 1843– 28 February 1916) A major American novelist, short story writer, and critic, James was born to a distinguished Boston family. His father was a philosopher who was deeply influenced by Swedenborg, and his brother

James, Henry William became one of the most important American philosophers who helped develop pragmatism as a uniquely American school of thought. His sister, Alice, wrote a remarkable book, The Diary of A. J., which is now considered a landmark in American autobiographical writing. James spent his childhood alternating between America, England, and France and is best known for bringing to artistic perfection the ‘‘international novel’’ which focuses on the experiences of American protagonists in Europe. Novels such as The American (1877), ‘‘Daisy Miller’’ (1878), The Portrait of a Lady (1881), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904) offer rich and complex visions of how Old World and New World cultures are related to each other. James is essentially ambivalent about both cultures, stressing both their weaknesses and their strengths. His central characters often find themselves tragically caught between the conflicting demands of American and European cultures. James is also important as a critic and an artist who brought fiction to new levels of conscious deliberation and formal perfection. His prefaces to his major novels are complex discussions of his artful uses of narrative point of view, setting, and character development. Many of these prefaces were collected in his Art of the Novel, a book which remains a seminal work in American critical theory. In Richard Wright: Books and Writers, Michel Fabre lists eight of James’s books in Richard Wright’s library, including The American, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, and The Art of the Novel. Like James, Wright was an expatriate who was fascinated by the relationship between European and American cultures, and he also shared James’s highly conscious approach to writing fiction. According to Margaret Walker, ‘‘if there were two literary books that were Wright’s Bible, they were Henry James’s Collected Prefaces on the Art of the Novel and Joseph Warren Beach’s Twentieth Century Novel’’ (Walker 75). When asked in a 1940 interview about which writers had influenced him, Wright

pointed out, ‘‘James, along with Theodore Dreiser, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, and Fyodor Dostoevsky’’ (Kinnamon 32). Joyce Gourfain, a friend Wright had met in the Communist Party, introduced Wright to James’s The Art of the Novel when he was living in Chicago in 1934 and was writing the stories which would appear in Uncle Tom’s Children. He was also one year away from making preliminary notes for Native Son, as Keneth Kinnamon has pointed out in New Essays on Native Son (Kinnamon 4). He re-read James’s prefaces after he had moved to Brooklyn in 1938 and was deeply immersed in the writing of Native Son. Wright, who sometimes referred to James’s The Art of the Novel as one of his ‘‘bibles’’ (Rowley 92), was strongly influenced by James in a number of important ways. He regarded James as one of the writers who helped him write more ‘‘consciously’’ (Webb 146), using highly calculated fictional techniques as a way of creating powerful emotional and psychological effects. One very important technique which James helped Wright to master was narrative point of view. In ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ which resembles a Jamesian preface, Wright stressed how he carefully filtered the novel through Bigger’s perspective: . . . I restricted the novel to what Bigger saw and felt, to the limits of his feelings and thoughts, even when I was conveying more than that to the reader. I had the notion that such a manner of rendering made for a sharper effect, a more pointed sense of the character, his peculiar type of being and consciousness. Throughout there is but one point of view: Bigger’s. This, too, I felt, made for a richer illusion of reality. (Wright 459)

James in his prefaces to What Maisie Knew and The Ambassadors, likewise, emphasized the importance of conscious use of point of view in creating formal unity and realism. Wright also stressed in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ how he structured scenes as a way of dramatizing, rather than summarizing, human experience. He explained how part of his intention to write a ‘‘well-constructed book’’ was to build scenes which would dramatize 205

Japan the action so that the reader would ‘‘feel that Bigger’s story was happening now like a play upon the stage’’ (Wright 459). He later reinforced this point in a 1960 interview when he claimed that he wanted to work out the meaning of a novel through ‘‘one scene after another’’ and not ‘‘through descriptions or narrative passages’’ (Kinnamon 215) and he credited James for showing him how to do this. James, like Wright, spent the final part of his career as an expatriate, dissatisfied with life in America. But Wright was careful to point out that his own exile was quite different from the one James chose. In a 1951 interview printed in the San Francisco Chronicle, he noted that he still considered himself an American and was deeply interested in American issues, adding that ‘‘I am not going in Henry James’s direction’’ (Kinnamon 153). While James became a British citizen and late in his life saw himself as a writer more rooted in English than American literary tradition, Wright never lost sight of himself as an American living in an ‘‘alien’’ land. As Fabre has emphasized in The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, ‘‘All through his life Wright remained an American’’ (Fabre 529). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad 1988. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

JAPAN Although Richard Wright never visited Japan, his work was first introduced to the country in 1940 by Moriya Emori’s translation of Native Son (Tokyo: Hibonkaku Press). Emori was a leftist

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poet and chief editor of The Red Flag (Akahata), an official newspaper for the Japan Communist Party. Only a leftist in such an important position could accomplish this task. Wright’s initial introduction was, however, soon interrupted by World War II, and it was not until the 1950s that his full reception began. Other early translations of Wright’s work appeared after 1950: ‘‘I Tried To Be a Communist’’ (1950), Black Boy (1952), Uncle Tom’s Children (1955), and The Outsider (1955). The mid-fifties marks the beginning of ‘‘serious’’ Japanese criticism on Wright’s life and work. Japanese critics observed, as did many American counterparts, that Wright was schooled in the tradition of American naturalism. During the 1950s, the relationship between Japan and the United States was so close that American culture poured into this country. Wright became one of the most frequently read black writers in Japan. In view of Wright’s life as an exile, several critics who lived a rootless urban life as outsiders in the post-war period have, in the decade, paid particular attention to the theme of alienation in his work. Above all, The Outsider was read from this point of view. Wright’s short stories ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ and ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ were introduced for the first time in 1960. Wright was at this time was regarded in Japan as one of the best black writers in America. An afterword to a Japanese translation of Wright’s Native Son observed that ‘‘Wright’s fame has been established and he is sure to be counted as one of the first-rate writers in America.’’ For this reason, the first Wright issue (No. 12, 1960) in Japan was published by Negro Studies (Black Studies since 1983), a journal for the Association of Negro Studies formed by a group of critics in 1954. In addition, the publication of The Complete Collection of Black Literature (Hayakawa Shobo Press) was begun in 1960 to meet the demands of the increasing number of serious and literary readers of black literature. Newly translated Native Son was selected as the first two volumes of the collection. Even his poem ‘‘Between the

Japan World and Me’’ and some haiku poems were chosen for the collection. Modern Literature, one of the premiere Japanese academic journals, however, did not select Wright as an opening article for the 1961 black literature issue. Instead, James Baldwin was closely examined in this issue. The editors of the journal were so sensitive to the trend of the times that they already knew that, by the early 1960s, the main stream of black literature was gradually shifted from Wright to new black writers like Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. The Japanese critics and writers composing the symposium on black literature in the issues of Modern Literature did notice that there was a wide gap between Wright and other African-American writers appearing after World War II. The untimely death of Wright in 1960 diminished Wright’s reputation for many critics and scholars. General readers, however, continued to read Black Boy even after Baldwin and Ellison took the place of Wright. The fact that another translation of Black Boy was published in 1962 as a volume in the Iwanami Library, one of the best and most widely-read libraries in Japan, does show that Black Boy still sold well, and that Wright was one of the most popular and important black writers in Japan. The autobiography has still been in print and is unfortunately Wright’s only book available in Japan now, while Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and The Outsider have long been out of print. In the middle of the 1960s, The Rising Generation (Eigo Seinen), one of the most widely-read journals among English teachers, published a special issue of black literature. Wright was featured as one of the most important black writers in it. The first book-length Japanese study of Wright was published during the decade, Masao Takahashi’s translation of the Michel Fabre biography, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. At the end of the sixties, White Man, Listen! (1969) and Eight Men (1969) were subsequently translated into Japanese. Thus, almost all of Wright’s major works were available in Japanese by that time.

In some way, the 1970s marks the greatest interest ever about black literature in Japan. The translation of Native Son was for the third time published as one of the Hayakawa Library in 1972. The book was, though in two volumes, so compact, handy, and inexpensive that general readers in Japan could easily have access to the novel. A Japanese translation of American Hunger was published in 1978. Not only has American Hunger received considerable attention, but other works, including Wright’s earlier fiction, have been reexamined with less emphasis on racial matters than was the case in previous decades. Wright criticism continued to flourish through the 1980s as the second book-length study of Wright was published, Giichi Ouchi’s translation of Fabre’s The World of Richard Wright (1991). Toru Kiuchi’s checklist of Wright studies in Japan, covering 1940 to 1983, stimulated Japanese students of African-American literature into more activity. Japanese critics of Wright in the eighties were especially interested in comparing Wright with other writers such as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alan Paton, Gertrude Stein, and Michael Gold and discussing Wright’s less-known novels and short stories such as Savage Holiday, Lawd Today!, ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and Wright’s unpublished work ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn.’’ Japanese commentaries on Wright’s writings in the eighties were characterized by a steady rise of discussions in depth of Wright’s thus far less studied aspects: the influence of Japanese haiku on Wright’s haiku, a difference between the dramatization of Native Son and the novel, Black Power in terms of Wright’s evaluation of Africa, Wright’s notion of the South in 12 Million Black Voices, young Wright’s deferred dream of pursuing male dignity in The Long Dream, and Wright’s perspective of Asia in The Color Curtain. The interest in Wright’s major works rose again during the 1990s. Especially, Black Boy, Native Son, Uncle Tom’s Children, and The Outsider were paid close attention to once again just as Wright was first introduced to Japan in the 1950s. For example, Black Boy was examined in terms of 207

Jim Hill Primary School black nationalism, the South, and slavery. Native Son was analyzed in terms of its relationship with Ellison’s Invisible Man and also for its portrayal of Bigger Thomas. The newly published Library of America’s edition of the novel was carefully examined. Wright’s concept of the relationship between literature and politics was also explored by a variety of critics. Uncle Tom’s Children was revaluated through the consideration of the special nature of the 1930s; it was studied for its vision of the South and Wright’s involvement with communism. The Outsider was examined as a detailed account of Wright’s hard struggle with the American society and the Communist Party; it was read as Wright’s autobiography which he wrote for the modern age, and it was analyzed through Wright’s notion of ‘‘the Other’’ as an important key to analyze his view of existentialism. In the nineties, Wright’s Pagan Spain, Rite of Passage, and his relationship to black music attracted the attention of critics for the first time in Japan. The 2000s opened with the publication of the translation of Lawd Today!, translated by Hiromi Furukawa and Seiji Kinugasa (Tokyo: Sairyusha Press, 2000). It was followed by the publication of Pagan Spain, translated by Hideo Ishizuka (Tokyo: Sairyusha Press, 2002). Significantly enough, the publication of both translations are indicative of the fact that the interest of Japanese general readers in Wright has shifted from major works to less-known works. Academic critics, on the other hand, still continued to have a great deal of concern about Wright’s haiku especially after the long-awaited publication of Haiku: This Other World, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Tener (New York: Arcade, 1998). Now that the whole aspect of Wright’s haiku was given by Hakutani and Tener’s edition, Japanese critics inevitably began to try to interpret the relationship between Wright’s haiku and Japanese haiku. Toru Kiuchi is the first in Japan to earn a Ph.D. in Wright studies in 2003 with the dissertation entitled ‘‘A Study of Richard Wright from an International Comparative Perspective,’’ which, in

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chapter seven, provides a detailed account of autobiographical elements in Wright’s haiku. Toru Kiuchi, Robert J. Butler, and Yoshinobu Hakutani’s bibliography The Critical Response in Japan to African American Writers (New York: Peter Lang) was published in 2003. This book is a comprehensive, detailed analysis of the Japanese response to African-American literature and places heavy emphasis on Wright. As noted earlier, Native Son and Black Boy have each been translated into Japanese three times, while Uncle Tom’s Children and The Outsider have twice been translated. Among them, only Black Boy has still been in print from the Iwanami Library (in two volumes). In 1969, seven years after the first edition in 1962, Wright’s autobiography went through the seventh impression. On the contrary, Native Son, published in 1972 first from the Hayakawa Library, never went through another impression and has still been out of print. One of the reasons why general readers prefer Black Boy to Native Son is that they read Black Boy as one of the traditional Bildungsromans they have liked since the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Consequently, an observation that Wright’s work resulted from his keen awareness of man’s universal plight rather than from his concern with racial problems is typical of the critical stance taken in Japan. Toru Kiuchi Selected Bibliography: Hakutani, Yoshinobu, and Toru Kiuchi. ‘‘The Critical Reception of Richard Wright in Japan: An Annotated Bibliography.’’ Black American Literature Forum 20 (1) (Spring 1986): 27– 61. Kiuchi, Toru, Robert J. Butler, and Yoshinobu Hakutani. The Critical Response in Japan to African American Writers. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. Kiuchi, Toru, and Yoshinobu Hakutani. ‘‘The Critical Response in Japan to Richard Wright.’’ Mississippi Quarterly 50 (2) (Spring 1997): 353–364.

JIM HILL PRIMARY SCHOOL When Richard Wright and his mother moved to Jackson, Mississippi to live with his grandmother,

John Reed Club a devout Seventh-day Adventist, in 1920 at age 12, Wright had never completed a full year of school. His pleas to attend the neighboring Jim Hill Primary School were dismissed; the Wilson women—his mother, grandmother, and aunt— decided that he would attend the Seventh-Day Adventist School, where his Aunt Addie, the teacher, could supervise both his academic and religious instructions. Wright’s already strained relationship with his aunt worsened as a student in her classroom. At the end of the school year, he informed his family that he would enroll in Jim Hill Primary School that fall. After much debate concerning his incorrigibility in behavior and religion, the women of the Wilson household, particularly his grandmother, consented to the change. Upon entering Jim Hill in 1921, Wright was placed into the fifth grade; however, within two weeks, he was promoted to the sixth grade. Wright, encouraged by the feat, decided to study medicine, giving no thought as to how he would afford such an education. Jim Hill Primary was extremely challenging. The teachers, who were paid a fraction of what their white counterparts received, were determined to educate their students, covering as much material as they could, acutely aware that many students were not going to advance beyond the eighth grade. Proper diction and grammar were strictly enforced. Any student found not speaking ‘‘Standard English’’ was reprimanded. Wright excelled at Jim Hill and was able to redeem his lost years of schooling in a very short time. Though Wright attended Jim Hill Primary School for only one year, the year proved formative in his academic and social growth. The following year, Richard Wright enrolled in Smith Robertson Junior High School from which he graduated valedictorian in 1925. Candice Love-Jackson

JOHN REED CLUB The John Reed Club was formed after the stock market crash of 1929 to provide a forum and

training ground for young artists, intellectuals, and organizers who were committed to radical left-wing ideals and strategies. It was named after an American journalist who had gone to Russia in 1917 to report on the Bolshevik Revolution and who wrote an influential account of the revolution in Ten Days That Shook The World. Reed helped to found the American Communist Party in 1919. He became a revolutionary hero for communists all over the world after he died in Russia in 1920 from typhus while working as an organizer in Russia. He is buried in the Kremlin, the only American so honored. The editors of New Masses, a communist weekly, formed the first John Reed Club in New York as a way of recruiting new members to the Communist Party. Novelist Michael Gold was one of the founders and urged club members to become ‘‘industrial correspondents’’ by doing research for workers groups and assisting them in their publicity and organizing. In this way, he hoped they would become ‘‘the tongue of the working class’’ (Aaron 213). Members of the club who would eventually establish themselves as significant literary figures included Wright, Gold, Nelson Algren, Kenneth Rexroth, and Phillip Rahv. Partisan Review, an important literary and cultural journal, was founded by the John Reed Club in 1932. Due to political infighting between club members who were split along a variety of ideological and tactical lines, all John Reed Clubs were dissolved on May 1, 1935 and were replaced by The League of American Writers, a group more tightly controlled by the Communist Party. Wright first became involved in The John Reed Club of Chicago in 1944 when his friend and fellow postal worker Abe Aaron invited him to a meeting. By this time, the organization had grown to over thirty branches dispersed throughout the United States, and the Chicago Club numbered over 100 members and published their own journal, Left Front. Although Wright initially had some hesitations about joining a group containing communists, he became a member after attending a few meetings and published his 209

John Reed Club first poem, ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ in New Masses in 1933. He was elected executive secretary of Chicago’s John Reed Club and officially became a member of the Communist Party in 1934. At this particular point in his life, leftist organizations such as the John Reed Club played a critically important role in Wright’s personal and artistic development. Such organizations put an end to the painful isolation he had felt for many years, providing him with regular contact with like-minded writers, activists, and intellectuals. And, on the surface at least, these groups offered Wright, for the first time in his life, a community which welcomed him as a black person and joined him to people of diverse ethnic, racial, and social backgrounds. The John Reed Club, in particular, became what Hazel Rowley has called ‘‘Wright’s University’’ (Rowley 78) since it provided him with reading lists, books, study groups, and lectures, as well as journals which published his writing. Wright’s program of self-education, initiated in Memphis, became more organized and disciplined, providing him with a lucid, coherent vision of the world which anchored his restless sensibility and formed a foundation for his writing. It was through the John Reed Club that Wright became acquainted with professors from the University of Chicago like Robert Morss Lovett and Louis Wirth as well as novelists Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, and Michael Gold. And his positive experience with the John Reed Club encouraged Wright to become involved in other groups such as the South Side Writers Group and The League of American Writers. As Margaret Walker has stressed, Wright had ‘‘a great need for such associations’’ because they ameliorated the ‘‘deep alienation’’ (Walker 284) which otherwise might have blighted his sensibility and crippled his imagination. It should be noted, however, that even though Wright was strongly committed to the John Reed Club and deeply regretted its dissolution in 1935, his experience as a member was not without its problems and doubts. As he revealed in ‘‘I

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Tried to Be a Communist,’’ he had suspicions of the group from the beginning, telling Abe Aaron ‘‘I don’t want to be organized’’ (Crossman 103) and privately harboring doubts about their ‘‘interest in Negroes’’ (Crossman 104). Even after he had become deeply involved with the club, developing what he called ‘‘the first sustained relationships of my life’’ (Crossman 105), a part of him drew back from such highly organized activity, sensing it as an encroachment on his individualistic nature. He felt that the communists in the club oversimplified the experience of minorities and poor people, envisioning them in ‘‘too abstract a manner’’ (Crossman 108). And he became particularly dismayed by the club’s Byzantine politics, particularly its tendency to expel dissident members after labeling them as ‘‘traitors.’’ When Wright was elected executive secretary of the Chicago branch, he was pleased, thinking that the club rewarded him for his leadership skills, but he later found out that he was politically used by a faction within the club which elected him as a way of limiting the power of a rival faction. His doubts about Communism in general and the John Reed Club in particular were deepened when he was mistreated by members who were jealous of his achievements and labeled him a ‘‘bastard intellectual’’ and an ‘‘incipient Trotskyite’’ (Crossman 127). (One member tried to intimidate him by pointing out that intellectuals were shot in the Soviet Union.) Such treatment brought Wright painfully back to his life in the segregated South when blacks were similarly labeled and marginalized by those in authority. After the John Reed Clubs were arbitrarily disbanded by the Community Party in 1935, a decision Wright strongly objected to, he became increasingly ambivalent toward the party. The doubts which festered within him as a club member grew as he felt increasingly constricted by the party’s demands that he subordinate himself to Marxist dogma and discipline. When he came to believe that Communism denied him the imaginative and moral freedom he required, as a man and a writer, he left the party in 1942.

Johnson, Fenton Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on The Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam Books, 1950. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988.

JOHNSON, FENTON (7 May 1888– 16 September 1958) Often perceived as a forerunner of the Harlem Renaissance poets who flourished in New York in the 1920s, Johnson was born in Chicago to middle class parents. (His father, a Pullman porter who owned the building in which his family lived, has been described as one of the wealthiest black men living in Chicago at that time.) Johnson attended predominantly white high schools and went to Northwestern University from 1908 to 1909 to study for the ministry. He also attended the University of Chicago as an ‘‘unclassified’’ student in 1910 and later studied at the Pulitzer School of Journalism at Columbia University. As a young man he worked at the Chicago Post Office to help finance his education and later was an instructor of English at the State University in Louisville (now Simmons College). He also held several positions as a journalist, including the Dramatics Editor for the New York News and a writer for the Eastern Press Association. He founded two literary journals, Favorite Magazine, which appeared from 1918 to 1920 and was dedicated to bringing about a ‘‘reconciliation of the races’’ in America, and Champion Magazine, which was created in 1916 to discuss racial issues. He published his first collection of poetry, A Little Dreaming in 1913, and two years later completed another book of verse, Visions of the Dusk, which was self-published. These early poems employ conventional diction and traditional forms and consist largely of dialect verse in the manner of Paul Laurence Dunbar and romantic lyrics which are imitative of late nineteenthcentury British poets such as Charles Algernon

Swinburne. Starting with Songs of the Soil (1916), however, Johnson abandons fixed verse and standard poetic diction, using free verse and black vernacular speech to explore in a more realistic manner the plight of twentieth century African Americans. Influenced strongly by Midwestern poets such as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lyndsay, he dispensed with what he called ‘‘the language of the academies’’ and began to write a new kind of African-American poetry which would later inspire a new generation of black American poets such as Langston Hughes. After Songs of the Soil, Johnson made little money from his writings and personal misfortunes plunged him into extreme poverty. He wrote two books in 1920, For the Highest Good, a collection of poems, and Tales of Darkest America, a group of short stories. These two books are a sharp reversal of his earlier romantic writing and focus sharply on serious social concerns, dramatizing what he called the ‘‘urban despair’’ of black people who had migrated from the rural South to northern cities. From 1920 onward, his vision of African-American life became progressively more pessimistic and his publications consisted of individual poems appearing in prestigious journals such as Harriet Monroe’s Poetry and the Liberator as well as important anthologies such as Alfred Kreymborg’s An Anthology of American Poetry (1930), Langston Hughes’s The Poetry of the American Negro (1949), and Arna Bontemps’s American Negro Poetry (1963). He was an important participant in the Chicago Renaissance of the 1930s, becoming a member of the South Side Writers Group and working for the WPA project, ‘‘The Negro in Illinois.’’ During this period, he wrote 42 WPA Poems which was never published but eventually became housed in the special collections at Fisk University. After the 1930s Johnson lapsed into an almost complete personal and literary obscurity, maintaining contact with only one person of literary significance, his close friend Arna Bontemps. When asked in 1958 to provide information about his life and career, he answered by 211

Jordan, Bill saying that ‘‘he did not have biographical material later or since 1930’’ (Worthington-Smith 205). Wright knew Johnson in Chicago during the 1930s when the two were members of the South Side Writers Group and later when both worked for the WPA. According to Margaret Walker, Wright admired Johnson’s socially engaged free verse poetry and considered him, along with Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson, and Langston Hughes, one of the outstanding black poets of the time (Walker 314). Wright, who wrote several free verse poems during the Great Depression, would have found much to learn from Johnson’s experiments in open form. And poems such as Johnson’s ‘‘Tired,’’ which complains ‘‘I am tired of building up somebody else’s civilization,’’ and ‘‘The Scarlet Woman,’’ whose narrator protests ‘‘I had nothing . . . starvation dances in me,’’ would have struck deep chords within Wright. The two men also shared temperamental similarities as both came to see themselves as outsiders who felt deeply alienated from mainstream American culture and victimized by American history. Although Johnson never literally expatriated himself, he often considered leaving the United States, wondering ‘‘If I should have cast my lot where I would never have to climb over the barrier of race’’ (Lumpkin 219). Just as Wright’s final years were spent in a self-imposed exile in France, Johnson chose to withdraw into an altogether private world, becoming in his own words ‘‘a man barricaded in an envelope—sending no signals, receiving none’’ (WorthingtonSmith 205). Selected Bibliography: Hutchinson, James P. ‘‘Fenton Johnson: Pilgrim of the Dusk,’’ Studies in Black Literature, (Autumn 1976): 14–16. Lumpkin, Shirley, ‘‘Fenton Johnson,’’ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 45: American Poets, 1880–1945, edited by Peter Quartermain, Gale Research, 1986. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Worthington-Smith, Hammett. ‘‘Fenton Johnson.’’ Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 50: AfroAmerican Writers Before the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Trudier Harris and Thadious Davis, Gale Research, 1986.

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JORDAN, BILL A member of Chicago’s John Reed Club when Wright joined that organization in 1933, Jordan also was the editor of the club’s literary journal, Left Front. Jordan encouraged Wright to submit his poems to that journal which then published three of Wright’s poems. ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ and ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ appeared in Left Front’s January–February 1934 issue and ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ appeared in their May–June 1934 issue. These poems, along with ‘‘Strength’’ and ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods,’’ which appeared in the March–April 1934 issue of The Anvil, were the first poems which Wright published and their success encouraged him greatly to pursue a career as a writer. Jordan and Wright became close friends and made presentations at the second and third national congresses of the John Reed Club held in Chicago in 1934 and 1935. Jordan enthusiastically encouraged Wright to write poetry and fiction and made him a member of the editorial board of Left Front. Wright often sought his advice on literary matters and found Jordan helpful when he revised ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ in 1935. Michel Fabre has observed that the friendships which Wright made as a member of Chicago’s John Reed Club were critically important to his development as a writer and a person because they provided him with ‘‘some of the first enduring friendships he had ever known’’ (Fabre 90) and became a kind of ‘‘spiritual family that would recognize and appreciate his talents’’ (Fabre 102). Jordan, along with people such as Abe Aaron, Nelson Algren, Herb Klein, and Jan Wittenber gave Wright contact with like-minded colleagues who understood his writing and valued it, just at the point where he was emerging as a writer. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1973.

Jordan, Dick

JORDAN, DICK He was a ‘‘steady friend’’ (Fabre 57) throughout Wright’s adolescence and early adulthood. They first met when they were fifth-grade students at Jim Hill Primary School, becoming part of a group which included Joe Brown, Perry Booker, D. C. Blackburn, Lewis Anderson, Sarah McNeamer, and Essie Lee Ward. They were also classmates at Smith Robertson Junior High School and many of them continued their friendships when they migrated to Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright described his school years in Jackson as a pivotal time in his life because it was a period when he found an alternative to both his personal loneliness and the repressive environment of his grandmother’s harshly religious household. He saw classmates such as Dick Jordan as intelligent, energetic young people who regarded school as a springboard for personal development and social advancement. The four years he spent at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson provided him for the first time in his life with an extended period of continuous education and stable friendships with people who envisioned their future in hopeful, pragmatic ways: I was now with boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking; it revitalized my being, whipped my senses to a high, keen pitch of receptivity . . . Suddenly the future loomed tangibly before me, as tangible as a future can be for a black boy in Mississippi. (Wright 170)

Jordan came from a middle class family as his father owned a grocery store on Clifton Street in Jackson. Nicknamed ‘‘Squilla,’’ he, along with Joe Brown, became close companions with Wright at a very formative stage of his development. The three became known as ‘‘Dick Wright’s Klan’’ and met often to tell stories and plan mischievous pranks on schoolmates and neighbors. Wright and Jordan were also newsboys who delivered copies of the Chicago Ledger and the Saturday Blade. It was Jordan who let Wright borrow his family’s magazines which contained serialized

chapters of Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, a novel which piqued Wright’s imagination and prompted him to try his own hand at fiction. When Wright graduated from Smith Robertson as valedictorian on May 29, 1925, Jordan was named the class’s salutatorian. When Wright balked at giving a speech prepared by the principal to please whites, Jordan advised him not to rebel against the principal’s wishes. He gave his own speech exactly as it was scripted by school authorities. Jordan appears as Griggs in Black Boy/American Hunger and assumes a significant role in the book. While working at a jewelry store on Capital Street in downtown Jackson, he noticed that Wright was having difficulty holding jobs because he was perceived by his white bosses as too impatient and not properly respectful. When Jordan encouraged Wright to apply for work at American Optical Company, he cautioned him to ‘‘learn how to live in the South’’ by realizing that ‘‘you’re black’’ (Wright 217) and must therefore act outwardly in a manner acceptable to whites. When Wright balked at taking such advice, Jordan became concerned about Wright’s welfare and shouted ‘‘Do you want to be killed?’’ (Wright 217). Wright could never fully internalize or accept this advice and soon left Mississippi because he did not want to be demeaned by such role playing. Jordan, ironically, was betrayed by the games he felt he had to play for whites. While outwardly appearing as an honest, loyal employee of the jewelry store, he secretly was stealing valuable merchandise. When he was caught and jailed, he jumped bail and fled to Chicago where he changed his name. While living in Chicago, Wright continued his friendship with ‘‘old pals’’ (Fabre 109) such as Jordan, Brown, and Essie Lee Ward. These acquaintances from ‘‘down home’’ helped to ease his transition from the South to the fast-paced and complex world of the urban North. However, Jordan was not as successful as Wright in negotiating the dangers of the modern metropolis. As Hazel Rowley has pointed out, he became an alcoholic and died ‘‘prematurely’’ (Rowley 72) in Chicago. 213

Joyce, James Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

JOYCE, JAMES (2 February 1882– 13 January 1941) An Irish novelist, short story writer, and poet, Joyce was a major force in the development of modern literature. His bold experiments with language, stream of consciousness, myth, and symbol helped to transform modern fiction giving it new depth, resonance, and subtlety. Joyce was born in Dublin and was educated at Jesuit schools such as Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College. As a young man, he considered the priesthood but eventually rejected Roman Catholicism altogether. After graduating from college in 1902, he went to Paris, ostensibly to study medicine, but actually to read widely in modern and classical literatures. His mother’s death brought him back to Ireland for a few years, but in 1906, he returned to Europe with his partner, Nora Barnacle, thus beginning an exile form his homeland which would last for the remainder of his life. He took teaching positions in Zurich, Trieste, Pola, and Rome while beginning his career as a writer. His first book, a collection of poems entitled Chamber Music, was published in 1907. Dubliners, a collection of interconnected realistic stories about the life he rejected in Ireland, appeared in 1914. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, an autobiographical novel which made extensive use of stream of consciousness, came out in 1916. After World War I, Joyce took up residence in Paris where he became one of the leading figures of a community of expatriate writers known as ‘‘the lost generation,’’ a group which included Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, e. e. cummings, and Ezra Pound. While he was in Paris, he wrote his masterwork, Ulysses, publishing it in 1922 under the imprint of Paris bookseller Sylvia Beach. Probably no other single

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work of modern fiction has created as much controversy as Ulysses—it was prosecuted in a U.S. court for obscenity and was banned in most English-speaking countries. Although they came from very different social and cultural backgrounds, Wright and Joyce shared significant biographical similarities. Both were brought up in strict religious traditions which they found oppressive and they rejected their religious background as a way of attaining the intellectual and emotional freedom they needed to become modern writers. Both used their writing to radically challenge the conventional thinking of their times, creating new directions in modern fiction. Wright and Joyce also lived large parts of their adult lives in exile, all the while continuing to write about the cultures which they rejected. Wright began reading Joyce’s work in Chicago in the mid-1930s when he was emerging as a writer and beginning to write ‘‘Cesspool,’’ a Joycean novel about one day in the life of a postal worker, a book which would be posthumously published as Lawd Today! In a 1940 interview, Wright listed Joyce, along with Dreiser, Conrad, and James as major influences on his fiction (Kinnamon 32). In a subsequent interview published in 1945 after he had completed Black Boy, Wright asserted that Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was one of the books which enabled him to see his own experiences more clearly, enabling him, ‘‘in looking back through alien eyes, to see my own life.’’ As he read Joyce’s novel which ‘‘depicted the double revolt of an Irish youth against the oppressive religious life of Ireland, an Ireland which England was seeking to strangle,’’ he was able to envision more clearly ‘‘the stifling Negro environment in the South’’ (Kinnamon 81). Wright was deeply impressed by the personal example of Joyce as a man who had the courage to rise above his oppressive social environment and write disturbing truths about that environment. He also learned much from Joyce as a technical innovator. As Hazel Rowley has observed,

Joyce, James ‘‘Wright loved the more experimental use of language and technical innovations he discovered in James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and the poetry of T. S. Eliot’’ (Rowley 103). Wright’s stories in Uncle Tom’s Children and Eight Men conclude with what Joyce called ‘‘epiphanies,’’ single moments of enriched perception which capture the meaning of the story in a dramatic flash of awareness. In Native Son and The Outsider, Wright made brilliant use of the stream of consciousness method which Joyce had pioneered in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, rendering his central character’s subconscious thoughts and impressions in a freely associated flow of images and symbols. But perhaps the book which is most indebted to Joyce is Lawd Today! Like Ulysses, the novel describes one full day in the life of its antiheroic central character which is ironically juxtaposed with a heroic narrative from the 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’’ (Wright 19) 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’’ (Wright 201), Jake’s story ends with his being consumed by his self-destructive hatreds and his inability to feel love for anyone but himself. Michel Fabre’s Richard Wright: Books and Writers lists four of Joyce’s books in Wright’s library, Stephen Hero, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. Joyce was clearly one of the writers who inspired Wright and gave him what he called in Black Boy/American Hunger ‘‘new avenues of seeing and feeling’’ which helped him to construct a ‘‘new life’’ (Wright 296–97) for himself as a writer. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michael. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Kinnamon, Keneth. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

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K KIERKEGAARD, SOREN (1813–1855) A Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century who is often considered as one of the thinkers who laid the foundations of twentieth-century existentialism. Like the existentialists, Kierkegaard believed that man was alone in a terrifying universe which did not yield rational explanation but that human meanings could be achieved through consciousness and free will. For Kierkegaard, a world of ‘‘fear and trembling’’ could be redeemed by a person’s ‘‘leap of faith,’’ a spiritual affirmation arising from the depths of the soul. After growing disillusioned with Marxism and leaving the Communist Party in 1942, Wright became interested in existentialist thought and began reading works by Martin Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Conversations with Dorothy Norman deepened his interest in existentialism generally and Kierkegaard particularly. When he asked her to instruct him in Kierkegaard’s work, she introduced him to existentialist theologian Paul Tillich, an expert on Kierkegaard’s religious ideas. When Wright left for France in 1946, he wrote to Gertrude Stein that ‘‘I’m bringing a good deal of the work of Kierkegaard, English translations, of course’’ (Fabre 88). At his death, Wright’s personal library contained 14 primary works by Kierkegaard, including Attack on Christendom, Either/Or, Fear and

Trembling, and The Sickness Unto Death. He also owned the following scholarly studies: Walter Lowrie’s Kierkegaard and A Short Life of Kierkegaard, Michael Wyschogrod’s Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence, and Theodore Haecker’s Kierkegaard, The Cripple. Although he was not able to embrace Kierkegaard’s hard-won faith in Christianity, Wright was deeply attracted to his brooding sense of the world as a dark, irrational place of fear and trembling. The experience of fear resonates throughout Wright’s work from early works like ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ and Native Son, which portray a violent southern society capable of imposing horrifying deaths on black victims to later works such as The Outsider which portray fear as a metaphysical principle. After reading Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread in 1947, Wright was particularly drawn to Kierkegaard’s idea that ‘‘Dread is an alien power which lays hold of an individual and yet one cannot tear oneself away.’’ This sentence was used as the inscription to the first chapter of The Outsider and sets the tone for the entire novel. Wright was also intrigued by Kierkegaard’s conviction that man could create a durable and potent self through deepened consciousness and action. Although this never took, for Wright, the religious meanings that it had for Kierkegaard, a 217

‘‘King Joe’’ ‘‘leap of faith’’ is central to Wright’s existential belief and can be found throughout his work. Bigger Thomas, for example, constructs a self in Book III of Native Son which allows him to go to his death as a human being rather than a pathetic victim. The protagonist of Black Boy/ American Hunger, likewise, can achieve a substantial victory over his environment by creating a self which can create durable works of art. Even Fred Daniels in ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ and Cross Damon in The Outsider can transcend the dehumanizing roles imposed upon them by society by achieving human identities through Kierkegaardian consciousness and action. While Kierkegaard’s theistic existentialism enabled him ultimately to experience a Christian god, Wright’s agnostic existentialism led him to experience transcendence of a sort through self creation and the creation of art. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright’s Books and Writers. Jackson and London: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

‘‘KING JOE’’ Richard Wright wrote this thirteen stanza song in honor of Joe Louis in September 1941, and it was copyrighted by Bergman, Vocco, and Conn a year later. The song was released by Okeh records as a 10-inch, 78 r.p.m. record in 1942 and sold 40,000 copies in a few months. Count Basie wrote the music to Wright’s lyrics, and Paul Robeson sang his first recorded blues song. (Blues singer Jimmy Rushing was on hand during the recording session to coach Robeson.) Wright had a strong interest in boxing, a sport which during the Great Depression enjoyed great popularity in America, and he was a particularly devoted fan of Joe Louis. When offered the job of ghost-writing Louis’s memoirs in 1945, Wright was sorely tempted, confessing that Louis ‘‘intrigues me to no end’’ (Rowley 304). He saw Louis as a representative black person who had grown up in severe poverty, both in the North and in the South, and had to endure much racial

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discrimination as a person and athlete. But he also regarded Louis as a unique individual who could not only use his extraordinary athletic talent to rise above poverty and become a dramatic success story but also as a rare black man who could strike back against white America with relative impunity. When he defeated white opponents, especially with emphatic knockouts, Louis became for Wright and most African Americans an extraordinary cultural figure, a ‘‘king’’ who could vividly symbolize black pride and dignity. Wright reviewed for New Masses one of Louis’s most important fights, his September 24, 1935 bout with Max Baer in Yankee Stadium. He regarded this fight, which gained enormous publicity and was broadcast nationally over radio, as a triumph for all black Americans since Louis had earlier been denied access to fighting many big name boxers and now had soundly defeated one of the most respected white heavyweights. In his article entitled ‘‘Joe Louis Discovers Dynamite,’’ Wright describes Louis’s mastery over Baer in the ring and the tumultuous celebrations of black people in Chicago’s South Side. Wright later described the even more important second Louis/Schmeling fight on June 22, 1938 in a Daily Worker article entitled ‘‘How He Did It and Oh!—Where Were Hitler’s Pagan Gods?’’ This fight, which drew an international audience and was billed as a contest between German fascism and American democracy, ended with a dramatic first-round knockout by Louis. Wright’s Daily Worker article celebrates Louis as an American folk hero who triumphed over Germany’s systematic racism and totalitarian politics. Wright also made an interesting reference to Louis in Lawd Today! when he describes a black postal worker gloating over Louis’s victory over Max Baer as he reveals that Louis’s triumph ‘‘made me feel good all the way down to my guts’’ (Wright 102). In a sense, Wright saw Louis as speaking with his fists what black people were not able to articulate verbally—a deep joy in striking back at a system which had discriminated against them since the time of slavery.

King, Martin Luther Wright’s blues tribute to Louis stresses his rise from a kind of modern slavery, working with engines on an assembly line at a Ford automobile plant and eventually becoming a powerful ‘‘engine’’ himself by defeating his adversaries in the ring. At one point in the song, Wright raises the subversive question of ‘‘What Joe Louis thinks when he’s fighting a white man’’ and answers that beneath Joe’s ‘‘deadpan’’ is the same thoughts of intense racial pride which the singer feels. In his New Masses article on the Louis/Baer fight, Wright observed that Louis represented ‘‘all the balked dreams of revenge, all the secretly visualized moments of retaliation’’ (Wright 8) which many black Americans felt. ‘‘King Joe,’’ although it could not be as boldly explicit about these feelings in a popular song, strongly suggests these powerfully subversive impulses. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How He Did It and Oh!—Where Were Hitler’s Pagan Gods?’’ Daily Worker, June 24, 1938. Wright, Richard. ‘‘King Joe.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Wright, Richard. Lawd Today! New York: Library of America, 1991.

KING, MARTIN LUTHER (15 January 1919–4 April 1968) A pivotal figure in the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. King was a proponent of non-violent direct action as a way of ending all forms of racial segregation and discrimination in both the North and the South. A minister who received his doctorate in Systematic Theology from Boston University in 1951, Dr. King came into national prominence as the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 and 1956. In 1957, he was one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization which spearheaded important civil rights movements in Albany, Georgia; Birmingham, Alabama; and Selma, Alabama. Dr. King helped organize the 1963 ‘‘March on

Washington,’’ the highlight of which was his ‘‘I Have a Dream’’ speech that envisions an America free of racial injustice. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his pioneering work in civil rights. In his later years, Dr. King broadened his work to include opposing the war in Vietnam and creating programs to help the nation’s poor. He was supporting a strike by sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, when he was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4, 1968. Richard Wright, who took a strong interest in the American civil rights movement, met with Dr. King in his Paris apartment on February 6, 1959. The meeting was arranged by Wright’s friend Lawrence Reddick, who was accompanying Dr. King to India and had just completed a biography of him, Crusader Without Violence. In what has been described as a day-long conversation, the two men discussed ‘‘the question of violence and non-violence’’ (Walker 336) as well as the problems of emerging nations in the Third World. No detailed written records exist of their meeting but Wright, in a brief letter to his agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. dated March 2, 1959, stated that, ‘‘I don’t agree all the way with King, but I like and admire him and above all he tells the truth’’ (Fabre 616). Wright probably had reservations about Dr. King’s devotion to non-violence, and he would not have shared his religious faith, but he certainly admired his taking a stand against the racism and violence which Wright knew growing up in the Deep South. Wright, who spoke out from his exile in France against the murder of Emmett Till, and who also expressed outrage at the treatment black students received in Little Rock, Arkansas, would have strongly supported Dr. King’s political activity. In the letter to Reynolds, Wright reveals that he addressed an important question to Dr. King: ‘‘Has the Negro’s relationship to America changed?’’ He would not have been reassured by the answer he received that no ‘‘qualitative change’’ (Fabre 616) had occurred. In an interview conducted by Madison Davis Lacy in 1994, Julia Wright provided important 219

Kitchenettes information about the meeting between her father and Dr. King. She was 17 at the time and was studying in a nearby room when Wright asked her to meet Dr. King and requested that she be shown the deep scar on his chest which he had received when a deranged person attacked him with a knife. Wright then told her ‘‘This is what happens to people in the States who speak up for their rights’’ (Rowley 497). As much as Wright admired Martin Luther King’s work, he was not tempted to return to America since he realized that the racism and violence which had forced him into exile was still very active in American life. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

KITCHENETTES A euphemism for the slum housing developed for black people by white landlords in the South Side of Chicago from the 1920s to the 1960s. A massive ghetto was formed in the Chicago’s South Side in the same way that ghettoes were developed in many other American cities when white realtors refused to rent or sell property to African Americans outside of designated areas agreed upon through restrictive covenants between realtors and banks. Realtors would buy up property in these areas for very low prices and then subdivide the space in apartments, creating smaller living quarters which would maximize their profits. For example, buildings with six- to seven-room apartments would be split into many one- or two-room ‘‘kitchenettes’’ with minimal conveniences consisting of little more than a stove and a sink. Bathroom facilities were primitive and were shared by many families. These kitchenettes would then be rented to black tenants at prices much higher than whites would pay for their apartments in other parts of

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the city. To make matters worse, white landlords would do very little to maintain their kitchenettes, allowing them to fall into serious disrepair and become fire and health hazards. In order to pay for the excessive rents which landlords gouged from them, entire black families would live in one room and rent the other room to relatives or boarders. Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices contains shocking photographs of the kitchenettes which were so common on Chicago’s South Side. These photographs depict a toilet in horrible disrepair, children packed together and sleeping on floors, and a bedraggled family of ten gathered around a decrepit table bare of food. In the book, Wright describes the kitchenette as ‘‘our prison, our death sentence without a trial’’ (106), a breeding place of crime and disease which reduces its inhabitants to ‘‘pulverized lives’’ (110). He describes the ‘‘desperate and unhappy people’’ living in such conditions as having personalities that are ‘‘warped’’ by ‘‘an unbearable closeness of association’’ (108). For Wright, Chicago’s kitchenettes are not only a brutal naturalistic environment which destroys families and condemns children to gang violence and empty futures, but they are also a resonant symbol of the social problems created by American capitalism and racial discrimination. He spoke of these matters with the authority of his own experience as he and his family lived for nine years in a series of kitchenettes. Wright, along with his mother, brother, aunt, and grandmother, were squeezed into such crowded conditions, and it left in him a lasting bitterness. When Margaret Walker paid him a visit in the mid-1930s to give him medicine for the cold he was suffering from, she discovered that he was living in a ‘‘room’’ which consisted of a closet with a light bulb. He was deeply ashamed of the living accommodations his family was forced to accept and forbade Walker to visit him at home again (Rowley, 121). Although Wright provided vivid depictions of the kitchenette in 12 Million Black Voices and American Hunger, his most powerful rendering of it was in Native Son, a novel which opens with

Koestler, Arthur the horrifying image of the Thomas family trapped in a one-room apartment which is rundown and rat-infested. Such an environment deprives him, his mother, brother, and sister of privacy and reduces them to the barest subsistence level. Indeed, their situation is comparable to the condition of the rat Bigger kills, an irony which Wright develops throughout the novel as he links Bigger with the trapped rat. Like the rat, Bigger is black, a ‘‘big bastard’’ (6) who lashes out with defiance and instinctive violence when cornered. And, like the rat, Bigger is destroyed by an environment which responds to him with fear and repulsion. Significantly, their lives are destroyed by violence administered to the head, rubbing out the consciousness which the kitchenette also destroys by reducing its inhabitants to animal hunger and fear. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Perennial Classics, 1991. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988.

KOESTLER, ARTHUR (5 September 1905–3 March 1983) Novelist, journalist, and political theorist who was born in Budapest, Hungary, of upper-middle class Jewish parents. He was educated in Vienna, and, after his parents lost their social standing and economic status as a result of WWI and its aftermath, he became a Zionist and worked on a kibbutz in Palestine. In 1927, he went to work for the Ullstein chain of German newspapers as their foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He returned to Berlin in 1930 and became science editor for Vossiche Zeitung, one of the Ullstein papers. Disillusioned with Zionism and rejecting a comfortable life as a well paid journalist, he joined the Communist Party on December 31, 1931 and traveled throughout Russia for a year-and-a-half. He was a communist organizer in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and was imprisoned and almost executed by the Franco government. He

resumed his activities as a member of a communist cell in Paris in 1939 and was again imprisoned when the Nazis took over France. He escaped to England in 1940, joined the British army and later worked for the BBC. After the war, he became a British citizen. His career can be seen as divided into two distinctly different periods. The first phase, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, is largely political in vision, while the second phase, from the mid-1950s to his death, is apolitical and focuses on a broad range of interests from aesthetics to science. His major works include Darkness at Noon (1941), a fictionalized version of the Moscow Show Trials; Scum of the Earth, a non-fiction account of the treatment political refugees received in French jails; The Yogi and The Commissar (1945), a critique of political systems emerging in the west as a result of World War II; The Sleepwalkers (1959), a study of the history of science; and The Ghost and The Machine (1969), a critique of behaviorism. In later years, he became an advocate of voluntary euthanasia and died in a double suicide with his wife after his health was destroyed by leukemia and Parkinson’s disease. Although they came from very different parts of the world and strikingly dissimilar economic backgrounds, the parallels between Wright and Koestler as modern intellectuals and artists are quite revealing. Both were members of despised minorities and each was a cosmopolitan wanderer who never felt fully at home in any particular culture. Moreover, they saw themselves at a time of radical social change when established institutions and values had been discredited by war, revolution, and depression. Each was strongly attracted to socialism and communism as new political faiths which could replace a decadent old system with a vibrant new society grounded in humanistic values. Just as Wright saw his commitment to leftist politics as a kind of conversion offering a redemptive new life, Koestler observed ‘‘I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society searching for faith’’ (Crossman 13). Wright and Koestler also served 221

Koestler, Arthur long periods of exile in their adult lives and centered their best fiction on marginalized outsiders condemned to underground lives. Wright and Koestler abandoned communism for strikingly similar reasons. Each came to see the Communist Party as a top-heavy authoritarian system which, ironically, enslaved its members as thoroughly as had earlier forms of political and religious oppression. Just as Wright came to see communism as imposing ‘‘psychological slavery’’ (Rowley 379) on its members, Koestler felt tyrannized both as a man and as an artist by party dogma and authoritarian procedure. Koestler formally cut his ties with the Communist Party in the spring of 1938, disillusioned by the Moscow Show Trials which resulted in the unjust imprisonment and liquidation of hundreds of party intellectuals and organizers.

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Wright and Koestler became colleagues during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Both contributed essays to Richard Crossman’s The God That Failed, explaining their earlier commitments to communism and detailing their reasons for eventually leaving the party. They were also active members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a group of intellectuals and artists formed in 1950 to define their position on the noncommunist left and their opposition to Cold War orthodoxies. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York, New York: Bantam Books, 1950. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow and Son. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

L LAFARGUE CLINIC A free clinic for troubled black youth which was founded in Harlem on April 8, 1946 by eminent psychiatrist Frederic Wertham who at that time was the director of the Mental Health Clinic at the General Hospital in Queens. Staffed by volunteers, it was housed in the basement of the St. Phillips Episcopal Church parish house. Despite its meager funding, it served a large number of people for several years. As Michel Fabre observed, ‘‘The clinic was never empty’’ (293). Wright, who had a strong interest in dealing with the problems of juvenile delinquency dating back to his work in Chicago at the South Side Boys’ Club, and who worked on a novel during the early 1940s entitled The Jackal, which focused on Harlem gangs, helped to raise money for the clinic. He also promoted the clinic in two articles he wrote for Twice a Year, ‘‘Psychiatry Comes to Harlem’’ and ‘‘Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem.’’ During the Great Depression and throughout the 1940s, juvenile delinquency rose steadily in Harlem due to skyrocketing rates of poverty and the family deterioration which usually accompanies poverty. To make matters worse, private and public social service agencies were ill-equipped to handle increased case loads. As historian Cheryl Lynn Greenberg notes, ‘‘Facilities for delinquent

black youngsters were still inadequate,’’ and ‘‘Few private agencies accepted blacks’’ (209). The Lafargue Clinic and the Wiltwyck School, both of which Wright and Wertham actively supported, were attempts to make a start in dealing with the ever-increasing problems suffered by ghetto youth. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Greenberg, Cheryl Lynn. Or Does It Explode?— Black Harlem in the Great Depression. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

LAMMING, GEORGE (28 June 1927– ) Poet, novelist, and trade unionist, George Lamming was born in Barbados where he graduated from Combermere High School. He moved to Trinidad in 1946 and he taught school there until 1950. He emigrated that year to England where he began working in a factory and within a year became a broadcaster for the BBC Colonial Service. Since 1967, he has taught creative writing at a variety of colleges and universities, including the University of Pennsylvania. He has also been a lecturer in Denmark, Tanzania, and Australia. Along with V. S. Naipaul, Derek Walcott, and Wilson Reid, he is regarded as one of the founders of post–World War II Caribbean literature. 223

Lamming, George He is best known for his first novel, In the Castle of My Skin, which was published in 1953. The book describes his growing up in colonial Barbados in the 1930s and 1940s. It stresses both the beauty of indigenous life and the damage done by colonialism while calling for a rebirth of native culture. His other work includes The Emigrants (1954) which focuses on the difficulties experienced by a group of West Indian expatriates in London and Age of Innocence (1958) which takes place on Lamming’s fictional Caribbean island of San Christobel. His non-fictional work, The Pleasures of Exile (1960), is considered one of the most penetrating studies of West Indian culture. Wright wrote the introduction to In The Castle of My Skin at the urging of his editor, Edward Aswell. In it he expressed high praise for the author’s ‘‘charged and poetic prose’’ (Wright 219) and made strong connections between his own growing up in the American South with Lamming’s portrait of his childhood and adolescence in British-controlled Barbados. He regarded both of their stories as representing a dramatic ‘‘change from folk life to the borders of the industrial world’’ (Wright 221). Wright envisioned their lives as ‘‘a symbolic repetition of the stories of millions of simple folk’’ who had been ‘‘catapulted’’ into the ‘‘turbulence and anxiety of the twentieth century’’ (Wright 219). But he also made a crucial distinction between his traumatic experiences in Mississippi and Lamming’s life in the West Indies. While Wright was part of a black minority which was dominated by an aggressively racist white majority, producing a ‘‘chronic, grinding racial hatred’’ (Wright 220) of whites, the black majority was less psychologically damaged by the relatively small ruling majority and was able to develop a richer, more nourishing culture of their own. Lamming, therefore, could present his past in a much more lyrical, affirmative manner, using a ‘‘quietly melodious prose’’ (Wright 220) which stands in sharp contrast to Wright’s highly ironic, often bitter, naturalistic style. Wright made one other important connection between himself and Lamming in his review of

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In the Castle of My Skin. As black people they must confront the complex problems created by what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘‘the double consciousness.’’ Inhabiting white-controlled worlds, each had to come to terms with a self which was psychologically ‘‘split:’’ The Negro, though born in the Western world, is not quite of it; due to the policies of racial exclusion, his is the story of two cultures, the dying culture in which he happens to be born, and the culture into which he is trying to enter . . . Such a story is, above all, a record of shifting, troubled feelings groping their way toward a future that frightens as much as it beckons. (Wright 220)

Wright in 1953 was deeply interested in the Pan African thinking advanced by his friend George Padmore and others because it offered him the prospect of resolving the problems of the painfully conflicted double consciousness he saw revealed in his own life and in the lives of writers such as George Lamming. The ‘‘new identity’’ (Wright 221) which both Wright and Lamming sought as Pan Africanists promised to unify them psychologically just as it would unify black people politically. Wright and Lamming met several times in Paris and London and shared many beliefs about the need for replacing colonial rule with selfgoverning Third World nations. They both attended and gave papers at the First International Congress of Negro Writers and Artists which met in Paris in September 1956. Lamming’s paper drew parallels between Black Boy and two works by Caribbean writers, Palm Wine Drunkard by Amos Tutuolo and Brother Man by Roger Mais. Wright’s paper, ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization,’’ examined the needs for emerging nations to move forward as modern, industrialized cultures. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Introduction to In the Castle of My Skin, in Richard Wright’s Books and Writers by Michel Fabre. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990.

Lawd Today!

LAW, OLIVER (c. 1899–9 July 1937) He was an important black leader in Chicago’s Communist Party when Wright became a member of the party in 1934. Before becoming involved in radical leftist politics, Law had been for many years a member of a black regiment of the U.S. Army and was known for his military demeanor and the high premium he placed on party discipline and obedience to Marxist ideology. In 1936, he fought in the Spanish Civil War as a commander of the Lincoln Brigade and died on the battlefield near Madrid. As Hazel Rowley has noted, he was ‘‘the first black man in American history to become the commander of a mostly white unit’’ (Rowley 97). Wright came to know Law in Chicago when his friend and fellow communist, David Poindexter, was arrested for inciting a riot and Law, who was the South Side representative of the International Defense League, was Poindexter’s lawyer. At that time, Wright was writing a book of biographical sketches of Chicago communists and one of his most important case studies focused on Poindexter. Sensing that Wright might be a spy who was doing research for the opposition, he ordered Wright to stop communicating with his friend and cease creative writing altogether so that he devote his energy full-time to political organizing. Law then assigned Wright the task of doing elaborate research on the high cost of living for poor blacks living on the South Side, a job which Wright resented bitterly but agreed to do in order to maintain his membership in the party. Law’s low regard for literature and his bullying Wright to place a higher priority on organizing rather than writing caused Wright to chafe against party directives and got him to consider withdrawing from the party. An incident involving one of Law’s subordinates, Harry Haywood, intensified Wright’s doubts about communism and fanned the flames of his anger with his superiors. Haywood, who shared Law’s suspicions about Poindexter and Wright as excessively individualistic persons who were a threat to party unity and discipline,

organized an elaborate trial of Poindexter in 1935 which in some ways was a miniature version of Stalin’s infamous show trials which would begin a year later in Moscow. Poindexter, who was opposed to the party’s official policy of the ‘‘Popular Front’’ because he thought it betrayed the best interests of African Americans, was accused of being a heretic and a traitor and was forced to admit his guilt and resign from the Communist Party. Haywood staged a three-hour trial in which Poindexter’s colleagues and friends testified against him and reduced him to the status of a broken man. Wright observed the trial and left early in disgust. It left a lasting impression on him and was one of the main reasons why Wright eventually renounced communism in 1942. He saw the brutal authoritarianism of men like Law and Haywood as strikingly similar to the power exerted by whites against blacks in the American South. As he revealed in American Hunger, ‘‘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’’ (Wright 119). Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam,1950, pp. 103–146. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

LAWD TODAY! This novel, completed by 1935 and published posthumously in 1963, is an anomaly in Wright’s works since it was written first but published last. The novel is divided into three parts— ‘‘Commonplace,’’ ‘‘Squirrel Cage,’’ and ‘‘Rats’ Alley’’—each corresponding chronologically to the three periods in Jake Jackson’s typical day. This might be compared to Wright’s division of Native Son into ‘‘Fear,’’ ‘‘Flight,’’ and ‘‘Fate,’’ but his theme basically differs between the two novels. Both novels are naturalistic in terms of philosophy: Jake and Bigger are largely victims of social environment. In both, Wright tries to 225

Lawd Today! show that their actions are the inevitable products of the circumstances and implies that one must blame society, not the individuals. Lawd Today! can be read as a naturalistic novel or as a satire. A naturalistic reading will be concerned with Jake’s character in light of the society in which he lives. A reading of the novel as satire may deal with the fashion in which social and personal ills are exposed and ridiculed. Throughout the text, the focus is on American society, but there is an ambiguity in Wright’s treatment of the protagonist as the narrative proceeds; however, in ‘‘Part Two: Squirrel Cage’’ in particular, Jake is used as a symbol. In this part of the story, Wright constructs dialogue among Jake and the rest of the African-American characters without, in most cases, distinguishing the speakers. As a result, the men are cut into a single character with one voice as if in a proletarian novel. The problem with this device is that Lawd Today! is not a proletarian novel. Nor is it a novel of any political persuasion. There is every sign that Jake is a naturalistic character; he is examined in terms of the social and economic forces over which he has little control. A naturalistic writer, however, cannot make a story out of a character who largely disappears in the midst of a fictional experiment. It is irrelevant whether a naturalist ought to place emphasis on the forces of circumstance, as E´mile Zola does in novels like L’Assommoir, or on the actions of his hero, as Wright himself does in Native Son. In any event, the focus of this attention must necessarily be on the interactions between will and determinism. Wright’s portrayal of Jake’s day, though comprehensive, is metaphorical. A literary naturalist establishes a milieu taken from life and, into it, projects characters to prove the process of a social phenomenon. What underlies the narrative in such a novel is the author’s constant reminder for readers to form their own reflections. In Lawd Today!, Wright provides as little interruption of the action as possible. Unlike a typical naturalistic novel, such as Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Lawd Today! has a severely limited time

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frame and only an occasional pause to indicate a transition or change of scene. By the time Jake stumbles into bed drunk and allows Lil to cut him down, readers have all but forgotten about her. Her final action, however understandable, precipitates as if in a gothic tale. Lawd Today!, on the other hand, is a successful attempt at satire, particularly in ‘‘Squirrel Cage.’’ Wright is completely impartial in treating his material. If Jake is a caricature, he is a caricature of not only black men but also white men and any ordinary men and women in urban society. This novel is at its best in Part 2 before Jake and the black characters descend into the brothel. The middle section of the novel provides the four African-American men with a full range of social, economic, and political commentary with no other characters intruding into their vision. These four are the most ridiculous of all the Wright characters for they have no inhibitions of any kind and no conflicts of interest with society. The novel is unique for Wright seems to have combined his two experiments, one in naturalism and another in satire, to produce a racial discourse. Granted, the tragic death of a hero, whether it is in Native Son or An American Tragedy, is no laughing matter. But in both novels significant elements of satire suggest that the crimes dramatized are inevitable products of American society and that both protagonists are morally free from guilt. In Lawd Today!, the elements of humor, irony, and cynicism are so dominant that the ideal of reform, which underlies satire, is minimized. Wright has no intention of reforming Jake or society at large; Jake is an average man, and his foibles are those of human nature. Wright knew them deeply and succeeded in letting readers witness them. Serious satire and light humor are harmoniously wed in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Twain’s masterpiece is basically an initiation story, not a naturalistic one. It seems difficult for any novelist to mix satire and naturalism as equal bases for a novel and accomplish both ends. Such an achievement, however possible it may be, has no precedent, and Lawd

Leaner, Arthur Today!, despite its merits, remains an apprentice novel. Yoshinobu Hakutani Selected Bibliography: Baldwin, James. ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel.’’ Partisan Review 16 (June 1949): 578– 85. Baldwin, James. ‘‘Many Thousands Gone.’’ Partisan Review 18 (November–December 1951): 665–80. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. 18–32. Hicks, Granville. ‘‘Dreiser to Farrell to Wright.’’ Saturday Review 46 (30 March 1963): 37–38. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Foreword.’’ In Richard Wright, Lawd Today. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1986. 1–6. Wright, Richard. Lawd Today. New York: Walker, 1968. Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.

LEAGUE OF STRUGGLE FOR NEGRO RIGHTS A group organized by the Communist Party in 1930 to replace the American Negro Labor Congress, it was committed to developing programs of self-determination for black people. It called for the confiscation of land from the big landlords of the South and a redistribution of that land to black and white small farmers. The league was also active in organizing support for the ‘‘Scottsboro Boys,’’ nine young black men who were sentenced to death for crimes they did not commit. It also campaigned for a separate black nation in the South and opposed southern segregation and police brutality. It had a general policy of opposing fascism and supporting Stalinist Russia. Langston Hughes became the president of the league in 1934, a year before it was disbanded as part of the Communist Party’s ‘‘Popular Front’’ strategy to moderate its radical policies as a way of making broader coalitions with other leftist organizations. It joined with other noncommunist organizations in 1935 to form the National Negro Congress. Wright, who joined the Communist Party in 1934 was largely in agreement with the goals and strategies of the league and was particularly supportive of their work in the Scottsboro case.

He became interested in the League of Struggle for Negro Rights in 1931 when he heard some of their members speak in the ‘‘Negro Forum’’ in Washington Park. He admired their boldly speaking out on racial issues and their commitment to a coherent program of reform resulting in action. Although Wright was disappointed by the Communist Party’s dissolving of the John Reed Clubs and the League of Struggle for Negro Rights as part of its ‘‘Popular Front’’ strategy, he did become a member of the National Negro Congress and helped to organize its first meeting in Chicago on February 14, 1936. He chaired a session called ‘‘Negro Artists and Writers in the Changing Social Order,’’ and panelists included Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps. In a New Masses report on the convention Wright declared that the National Negro Congress had created ‘‘new hope’’ (Rowley 116) for American blacks. Selected Bibliography: Ottanelli Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States: From Depression to World War II. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume One. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

LEANER, ARTHUR He was one of Wright’s classmates at Jim Hill Primary School and Smith Robertson Junior High School in Jackson, Mississippi when he attended those schools between 1921 and 1925. Hazel Rowley characterizes him as the ‘‘rogue’’ (Rowley 72) of the class who often hatched schemes which made easy money for him. Although Wright developed warm, lasting friendships with other classmates such as Dick Jordan, Joe Brown, Minnie Farish, and Essie Lee Ward, he never was comfortable with Leaner, viewing him with suspicion and disapproval. In a 1967 letter to Constance Webb, Brown observed ‘‘There was always an element of resentment between Dick Wright and Leaner. Dick felt that we were being sold down the river by Arthur’s tricky way of using us’’ (Rowley 34). 227

Lee, Canada Leaner’s family lived on Church Street in one of Jackson’s most prestigious black neighborhoods. His father and three brothers were musicians who formed a Dixieland band that would often play at white dances. Constance Webb describes him as having ‘‘a talent for showmanship’’ (Webb 73), an entrepreneur and con-man who as a teenager organized minstrel shows performed by his classmates. Wright disapproved of them, not only because they promoted racial stereotypes, but also because Leaner would always get a disproportionate share of the profits. It was Leaner, however, who involved Wright in a scam which enabled him to make the money he needed to move to Memphis in 1925. He arranged for Wright to get a job as a ticket taker at the Alamo Theatre in Jackson and showed him how to hold out previously sold tickets and then resell them at later showings. According to Michel Fabre, Wright was thus able to save a ‘‘sizable sum’’ (Fabre 58) which he needed to buy train tickets and get established in Memphis. As was the case with many of his friends whom he knew at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson, Leaner eventually migrated to Chicago in the early 1930s in search of economic opportunities which were not available to black people in the Deep South. When Wright later made contact with Leaner in Chicago, he found him on hard times, being unemployed and evicted with his wife and two children from their South Side apartment. Leaner was living in Red Cross housing and invited Wright and Joe Brown over to plan a get-rich-quick-scheme. He proposed that they invent a fraudulent mail order business where they would present themselves as ‘‘The Three Wise Men from the East’’ who would offer at a price spiritual advice and romantic counseling. Wright, who worked for the post office, and was well aware of the stiff legal penalties for mail fraud, did not take Leaner’s bizarre plan seriously but enjoyed his impassioned and lengthy proposal. He and Brown never followed up on Leaner’s scam and gradually lost contact with him.

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In later years, Leaner became involved in a number of business projects, including selling records, running a nightclub, and publishing a newspaper. He became a successful disc jockey on a Chicago radio station and sometimes ‘‘posed as a minister by night’’ (Webb 104). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

LEE, CANADA (3 May 1907–9 May 1952) An actor who pioneered many roles for African Americans on stage, in film and on radio, Lee was also an accomplished professional boxer and courageous promoter of civil rights. Born Lionel Cornelius Canagata, he began studying violin at age seven and became a concert violinist five years later. He ran away from home when he was fourteen to be a jockey at Saratoga, and, when he grew too heavy and tall for jockeying, he turned to boxing. After winning ninety amateur bouts, he turned pro in 1926, eventually establishing himself as a contender for the world welterweight title. It was as a prize fighter that he underwent a name change as a ring announcer, unsure of how to pronounce both his first and last names, dubbed him ‘‘Canada Lee,’’ a name that stuck with him for the remainder of his life. He retired from the ring in 1933 after suffering a detached retina. It was during the Great Depression that Lee developed into an actor. He had prominent roles in Federal Theatre Project productions of Brother Moses and Stevedore, drawing the attention of Orson Welles, who then cast him as Banquo in his all-black production of Macbeth and, after, as the black revolutionary, Jean Christophe, in Haiti. Lee attained national attention in 1941 when he played the role of Bigger Thomas in Welles’s Mercury Theatre production of Native Son. The play drew strong praise from a wide range of

Left Front critics, many of whom singled out the excellence of Lee’s acting. Lee, whose careers as a jockey and a boxer had given him close contact with many people resembling Bigger Thomas, brought the play’s central character powerfully to life. As Michel Fabre has stressed, he elicited ‘‘intense sympathy’’ for Bigger while being careful not to sentimentalize him: ‘‘His gestures, intonations, and even his silences expressed to perfection Bigger’s frustrations and hatred’’ (Fabre 214). Lee has been called by some the Jackie Robinson of American film and theatre because he broke down the barriers that confronted black actors and created new roles for them. When he portrayed Bosola in Webster’s Dutchess of Malfi he was the first African American to play a white actor in professional American theatre. He regarded his portrayal of Bigger Thomas as groundbreaking. As he revealed in a 1945 issue of Negro Digest, he saw his work in Welles’s play as ‘‘making history in the theatre. The Negro has never been given the scope I’m given in this play. Now they’ll think of the Negro as an actor and not some butler-valet type, some ignorant person’’ (Fabre 217). In 1944, Lee appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat but insisted on re-writing substantial parts of the script to eliminate racial stereotyping of his role. In 1945, he was the first black person to play the role of Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Like Paul Robeson, who became his close friend, Lee was actively engaged in the struggle for racial equality in America. He hosted a radio show in the late 1940s, New World A’Comin’, which discussed racial issues and black history and supported the work of civil rights organizations. These activities drew the attention of the FBI and the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities during the McCarthy era. At one point the FBI offered to ‘‘clear his name’’ if he would testify against Paul Robeson. When Lee refused, he was blacklisted and had difficulty finding work in theatre, film, radio, and television. This not only created serious financial problems for him but contributed to worsening health problems which brought about his premature

death from kidney failure. When the State Department would not allow him a visa to go to South Africa to film Cry the Beloved Country under the auspices of a British motion picture company, he had to be smuggled out of the United States. He died shortly after the film was completed. Richard Wright, a long-time boxing fan, admired Lee as a fighter and came to know him well when the two worked together on the stage version of Native Son. The two became good friends for the remainder of Lee’s life. Wright considered Lee to be ‘‘one of the finest’’ (Kinnamon 41) actors he had ever seen and wanted him to play Bigger in the film version of Native Son directed by Pierre Chenal. When Lee’s declining health and prior engagements made this impossible, Wright performed the role himself. Wright was well aware of how Lee was mistreated by the FBI and the State Department. This strengthened his own resolve to remain in exile in France, refusing to return to the United States where he almost certainly would have also been made a casualty of the McCarthy era. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

LEFT FRONT It was founded in 1933 by the John Reed Club of Chicago as its official literary magazine. Unlike the New Masses, which operated out of New York and favored the work of established writers, Left Front encouraged the poems, essays, and stories written by fledgling writers of the Midwest. The first meeting of the John Reed Club which Wright attended in the autumn of 1933 was, significantly, a meeting of the editorial board of Left Front. Wright was impressed not only by the friendliness of these young white men but also by their keen interest in writing literature which was leftist in outlook and aggressive in tone. He joined the John Reed Club shortly after this 229

Leopold and Loeb meeting and placed his first two published poems, ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ and ‘‘Rest for the Weary,’’ in the January–February 1934 issue of Left Front. Wright was an enthusiastic supporter of the magazine and was deeply disappointed when it was dissolved at the 1934 meeting of the Midwest Writers Congress in Chicago. Those voting for eliminating the magazine felt that it deflected too much time and energy away from more important political matters and believed that national communist publications such as the Daily Worker and New Masses were sufficient outlets for literary activity and political writing. Wright sharply disagreed with their decision to disband Left Front, arguing that local magazines had a special value in promoting Marxist art and raising the consciousness of workers. His disillusionment with the national office of the American Communist Party deepened a month later when at the Second National John Reed Club Congress, the John Reed Clubs themselves were disbanded. The loss of Left Front and the John Reed Clubs troubled Wright and planted doubts in his mind about the Communist Party’s understanding of the importance of addressing local issues and giving regional organizations the autonomy they required to function adequately. He also began to doubt the party’s grasp of the importance of art in effecting political and social change. These doubts deepened over time and, together with other problems which Wright experienced with the party, led to his eventually breaking with communism in 1942. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

LEOPOLD AND LOEB Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were sons of wealthy Chicago families who, on May 21, 1924, murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks, Loeb’s distant relative. Loeb was an intellectually gifted 18-year-old graduate of the University of

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Michigan and a graduate student at the University of Chicago while Leopold was a 19-year-old law student at the University of Chicago and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. Mentally precocious but psychologically and morally twisted, they killed Franks merely for the ‘‘thrill’’ of it to reinforce their Nietzschean delusions about themselves as supermen who were above the law. Their attempt at achieving the ‘‘perfect’’ crime, however, went pathetically wrong when Franks’s body was discovered on the very day of the murder, and Leopold’s eyeglasses were found nearby. The typewriter which was used for the ransom note to Franks’s parents was also discovered soon after the crime and was easily identified as belonging to Leopold. The sensational trial took place in Chicago from July 23 to September 10, 1924, drawing national and international attention. Clarence Darrow was hired as the defense lawyer for a huge fee of $100,000. He developed a brilliant defense which spared his clients the death penalty, resulting in their receiving life sentences for murder and an additional ninety-nine years for kidnapping. The defense was premised upon deterministic grounds, claiming that Loeb and Leopold were either constituted at birth or conditioned by their privileged but decadent environment to perform such a ruthless act without experiencing any remorse for or moral awareness of their actions. (In a famous summation Darrow argued ‘‘They killed him as they might kill a spider or a fly. . . . They killed him because they were made that way.’’) Although given a reprieve from the electric chair, Loeb was slashed to death in prison in 1936 by another inmate after an argument. Leopold, who became morally reformed in prison, was paroled in 1958 after Governor Adlai Stevenson reduced his original sentence. He spent the remainder of his life in Puerto Rico where he led an exemplary life, volunteering for service work in hospitals and church missions and teaching mathematics. He died in 1971. Wright, who had a life-long fascination with criminal behavior and used the Robert Nixon

Leopold and Loeb and Clinton Brewer cases as sources for his novels, was keenly interested in the Loeb/Leopold murder. He read the news accounts of the case in the Jackson, Mississippi newspapers in 1924 and, according to Hazel Rowley, had a copy of Darrow’s Pleas in Defense of Leopold and Loeb on his writing desk when he drafted the trial scenes in Native Son (Rowley 153). There are many revealing parallels between Bigger Thomas’s killings of two women and the murder of Bobby Franks. Mary Dalton, like Franks, came from a privileged background and her millionaire parents, like Franks’s parents, sent her to exclusive schools. Loeb and Leopold murdered a defenseless young boy mainly for ‘‘thrills’’ and the perverse sense of power it temporarily provided them with. In a similar way, Bigger is filled with ‘‘elation’’ (Wright 107) after he kills Mary and exults with ‘‘pride’’ (Wright 106) over his actions. Like Loeb and Leopold, he was inflated with a false sense of power over his violent actions which eventually resulted in imprisonment. Bobbie Franks and Bessie Mears are killed by violent blows to the head. Loeb, Leopold, and Bigger are caught when the corpses which they think they have cleverly disposed of are discovered shortly after the crimes have been performed. It is significant that Bigger and Loeb try to destroy evidence by burning it in a home furnace. Even stronger parallels can be found between the trial scenes in Native Son and the actual trial which took place in Chicago. Clarence Darrow, like Max, was a leftist opposed to capital punishment, and the defense constructed by the two lawyers bear striking similarities. Both opt for a guilty plea, thus avoiding a jury trial, and both rest their cases on deterministic grounds arguing that their clients were compelled by environmental forces to commit their crimes. Max and Darrow also remind their respective judges that American society stands at a critical junction in its historical development and that their decisions will either move America forward as a better society or will help it regress to a less civilized condition. Just as Darrow reminded Judge Caverly that he stood between a barbaric past which employed capital

punishment and a more humane future which would try to reform rather than destroy the criminal, Max warns the judge in Native Son that western civilization is in danger of collapsing if it does not eliminate the social pathologies which have shaped Bigger’s violent behavior. But it is important to realize that Wright did not simply transcribe the literal events of history when he wrote fiction but, instead, re-shaped these events to express more clearly his own vision of African-American life. While the court records and news accounts of Loeb and Leopold establish them as remorseless monsters, Wright constructs Bigger Thomas in complexly human terms. Wright makes it clear throughout the novel that there are ‘‘two Biggers’’ (Wright 252), an outer self which compulsively performs two grim killings and takes a grisly pride in both actions and, secondly, an inner self which is tormented morally by what he does. It is this inner self which triggers Bigger’s human growth in Book 3 of Native Son. The verdicts arrived at in the two trials are also dramatically different, creating powerful ironies which go to the core of Wright’s distinctive vision. Leopold and Loeb were highly privileged white men whose millionaire parents could pay a famous lawyer extraordinary fees to save them from the electric chair. But Bigger is fated to be executed because he is a black man without money, power, or influence. While the judge presiding over the Loeb/Leopold trial broke down into tears of sympathy while listening to Darrow’s eloquent summation, the judge controlling Bigger’s destiny shows no such human understanding or mercy. This irony is intensified when one considers that Bigger is condemned for the accidental death of Mary Dalton while Leopold and Loeb were allowed to live even though they were entirely guilty of consciously planning and coldly carrying out the brutal murder of an innocent boy to prove they were above the law which helps to destroy Bigger and his people. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘The Function of Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ Black American Literature Forum 20 (Spring–Summer 1986) 231

LeSueur, Meridel 9–25. Fass, Paula, ‘‘Making and Re-Making an Event: The Leopold and Loeb Case in American Culture.’’ The Journal of American History 80, No. 3 (December 1993) 919–951. Leopold, Nathan F. Life Plus 99 Years.. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1958. Sitakis, Carl. The Encyclopedia of American Crime. New York: Facts on File, 1982. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Library of America, 1991.

LESUEUR, MERIDEL (22 February 1900– 14 November 1996) LeSueur was raised in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she lived most of her life. She was extremely active in leftist politics of the 1930s and became part of what Margaret Walker has characterized as the ‘‘little Bohemia’’ of politically committed writers which developed in Chicago during that time. The group included Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Jack Conroy, and James T. Farrell. As a young woman, she was hailed as a promising leftist writer and published her work in American Mercury, New Masses, and Scribner’s. Her essay ‘‘Women on the Breadlines,’’ which appeared in the January 1932 issue of New Masses, was a powerful evocation of the suffering endured by unemployed women whose husbands had also lost their jobs. She saw these women as ‘‘slaves without the security of a slave’’ who endured ‘‘endless labor without dream’’ (Swados 190). Her story ‘‘I Was Marching’’ won the New Masses prize for fiction in 1934. When Wright’s ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ won Story magazine’s coveted prize in 1937, LeSueur’s American Primitive was named the runner up, supported strongly by Sinclair Lewis who was one of the contest’s judges. She published a book of short stories, Salute to the Spring, in 1940 and five years later published a regional history of Minnesota, North Star Country. After that she passed into literary obscurity and, in the words of Harvey Swados, failed to ‘‘fulfill her early promise’’ (Swados 181). Wright met LeSueur at the Second National John Reed Club Congress which met in Chicago in August, 1934. And they both attended the 232

First American Writer’s Congress in April 1935 where she presented a paper on the literary situation in the Middle West. The two also were present at the Fourth American Writers Congress in 1941 and, along with Albert Maltz and Theodore Dreiser, were named vicepresidents of the conference. As fellow members of the John Reed Club and workers for the WPA, Wright and LeSueur had much in common. Both saw capitalism as causing enormous suffering for working class and poor people, and both felt that radical changes needed to be made in American social, economic, and political life. LeSueur greatly admired Wright’s work and when the stage version of Native Son played in Minneapolis in 1942 and drew a negative review in the local newspaper, she responded with a letter to the editor vigorously defending Wright’s depiction of black poverty. She was particularly strong in her defense of Wright’s determinism. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Swados, Harvey. The American Writer and the Great Depression. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

LEVI, CARLO (1902–1975) Italian novelist, doctor, journalist and politician, he is best known for his novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli which was published in 1945. The book is set in Italy in the years prior to World War II and is a powerful indictment of the fascist dictatorship which controlled Italy in the 1920s and 1930s. Levi was born in Turin to Jewish parents. His uncle, Claudio Treves, was one of the leaders of the Italian Socialist Party and Levi grew up strongly influenced by leftist ideas. In 1930, he joined the socialist reform movement, ‘‘Justice and Liberty.’’ Because he was a Jew and a fervent anti-fascist, he was exiled in 1935 and 1936 to a remote village in the province of Luciana where he developed the material for Christ Stopped at Eboli and served as a physician to local people.

Le´vi-Strauss, Claude After World War II, Levi became active in Italian leftist politics. He was editor of L’Italia Libre, a journal sponsored by the Socialist Action Party. Like Ignazio Silone an Italian novelist who rejected the totalitarianism of both the right and the left, Levi was deeply suspicious of abstract ideology and programmatic politics but he was strongly drawn to socialist principles. In 1963, he was elected to the Italian Senate and remained one of its members until he died on January 4, 1975. Wright greatly admired Levi as a writer and political reformer. In a June 1957 interview in an Italian newspaper, he reported that he had read Silone’s Fontamara and ‘‘almost all of Carlo Levi’’ (Fabre 95). His library contained a copy of Levi’s philosophical prose work, Fear and Freedom. When Wright traveled to Rome in February 1948 to give a lecture on African-American literature and promote the Italian translation of Native Son, Levi gave a luncheon in Wright’s honor. Later that year, the two participated in the writers’ congress sponsored in Paris by Rassemblement De´mocratique Revolutionaire (RDR), a group of writers and intellectuals on the non-communist left. The theme of the conference was ‘‘The Internationalism of the Mind’’ and featured talks by Wright, Levi, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Andre´ Breton. Both Wright and Levi were deeply committed to RDR’s goal of keeping post–World War II Europe free of the Cold War agendas put forth by the United States and the Soviet Union. This organization appealed to Wright and Levi because it offered them a way of remaining true to their commitments to radical leftist principles and action without paying allegiance to political organizations which limited their freedom as artists. After the Writers’ Congress, Wright helped Levi place an article in the tenth anniversary issue of Dorothy Norman’s Twice a Year, which also featured pieces by Silone, Stephen Spender, and Andre´ Malraux. The theme of this special issue was ‘‘Art and Action.’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi

Press, 1990. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

LE´VI-STRAUSS, CLAUDE (28 November 1908– ) He was a French anthropologist whose pioneering studies of native people in Brazil led to the development of a new school of anthropology called structuralism. His major works include The Elementary Structure of Kinship (1969), Race and History (1952), Structural Anthropology (1963), and The Savage Mind (1966). He played an important role in Wright’s gaining a passport to visit France in 1946. When Wright’s request for a passport was turned down by the U.S. State Department on the improbable grounds that American visitors might get stranded in France because of the chaotic postwar conditions there, Wright investigated the matter further and sought the assistance of his friends. Dorothy Norman contacted the State Department and informed them that it would be necessary for Wright to be in France to manage the affairs of her journal, Twice a Year. Wright then contacted a French friend, Michael Gordy and his father-inlaw, Marc Chagall, asking them to intercede on his behalf with the French officials. They contacted the French government through its attache´ in Washington, who turned out to be Le´vi-Strauss. Strauss was also contacted by his friend, Gertrude Stein, who also spoke on Wright’s behalf. After red tape on both sides of the Atlantic had been cut through, Le´vi-Strauss sent to Wright on April 25, 1946 a formal invitation from the French government to visit France as an official guest. French officials agreed to pay all of Wright’s expenses for the first month of his stay and he sailed for France with his wife and daughter on May 1. They arrived in Le Havre eight days later, and on May 9 they were welcomed in Paris by Stein and what Michel Fabre has described as ‘‘an eager crowd of reporters and critics’’ (Fabre 302). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 233

Lewis, Sinclair 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

LEWIS, SINCLAIR (7 February 1885– 10 January 1951) American novelist who wrote realistic novels depicting the provinciality and sterility of life in Midwestern towns in the first three decades of the twentieth century. His best known work includes Main Street (1920), Babbitt (1922), Elmer Gantry (1927), Dodsworth (1929) and It Can’t Happen Here (1935). In 1930, Lewis became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in literature. Wright was strongly influenced by Lewis’s work during his apprenticeship in Memphis and Chicago. In Black Boy, he observes that the first ‘‘serious’’ book he read was Main Street and that novel helped him to more clearly see and better understand the American ‘‘types’’ who not only populated Lewis’s world but also could be found in Wright’s own experience. In the same way the ‘‘narrow life’’ (Wright 273) depicted in Babbitt helped Wright to gain a sharper awareness of the segregated South, a world ‘‘ringed by walls’’ (Wright 274) which blinded and stunted people. Like H. L. Mencken and Theodore Dreiser, Lewis was interesting to the young Wright because his writing exposed many of the qualities of American life which Wright deplored. Elmer Gantry vividly exposed the hypocrisies of fundamentalist Christianity and would therefore have touched down solidly on Wright’s deep resentments toward organized religion. Lewis’s satire on the stultifying qualities of small town life also squared with Wright’s negative assessment of his experiences in Mississippi backwaters such as Natchez and Greenwood. Wright was also impressed by Lewis’s deliberately flat, understated writing style which was used so skillfully to deflate middle class pretensions and romantic illusions. When Wright claimed in Black Boy that ‘‘All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel’’ (Wright 274), he was surely thinking of Sinclair Lewis as an 234

important practitioner of such fiction. And he would have been pleased to discover that Lewis was one of the judges who awarded first prize to ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ in Story magazine’s 1937 contest. As Wright stressed in a 1960 interview a few months before his death, Lewis was one of the writers who gave him ‘‘a light which I could use to look at people’’ (Kinnamon 214). Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Wright Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

LIBRARY OF AMERICA Funded by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Andrew E. Mellon Foundation, the Library of America is an attempt to provide what it considers ‘‘the only definitive edition of America’s greatest writers.’’ Each book in the series is edited by a distinguished scholar. In 1991, Wright’s collected work, edited by Arnold Rampersad, appeared in two volumes in the Library of America. The first volume included Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, and Native Son, while the second volume consisted of Black Boy/American Hunger and The Outsider. Keneth Kinnamon described this as a ‘‘literary event of the first magnitude’’ (Butler 173) and James Tuttleton called it ‘‘an event of great cultural importance’’ (Butler 167). Not only did Wright’s inclusion in this prestigious series place him in the company of canonical writers such as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, but it also provided the opportunity to address serious textual problems which have afflicted several of Wright’s most important books. Rampersad’s careful study of Wright’s manuscripts and published works revealed that his editors often persuaded him to make substantial revisions which greatly altered the meanings of books such as Native Son, Black Boy, and Lawd Today! By restoring these texts to their original condition, the Library of America editions have

Library of America made available to general readers Wright’s intentions before he had to deal with editorial control. For example, when Native Son appeared as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection in 1940, it was greatly changed from the novel which Wright completed in 1939 and was accepted by Harper and Brothers in the same year. The editors at Book-of-the-Month-Club, however, were uncomfortable with the novel as Wright intended it and asked for a series of changes which Wright, perhaps reluctantly, agreed to make. They insisted that he tone down the book’s bold treatment of sex by eliminating a scene where Bigger and his friends masturbate in a neighborhood theatre, and they also wanted Wright to eliminate a passage where Bigger imagines Mary Dalton as he rapes Bessie Mears. Mary Dalton’s sexual attraction to Bigger is made much less explicit, and her role in the novel’s bedroom scene is made much more passive, making this scene more of a rape than mutually-desired sexual activity. And the novel’s political militancy is muted by eliminating or reducing several of Max’s courtroom speeches. Wright realized that having his work appear in the prestigious Book-of-the-Month format would not only greatly increase its sales but would also provide Native Son with the national attention it deserved. So he was understandably reluctant to challenge the demands of Dorothy Canfield Fisher and other Book-of-the-Month-Club editors. There is no written or oral record of his response to such editorial control, so if he did have serious objections to the revisions which editors suggested or insisted on, he kept them to himself. Important changes in Wright’s manuscript were also required by Book-of-the-Month-Club editors when Black Boy was published in 1945. As originally written, Wright’s autobiography came in two narrative segments, his growing up in the South which he titled ’’Southern Nights’’ and his subsequent experiences in Chicago which he called ‘‘The Horror and the Glory.’’ Wright was convinced to drop the northern section, having been promised by his editor Edward Aswell

that it would be published separately at a later date by Harper and Brothers. (It would appear many years later in 1977 as American Hunger.) Wright was much more troubled, however, by Canfield Fisher’s suggestion that the book conclude more positively on a note consistent with what she characterized as ’’American ideals’’ (Rowley 288). Fearing that such a revision would violate the integrity of the book by concluding it on a falsely sentimental note, Wright resisted making the change. After much serious deliberation, he provided a bittersweet conclusion to the book by describing how writers such as Theodore Dreiser, H. L. Mencken, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson had awakened him as a writer and freed him from the hellish environment of the South but he also stressed how these writers were also cultural rebels who were deeply critical of ‘‘American ideals’’ as they were conventionally understood. Wright then clearly rejected the rather insipid title, First Act, which was suggested by the editors, titling the book Black Boy to stress its bitter ironies. Lawd Today!, which was originally named Cesspool when Wright completed it in 1936, was published posthumously by Walker and Company in 1963. It too was changed by editors who damaged the book’s realism by eliminating many colloquial and obscene expressions. They also reduced the effectiveness of the novel’s stream of consciousness passages by ‘‘correcting’’ Wright’s Joycean experiments with punctuation. The Library of America reversed these editorial changes, restoring the book to its original condition as Wright intended it. The Library of America edition of The Outsider rejected some of the manuscript changes demanded by people at Harper and Brothers while accepting other revisions which improved the novel. John Fischer, Wright’s editor, reduced one-third of the unwieldy manuscript which Wright submitted and eliminated some stream of consciousness sections which impeded the book’s narrative. Rampersad maintained these deletions made by Fisher, but he restored cuts made by copy editors who deleted many words which they 235

Lipton, Lawrence considered obscene as well as two whole pages of narration. By thus ‘‘restoring’’ Wright’s major works, the Library of America has made a critically important contribution to Wright studies. Wright’s inclusion in this important collection gives his work a much-deserved place in the canon of major American writers. And it also enables readers for the first time to have access to the books as Wright originally envisioned them. Empowered by this wealth of important textual material, readers and scholars can now make their own decisions about the relative merits of the different editions of Wright’s major works. Since the publication of the Library of America’s editions of Native Son and Black Boy, an interesting critical debate has developed, with some scholars preferring the ‘‘restored’’ texts as stronger and more authentic renderings of Wright’s true vision. Others, however, have maintained that Wright’s editors, like the editors who worked with Thomas Wolfe and Theodore Dreiser, served him well by encouraging him to write in a more disciplined, precise manner. Rampersad strongly advocates for the restored editions, arguing that Wright’s editors weakened his major work by compromising his bold treatment of America’s racial problems and muting his militant political protest. Charles Johnson, James Tuttleton, and Eugene Miller, however, have concluded that the textual changes suggested by Wright’s editors enhanced the literary quality of Native Son and Black Boy. Keneth Kinnamon has taken an intermediate position, especially regarding Native Son, arguing, ‘‘I want a version of Native Son that restores all the coerced sexual cuts but retains all other changes made by Wright for the 1940 edition’’ (Butler 176). Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Too Honest for His Own Time.’’ New York Times Book Review (December 29, 1991), 3. Tuttleton, James. ‘‘The Problematic Texts of Richard Wright.’’ The Hudson Review (Summer 1992), 261–271.

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LIPTON, LAWRENCE (10 October 1898– 9 July 1975) Novelist, poet, and journalist, Lipton was born in Lodz, Poland and came to the United States with his family in 1903. They settled in Chicago and experienced severe poverty after the father died in 1912. Lipton was largely self-educated and worked a variety of jobs to support himself and his family. By the 1920s, he was part of a group of Chicago writers which included Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, Sherwood Anderson, and Harriet Monroe. During the Great Depression, Lipton became involved in radical leftist politics, joining the Chicago John Reed Club. He also collaborated with his wife Georgianna Craig on the writing of twenty-two mystery novels, publishing them under the name of Craig Rice. During the early 1940s, he published two novels that explored American anti-Semitism, Brother, the Laugh Is Bitter (1942) and Secret Battle (1944). After World War II, he became part of the ‘‘Beat movement,’’ writing an award-winning book of poems, Rainbow at Midnight (1955) and The Holy Barbarians (1960), a non-fiction study of beatnik literature and social criticism. He settled into the bohemian community of Venice, California, where he wrote poetry and became a teacher and advisor to young writers interested in writing jazz-inspired free verse. In 1965, he published The Erotic Revolution, an early manifesto of the hippie movement calling for radical changes in American lifestyles and sexual behavior. Throughout his varied career, Lipton saw himself as a visionary pressing for radical social change and personal liberation. Wright met Lipton in the mid-1930s when both were members of Chicago’s John Reed Club, and the two developed a lasting friendship. He was one of Wright’s ‘‘favorite companions’’ (Fabre 109) in a group of young leftists such as Abe Aaron, Abraham Chapman, Nelson Algren, and Howard Nutt. Wright admired Lipton’s strong individualism and flamboyant lifestyle and often participated in literary discussions held

‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States’’ at his Rush Street home. These meetings were particularly interesting to Wright because of their freedom from the ideological limits set by conversations held at the John Reed Club’s official quarters. He respected Lipton’s assessments of his early poetry and fiction, looking up to him as a person who had known discrimination as a Jew and a writer who understood the problems of American underdogs. The two were also drawn together by their poverty backgrounds and their status as self-educated writers. After the John Reed clubs were disbanded in 1935, they worked together on the Illinois Writers’ Project and continued their friendship for many years. Wright particularly admired Lipton’s novel Brother, the Laughter Is Bigger and helped get it published at Harper’s by strongly recommending it to Edward Aswell. In a 1941 radio interview with Edwin Seaver, he singled out that book for special praise when asked about a contemporary book ‘‘that holds a great deal of promise’’ (Kinnamon 46). He later wrote an enthusiastic letter of support for Lipton’s application for a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1968, Lipton wrote a brief but revealing essay about Wright entitled ‘‘Richard Wright: The Agony of Integration’’ which appeared in the Los Angeles Free Press. Lipton described a visit he made with other young writers to the Chicago apartment which Wright shared with his mother. They were concerned about Wright’s whereabouts when he failed to appear for three weeks at their writers’ workshops and wanted to encourage him to attend future meetings. When they entered the building where the Wrights lived, they were struck by ‘‘the smell of poverty and decay’’ which pervaded the place and were taken aback by Wright’s ‘‘hostile, sullen, and resentful’’ (Rowley 90) response to their visit. Wright, who always kept his personal and family life hidden from his friends, especially his white friends, was offended by what he perceived was a violation of his privacy. Lipton fully understood the mistake which he and his friends had made and never discussed the episode with Wright.

Selected Bibliography: Lipton, Nettie. From the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians of Postwar America. Edited by Anne Charters. Detroit: Gale Research, 1983, pp. 352–56. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘THE LITERATURE OF THE NEGRO IN THE UNITED STATES’’ Included as one of the four essays in White Man, Listen! which was published on October 15, 1957 by Doubleday, it was an expanded version of a lecture Wright delivered in Europe in the early 1950s. Focusing on ‘‘Negro poems’’ (Wright 69), Wright’s intention was to describe the distinct nature of African-American literature, its origins and ‘‘what it means to us today’’ (Wright 69). He stressed that such writing arose from the unique circumstances endured by black people in America from the time of slavery to the present day. Characterizing black history as ‘‘the history of America written in vivid and bloody terms’’ (Wright 71–72), he argues that Negro literature in the United States is grounded in a ‘‘tradition of lament . . . a vast reservoir of bitterness and despair and infrequent hope’’ (Wright 79). Wright poses two important questions early in the essay: ‘‘What is a Negro?’’ and ‘‘What is Negro writing?’’ His answer to the first question emphasizes that the term ‘‘Negro’’ refers not to a genetic condition defining race but to a sociological condition of being stripped of one’s culture, held in bondage by a dominant culture, and reduced to the status of a marginalized outsider. Taken from Africa where they were an organic part of a ‘‘warm tribal culture’’ (Wright 71), American blacks were placed in an alien society of ‘‘strident individualism’’ (Wright 72) which, ironically, denied them all of their rights as individuals. A central drive for Wright in Negro literature, therefore, is a ‘‘constant striving for identity’’ (Wright 72) and a bitter protest against a social system which

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‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States’’ proclaims humanitarian principles but ignores them in its dealings with black people. For this reason, Wright regards writers such as Alexander Dumas, Alexander Pushkin, and Phyllis Wheatley as genetically ‘‘black’’ but not ‘‘Negro’’ authors since each was ‘‘emotionally integrated’’ (Wright 75) with their country’s culture. He dates Negro writing in the United States from the early nineteenth century when poets such as George Moses Horton began writing pieces which made strong protests against slavery and rejected their condition as ‘‘split’’ (Wright 78) men who were aware of their humanity but were treated as objects by their societies. Wright cites several other examples of tragically divided black writers such as James M. Whitfield, Frances Ellen Harper, and Albery A. Whitman whose work was centered in the ‘‘horror’’ (Wright 79) of being treated as non-human beings in a society abstractly devoted to humanitarian principles. Wright then traces two main traditions in modern African-American literature, what he terms ‘‘two pools of black expression’’ (Wright 86). The first is what he calls ‘‘The Narcissistic Level’’ of writing produced by middle class black authors such as Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois which focuses on racial uplift and avoids the more disturbing experience of poor blacks. He designates the second tradition ‘‘The Forms of Things Unknown,’’ a folk literature which includes the spirituals, the blues, work songs, jazz, and folk stories. Wright clearly rejects the literature of the black bourgeoisie and identifies strongly with the folk literature which traces its roots back to slavery. While the ‘‘upper levels of Negro life’’ (Wright 85) were busy creating an escapist literature of unrepresentative stories of personal success, black folk artists were probing the lives of the masses of black people suffering in ‘‘black ghettoes [which] were growing ever larger’’ and segregation which ‘‘grew, deepened, spread’’ (Wright 85). Wright drew his inspiration from black folk tradition, revealing that he felt ‘‘personally identified with the migrant Negro, his folk songs, his ditties, his wild tales of bad

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men . . . because my own life was forged in the depths in which they lived’’ (Wright 85). He also argued that the best American Negro writing of the twentieth century is also centered in and arises from this rich and vital stream of ‘‘black folk expression’’ (Wright 86) which squarely confronted the pain and injustice of ordinary black people. For example, he praises Fenton Johnson for lucidly expressing his ‘‘racial bitterness’’ over the squalid conditions of ghetto life in Chicago. And he celebrates Claude McKay’s poetry for its ‘‘white hot pitch of passion’’ (Wright 96) in denouncing American racism. While stressing the angry protest which drives much Negro literature, Wright nevertheless points out that such negative feelings do not constitute ‘‘the entire picture’’ (Wright 98) of AfricanAmerican writing, especially that produced after World War I by poets such as Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. These writers were able to express a measured hope, Wright believed, because racial conditions in the United States were slowly improving. And he also pointed out that politically engaged black writers who were drawn to Marxism and communism were able to affirm a ‘‘whole-hearted commitment to a new world’’ (Wright 98), a rejuvenated society which might provide dispossessed people with a ‘‘new sense of oneness, a new integration’’ (Wright 98) with the world. Wright also suggests that a younger generation of writers emerging after World War II such as James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison might be able to reduce the ‘‘racial discontent’’ (Wright 103) of their work if America could finally ‘‘set [its] racial house somewhat in order’’ (Wright 103). But even as he sounds this very tentative note of racial hope, Wright is quick to remind us that such ‘‘hope is steeped in a sense of tragedy’’ (Wright 102), given the somber history of African-American race relations. Wright concludes his essay with a very firm belief in the growing importance and resonance of African-American literature in the modern world. He declares boldly that the fate of American Negroes is interwoven with the fate of

Little Rock, Arkansas America and the fate of oppressed people all over the world. Just as he had earlier asserted that ‘‘The Negro is the metaphor of America’’ (Wright 72), he concludes by asserting that ‘‘The Voice of the American Negro is rapidly becoming the most representative voice of America and oppressed people anywhere in the world today’’ (Wright 101). The Negro’s quest for identity in a world of collapsing traditional values and institutions finally becomes for Wright the quest of modern man as he moves from a closed but secure traditional world to an open but anxiety-laden modern existence. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday, 1964.

LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS The integration of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas in the fall of 1957 is one of the major events of the American civil rights movement. After the Little Rock School Board had unanimously voted to integrate the city’s high school in the summer of 1957, nine African-American students attempted to matriculate at Central High School on September 23, 1957. They met with massive resistance in the form of an angry mob of 1,000 white students and citizens who tried to bar their way into the school and threatened them with racial insults and violence. When the students entered undetected through a side door of the school, the mob began to challenge the police and surged through the school, shouting threats and attempting to remove the nine black students. Because the police were unable to control the crowd, school was called off after a few hours. Two days later, in an attempt to protect the black students and also to enforce the Supreme Court decision of 1954 mandating an end to segregated education, President Eisenhower federalized the National Guard and sent 1,000 members of 101st Airborne Division of the

United States Army to Little Rock. The school was forcibly integrated, but the nine AfricanAmerican students were subjected to racial abuse and harassment throughout the year. Only one of the students, Ernest Green, graduated from Central High’s class of over 600 students in May 1958. The troubles at Little Rock were widely reported throughout the United States and the world, both in print media and on television. The full ugliness and injustice of southern segregation were vividly displayed to millions of people, creating substantial support for the growing civil rights movement and well-deserved global embarrassment for the United States. Wright, whose White Man, Listen! appeared in the fall of 1957, was deeply moved by the events in Little Rock and expressed his views on that subject in a long interview in the French Journal, La Nef. He placed the disturbances at Central High School in a broad historical context, going back to the Reconstruction period when the United States withdrew its troops from the South in 1877, thus allowing southern states to reenslave black people with systems of segregation and sharecropping. He regarded President Eisenhower’s sending of troops to Little Rock as ‘‘a direct resumption of federal activity which left off in the South after the Civil War’’ (Kinnamon 175). In Wright’s mind, if federal troops had not been removed from the South during Reconstruction, America’s current racial problems might have been more manageable or even ‘‘resolved’’ (Kinnamon 175). But after eighty years of ‘‘semislavery’’ (Kinnamon 174), African Americans were presenting the nation with a ‘‘moral bill’’ (Kinnamon 174) which had to be paid by delivering to them the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Bill of Rights. Wright, therefore, saw Eisenhower’s actions in Little Rock as an attempt to make a payment on this moral bill, thus reasserting ‘‘the authority of the theory of one nation, one law, one people, as the American Constitution so clearly provides’’ (Kinnamon 175). 239

Locke, Alain In the La Nef interview, Wright expressed substantial worries about the possibility that it was too late for America to solve its racial problems and conjectured that ‘‘The Negro in the United States might well meet the fate of the Jew in Germany’’ (Kinnamon 177). He pointed out that American racism had deep roots in both the North and the South and saw the troubles in Little Rock as exhibiting both white resistance to social change and black temptations to retreat into racial nationalism. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Are the United States One Nation, One Law, One People?’’ La Nef (November 14, 1957) 570–60, in Conversations with Richard Wright edited by Keneth Kinnamon and Michel Fabre. Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

LOCKE, ALAIN (13 September 1886– 9 June 1954) Literary critic, philosopher educator, and art historian, Locke was a driving force behind the Harlem Renaissance and a major figure in twentiethcentury African-American criticism. Throughout his career, he promoted black literature and the arts, helping to bring them to national and international attention. He is best known for developing and popularizing the concept of the ‘‘New Negro’’ which defined a new kind of black identity emerging in modern America. Locke’s New Negro was characterized by strong self reliance, political activism, black pride, and disdain of white philanthropy. Locke’s bold portrayal of the New Negro radically challenged earlier stereotyped ways of picturing black experience by racist whites and black accomodationists such as Booker T. Washington. Although he came from an old and distinguished Philadelphia family, Locke’s own life, in some ways at least, provides a vivid illustration of what he meant by the term New Negro. He graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in three years. He was the first black person in

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America to win a Rhodes Scholarship, earning a degree from Oxford University and then studying philosophy at the University of Berlin. Returning to the United States in 1912, he began a long and distinguished teaching career at Howard University, and, except for two years at Harvard to complete his doctoral dissertation, he remained on the faculty at Howard for the remainder of his life. Over the years, he took several leaves from Howard to pursue research and teaching at Fisk University, the University of Wisconsin, the New School for Social Research, and the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. In 1925, he edited a special number of The Survey magazine entitled ‘‘Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro’’ which formed the basis of the book, The New Negro, which was published later that year. It included brilliant illustrations by artists such as Aaron Douglass and Miguel Covarrubias, as well as the work of established scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois and also a series of promising young writers like Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Locke’s own essay, ‘‘The New Negro’’ introduced the book by defining what became one of the artistic credos of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke published several other important books, including Plays of Negro Life (1927), A Decade of Negro Expression (1928), Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), and The Negro in America (1953). As a teacher, mentor, critic, and editor, he played a key role in the development of several generations of black scholars and creative artists. Richard Wright was one of the young writers whom Locke helped to emerge as a powerful new voice in American literature. Alain Locke wrote an extremely favorable review of Uncle Tom’s Children for Opportunity, predicting ‘‘a major literary career’’ (Locke 8) for Wright, comparing his literary debut favorably to Jean Toomer’s emergence as the author of Cane during the Harlem Renaissance. He praised Wright for honesty and boldly depicting racial problems which earlier writers were unwilling or unable to discuss. He was particularly lavish in his praise for ‘‘Big

‘‘Long Black Song’’ Boy Leaves Home’’ and ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ admiring their ‘‘poignant beauty’’ (Locke 8) and honest depiction of ‘‘The Negro Tragedy in the South’’ (Locke 8). When Native Son came out in 1940, he had even a higher estimate of this book. He applauded Wright’s ‘‘artistic courage and integrity’’ as well as his ‘‘daring and originality’’ (Locke 5). He regarded the novel as a ‘‘Zolaesque’’ work which put an end to ‘‘much evasion and self-deception’’ (Locke 7) about America’s racial problems by providing a ‘‘timely and incisive analysis of the core dilemmas of the situation of race and American democracy’’ (Locke 5). Locke saw Bigger Thomas as a character who is ‘‘the native son of the black city ghetto’’ (Locke 5) and, as such, is a powerful warning to America of what might happen if racial injustices are not addressed. He concluded by congratulating Wright for having performed ‘‘a great national service’’ (Locke 5) in writing such a powerful indictment of American racism. Locke’s 1942 survey of African-American literature for Opportunity lauded the stage version of Native Son directed by Orson Welles, but criticized 12 Million Black Voices for lacking in objectivity and providing an excessively bleak vision of African-American life. But in his Phylon yearly review of African-American literature in 1953, he cited Native Son as being one of the ‘‘three points of peak development in Negro fiction’’ (Locke 34) during his thirty years of reviewing literature. He compared the book favorably with Toomer’s Cane and Ellison’s Invisible Man, asserting that Wright’s book was ‘‘masterful’’ and ‘‘as skillful as any work of Dreiser’s or Farrell’s’’ (Locke 35). He did, however, add a note of criticism not found in his earlier assessments of Native Son, faulting it for being ‘‘marred’’ by Wright’s ‘‘doctrinally propagandistic tone’’ (Locke 36). But he concluded by ranking Wright’s novel above Cane and Invisible Man, asserting that it was ‘‘The Negro novelist’s strongest bid for fiction of the first magnitude’’ (Locke 35). Wright knew Locke personally and participated with him on May 6, 1939 in a panel discussion on black American literature and art at the Harlem

Cultural Congress. Other panelists included Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Warren Cochrane. Although Locke and Wright came from vastly different social and economic backgrounds, Wright admired Locke as a person who had done much to assist the development of modern black American literature and culture. In a 1953 interview, he credited Locke for having ‘‘revolted’’ against conventional ways of envisioning black experience and, in so doing, ‘‘inaugurated a new era . . . an era of reform enlightenment, and a radical change from antiquated theories’’ (Kinnamon 155). Wright and Locke, coming from two very different social worlds, had this much in common: They cleared away from the American mind age-old stereotypes and thus helped pave the way for modern AfricanAmerican literature and art. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Locke, Alain. ‘‘The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer—A Retrospective Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1938.’’ Opportunity, 17 (January 1939), 4–10. Locke, Alain. ‘‘Who and What is ‘Negro’?’’ Opportunity, 20 (February 1942), 36–41. Locke, Alain. ‘‘From Native Son to Invisible Man: A Review of the Literature of the Negro for 1952.’’ Phylon, 14 (Spring 1953), 34–44.

‘‘LONG BLACK SONG’’ Wright began this story while a member of the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago and submitted a draft of it in 1936 for discussion at the South Side Writers’ Group. He completed it after moving to New York in 1937 and included it as the third story in both the 1938 and 1940 editions of Uncle Tom’s Children. As such, it occupies a pivotal place in the collection, signaling an important thematic shift. Whereas the first two stories, ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ and ‘‘Down by the Riverside,’’ focus on African-American characters who are reduced to the level of stunned victims of southern racism and violence, ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ and ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ center on black men who attain the status 241

The Long Dream of heroic rebels who aggressively fight back against the system, using dramatic violence resulting the in deaths of some of their white attackers. In American Hunger, Wright pointed out that he wrote ‘‘Long Black Son,’’ ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ and ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ in an attempt to answer the following question: ‘‘What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die in a country that denied his humanity’’ (Wright 81)? A brief plot summary of the story vividly illustrates Wright’s conviction that southern black people inhabited a culture which systematically stripped them of their humanity and treated them as animals. The protagonist, Silas, who is perhaps named after Wright’s Uncle Silas who was murdered by whites, comes home from work one day to discover that his wife Sarah has been seduced by a white traveling salesman. When this man returns the next day with another white man for more sex, Silas shoots and kills one man while the other escapes to a nearby town. Although Sarah begs him to escape with her, Silas refuses to leave his home and waits for the white people from town to come to his farm to punish him. A lynch mob soon appears on the scene and sets fire to the house with Silas in it. Again, he refuses to run and tries to shoot as many whites as possible, wishing that ‘‘all them white folks wuz dead’’ (Wright 113). As his wife impotently observes the scene from a nearby hill, Silas goes to his fiery death defiantly. Unlike Bobo who is the passive victim of a grisly lynching in ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ and Mann who is shot to death while sinking in mud as he tries to escape a lynch mob in ‘‘Down by the Riverside,’’ Silas steadfastly holds his ground, courageously confronts his attackers, and takes a few of them with him in death. As Michel Fabre has stressed, ‘‘Silas retained his human dignity in death’’ (Fabre 159). Margaret Walker has described the story as ‘‘a violent and tragic piece’’ and has argued that it ‘‘foreshadows Wright’s negative treatment of women and, in particular, black women’’ (Walker 117). She sees Sarah as a forerunner of female characters such as Bessie in Native Son,

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Eva in The Outsider, and Jake’s wife in Lawd, Today! who are portrayed as weak victims of a dehumanizing social system. Fabre also regards Sarah as ‘‘passive and primitive’’ (Fabre 159), easy prey for city slicker who seduces her with his smooth talk, physical advances, and his authority as a white man. Wright’s portrayal of her does indeed stress her passivity and unchecked sensuality as she goes ‘‘limp’’ and her ‘‘loins ached’’ (Wright 102) while giving little resistance to a white stranger. Silas’ treatment of her greatly resembles Jake’s treatment of his wife and Bigger’s violent response to Bessie—he whips her ‘‘as she had seen him whip a horse’’ (Wright 108). ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ despite its limitations, is an important literary achievement. Like all of the stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, it speaks with a new voice and focuses on problems which previous writers were either unaware of or lacked the nerve to engage. Wright’s bold treatment of southern racism and his lucid description of black rage and resistance helped to transform American and African-American literary traditions. In the words of Lewis Gannett’s review of Wright’s extraordinary first book, the ‘‘spirit’’ of his stories is ‘‘part of a new American history (Gannett 17). Selected Bibliography: Davis, Jane. ‘‘More Force Than Human: Richard Wright’s Female Characters.’’ Obsidian 11 (Winter 1986), 68–83. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Gannett, Lewis. ‘‘Review of Uncle Tom’s Children.’’ New York Herald Tribune (March 25, 1938), 17. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Signet, 1963.

THE LONG DREAM In the last published novel of his lifetime, Wright returns to the small-town American South of his formative years, previously the setting of Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and his autobiography

The Long Dream Black Boy (1945). Part of a projected trilogy, The Long Dream was published in 1958 while the author was exiled in France. Its Paris-centered sequel, ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ remained unrevised and unpublished at the time of his death in 1960. The Long Dream followed the European novels The Outsider (1953) and Savage Holiday (1954) and was adapted for the stage by Ketti Frings in 1959. Its reception in America, like the two earlier novels, was unenthusiastic compared to the resounding success of Native Son (1940). Such commentators as Saunders Redding and Ted Poston inferred that Wright’s geographic distancing had concurrently led to a creative alienation from the American milieu. The Long Dream revisits the motifs of fear, flight, and fate that defined Bigger Thomas’ life, conflating the latter two ideas as the protagonist, Rex ‘‘Fishbelly’’ Tucker, literally takes flight at the end of the novel on an airplane to Paris. The fugitive remains a metaphor for the inability to find a sense of belonging regardless of place. Divided into three sections (‘‘Daydreams and Nightdreams,’’ ‘‘Days and Nights,’’ and ‘‘Waking Dream’’), the novel uses abundant figurative language, oneiric imagery, and painstaking detail to convey what A. Robert Lee calls ‘‘a version of Black Childhood itself, the dynastic reenactment of what it means to be black, curious, and permanently at risk from white authority’’ (125). Above all, The Long Dream is a bildungsroman that traces the masculine initiation of Fishbelly (or simply ‘‘Fish’’) in a suffocating racial environment. The novel follows his coming-ofage story for little over a decade (from ages six to eighteen) in the segregated Mississippi town of Clintonville. Central to his maturation process is the understanding of sexual mores between whites and blacks in the Deep South, especially with regard to interracial romance. Fish is taught to defer to the myth of sacred white womanhood, a lesson that his older friend, the bellhop Chris Sims, fails to respect. Chris’ subsequent torture and lynching are a testament to the caution instilled in Fish by Tyree, his mortician, hustler, and brothel-owning father. According to Earl V.

Bryant, Fish’s visceral encounter with Chris’ mutilated body is ‘‘an absolute prerequisite for his survival in the white world’’ (57). The impact of direct experience as opposed to hypothetical instruction is a repeated theme throughout the novel. Fish is haunted by the question of what it means to be a black male in Jim Crow-era America. He learns early on that race relations are not merely a Manichean allegory of good versus evil. The apparent coherence of relationships between leaders in the respective communities is but a fac¸ade for a reality of limitations and a conspiracy between parties in power. Much of the novel’s tension and submerged meaning resides in the complexity of the paternal-filial relationship. Fish realizes that the relatively comfortable bourgeois life his family enjoys is predicated upon Tyree’s direct involvement in municipal corruption, particularly in his dealings with the chief of police, Gerald Cantley. The major fire at the Grove nightclub that marks the climax of the text leads to the death of over forty people, including Gladys, Fish’s lover. The ensuing scandal threatens to implicate citizens of stature, including the town’s mayor, doctor, and, of course, Chief Cantley. Although well intentioned as a father, Tyree’s symbolic legacy is that of a black man crippled by voluntary complicity in a system assuming white supremacy and black subservience. Economic survival, material stability, and self-sufficiency are key aspects of Tyree’s character. His illicit business affairs are what lead to his eventual murder by his co-conspirators and Fish’s incarceration on false allegations of rape. As with many of Wright’s male protagonists (‘‘Big Boy’’ Morrison and Bigger Thomas among them), the axis of misunderstanding is the specter of the white woman and the perceived threat of violent black male sexuality. Fish’s repudiation of Tyree’s business and all it entails finds ultimate expression in his escape to Europe, a drastic but necessary estrangement that resonates with Wright’s own life choices. Sexual relations with women of both races fall chiefly within Fish’s educational purview. Black women (many of whom are prostitutes, like 243

Louis, Joe Gladys) come across as sexually permissible and available for conquest. Their white counterparts are expressly forbidden, although Wright is quick to problematize the meaning of ‘‘whiteness,’’ especially as a visual signifier of superiority or race purity. Gladys, for instance, is light-skinned and even mistaken for a white woman when she and Fish are together. The author broaches related topics like the chromatic skin fetish (the privileging of light over dark complexions within the black community), the power games underlying police brutality, the significant threat of castration, and the shifting dynamics of male friendship. Most critics of the time agreed that The Long Dream lacked the polished realism and political acuity that Wright’s earlier efforts had sustained. The psychological meanderings of the dream metaphor and the writer’s attempts to infuse ambivalence into white and black characters may have fueled confusion or distaste for the text’s aesthetic direction. Overall, however, the novel stands as Wright’s conscious attempt to return to the South and its attendant racial troubles, obviously not forgotten despite his relocation overseas. In the end, The Long Dream was a homecoming and the start of an imaginative journey cut short by the author’s early death. Nancy Kang Selected Bibliography: Bryant, Earl V. ‘‘Sexual Initiation in Richard Wright’s The Long Dream.’’ Southern Quarterly 21.3 (1983): 57–66. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah, eds. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1990. Lee, A. Robert. ‘‘Inside Narratives.’’ Richard Wright. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987, pp. 109–126. Redding, Saunders. ‘‘The Way It Was.’’ New York Times Book Review 26 Oct. 1958.

LOUIS, JOE (13 May 1914–12 April 1981) Joe Louis is considered by most boxing experts to be one of the greatest heavyweight fighters of the twentieth century. Moreover, he became an extraordinary cultural figure who epitomized black achievement at a time when African

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Americans were denied access to the promises and possibilities of American life. He was born Joe Louis Barrow to povertystricken parents in Chambers County, Alabama. His father was committed to a mental hospital when he was two, and his family, which included seven other children, moved to Detroit after his mother remarried in 1924. His amateur boxing career began when he was eighteen and he won 50 of his 54 amateur bouts, becoming AAU boxing champion in 1934. He moved to Chicago in that year and commenced a professional career, winning all of his first eighteen fights. He gained national attention in 1935 when he knocked out former heavyweight champion, Primo Canero, in six rounds in Yankee Stadium. Later that year, he beat highly regarded Max Baer. Louis won the heavyweight championship on June 22, 1937 by knocking out Jim Braddock in eight rounds. But perhaps the two most important fights in Louis’s career were the two bouts he fought against German heavyweight Max Schmeling. He suffered his first professional loss when Schmeling scored a first round knockout in their June 18, 1936 match in New York, but he scored an impressive victory over Schmeling in their rematch two years later, knocking out his opponent early in the first round. These two bouts were heavily promoted as contests between two competing modern cultures, democratic America versus fascist Germany. When Louis defeated Schmeling, he became a folk hero not only for black Americans but all people in the free world. Wright was keenly interested in boxing, seeing it as one of the few areas in American life where black people could compete against white people on an even playing field. He modeled the protagonist of his unpublished novel, ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn,’’ on Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, whom Wright deeply admired for defying white expectations for black people. He was an enthusiastic fan of Joe Louis whom he regarded as possessing, like Johnson, a symbolic significance for black people. He closely

Lynching followed Louis’s career and wrote several penetrating articles describing Louis’s athletic prowess and his importance as a cultural figure. Indeed, Wright’s first piece of journalism was an article entitled ‘‘Joe Louis Uncovers Dynamite’’ which appeared in the October 18, 1935 issue of New Masses. In that essay, Wright argued that Louis was a potent symbol for black people because his highly-publicized victory over Max Baer empowered blacks by showing them a dramatic example of black achievement. Moreover, Wright suggested that Louis tapped into a vein of AfricanAmerican rebellion. In Lawd Today!, which Wright was composing at the time of the Louis/ Baer match, a postal worker gives vivid evidence of this when he exults that Louis’s pounding of Baer because it made him ‘‘feel good, way down in my guts.’’ Wright reported on Louis’s championship victory over Braddock and attended the second bout with Schmeling on June 22, 1938. He wrote two pieces celebrating Louis’s sensational victory over Schmeling, a New Masses article entitled ‘‘High Tide in Harlem: Joe Louis as a Symbol of Freedom’’ and another article for The Daily Worker, ‘‘How He Did It—and Oh!—Where Were Hitler’s Pagan Gods?’’ Both articles celebrate Louis’s victory as a triumph of American democracy over German fascism and racism. Wright’s admiration for Louis as a person, athlete, and cultural icon was so great that he composed a 13 stanza blues song in his honor, ‘‘King Joe,’’ which imagines Louis as a latter-day John Henry figure whose life is a testimony to man’s ability to triumph over environment and achieve heroic status in an age of machines. The song was recorded by Count Basie’s orchestra using Paul Robeson as soloist and Jimmy Rushing as Robeson’s coach. The recording sold over 40,000 copies. Joe Louis in the 1930s and early 1940s, therefore, had achieved a kind of heroic status which Wright’s fictional characters sometimes aspire to but never achieve. A man who arose from humble status and triumphed over the institutional racism that was designed to keep black people in their

‘‘place,’’ Louis was for Wright a bright sign of racial pride as well as a powerful affirmation of the human spirit. Selected Bibliography: Bryant, Jerry. ‘‘Born in a Mighty Bad Land’’: The Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2003. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

LYNCHING Southern segregation and the racial codes underpinning it were enforced by many varieties of extralegal violence, but the ultimate form of vigilante terrorism was lynching, a ritual conducted by an angry mob which tortured, murdered, and sometimes mutilated its victims. The term ‘‘lynching’’ derives from the ‘‘lynch law’’ used by Colonel Charles Lynch of Virginia who, during the Revolutionary War, used severe corporal punishment such as tar and feathering to punish Tories. Until 1850, lynch law was associated with vigilante violence but of a non-lethal sort. But in the decade preceding the Civil War, white mobs, particularly in Texas and Louisiana, began to hang black men suspected of being Union sympathizers. Data on lynching was not kept until the early 1880s and is often inaccurate because many lynchings were not reported and took place in remote rural locations. But the figures on reported lynchings are nevertheless appalling. From 1882 to 1950, there were 4,739 recorded lynchings in the United States, most of them in the South and the great majority of them victimized black men. There were an average of 150 lynchings per year in the final 18 years of the nineteenth century, with a peak of 230 in 1892. During the first ten years of the twentieth century, an average of 84 lynchings per year were reported in the United States, and from 1920 to 1930 lynchings averaged 84 per year. During the 1930s, 114 lynchings were reported. From the late nineteenth century to the onset of World War II, there were several attempts to 245

Lynching create legislation which would punish people involved in lynchings, but all of them failed. Ida B. Wells and groups such as The Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching campaigned vigorously against lynching in the early part of the twentieth century, but their efforts produced no tangible results. The NAACP, in 1919, attempted to get the federal government to develop anti-lynching laws, but a southern filibuster in the Senate prevented a vote. Similar bills were introduced by the NAACP in the 1920s and 1930s but met the same fate. Richard Wright, therefore, grew up at a time when lynchings were a constant threat to all black people and there was no hope of legal reform which would punish such barbaric behavior. His home state of Mississippi produced 539 reported lynchings from 1882 to 1989, far more than any other state in America. Although the usual triggering event for such mob violence was an alleged rape of a white woman, more than two-thirds of reported lynchings resulted from charges of burglary, arson, insulting a white person, or even something as trivial as stealing chickens. (Emmett Till, for example, was lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 for allegedly giving a wolf whistle to a white woman and referring to her as ‘‘baby.’’) It is not surprising, therefore, that lynching plays a central role in Wright’s work. His poem ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ written early in his career in 1934, graphically describes a lynching and the traumatic effects it has on the black man observing it. His 1935 story ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ centers on a young black man who is psychologically devastated when he

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observes his friend being lynched by white people. Bigger Thomas’s killing of Mary Dalton and the mutilation of her body may be seen as a kind of reversed lynching. Certainly his strange elation and feeling of power after he performs this grisly act can be explained as a release from his pentup fear of being treated in a similar way by white people. Wright’s literary treatment of lynching and other forms of racial violence was strongly rooted in his own personal experiences. His Uncle Silas Hoskins was shot to death by a white man who resented Hoskins’s success in business. Wright also knew a young black man who worked as a bellhop in a Jackson hotel and was castrated when he reportedly had sex with a white prostitute. And Wright himself was overwhelmed with 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 wood for the fireplace. (He later revealed to psychiatrist Frederic Wertham that this disturbing episode from his youth was the germ of the scene in Native Son when Bigger panics in Mary Dalton’s bedroom.) Selected Bibliography: Dray, Phillip. At The Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America. New York: Random House, 2002. Franklin, John Hope. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1967. Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998. Smith, Lillian. Killers of The Dream. Garden City, New Jersey: Anchor Books, 1963.

M MALRAUX, ANDRE´ (3 November 1901– 23 November 1976) A twentieth-century French novelist who, like Wright, saw himself as an ‘‘e´crivain engage´e,’’ a ‘‘committed writer,’’ who envisioned literature as a means of social and political change. While not being narrowly propagandistic, his fiction probes modern cultural problems and political crises from a leftist perspective. Like many European and American writers emerging in the aftermath of World War I and experiencing the disasters of the Great Depression, Malraux saw western civilization in a state of serious decline and poised on the edge of collapse. He directly experienced many of the cultural hot spots of his time, traveling through Indochina in the late twenties when it was in a state of rebellion against French colonial rule and also living in China during the 1930s when a leftist revolution led by Mao Tse-tung was in its early phases. Moreover, he fought against Franco’s Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War and was an active member of the French Resistance during World War II. In later years, he served as Minister of Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle’s regime in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of his aversion to political dogma and any closed systems of thought which would inhibit his freedom as a writer, Malraux never

became a member of the Communist Party, although he championed Marxist causes for most of his adult life. A committed anti-fascist, he saw communism as a bulwark against dictatorships of the right, which had developed in Europe and Asia after World War I. His novels reflect his strong commitment to radically leftist values without degenerating into the rigid propaganda which flaws much of the protest literature of the period. The Conquerors (1928) focuses on the struggles between nationalists and communists in China after the Shanghai riots of 1928. Its hero, Pierre Garine, whom Malraux considered a ‘‘new man’’ devoted to ‘‘action, culture, and lucidity,’’ opposes western capitalism and imperialism and works for leftist revolutionaries. Man’s Fate (1933) takes place several years later during the civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s communists. Although Malraux ironically undercuts the political ideologies embraced by most of the characters and stresses the tragic waste and terrible violence of modern revolution, the novel finally affirms a measured faith in man’s ability to distill human value from political struggle. Man’s Hope (1937) draws upon Malraux’s experiences as a squadron commander in the International Air Force during the Spanish Civil War. Although it describes in horrific detail the 247

‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ terrors of twentieth century machine warfare and chronicles the military victory of Franco’s fascists, it is grounded in a belief in human solidarity and predicts the defeat of Fascism in the long run. Although Wright did not develop the kind of personal relationship with Malraux which he had with other French intellectuals such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir, he greatly admired Malraux as a man and a writer. He read Man’s Fate in the winter of 1938 while rooming with the Newtons in Brooklyn and was struck by Malraux’s ability to explore a complicated political vision without compromising his artistic integrity. He read Man’s Hope when he was in the process of writing Native Son. When interviewed in 1938, Wright was asked who his ‘‘favorite modern writer’’ was and he replied that Malraux and William Faulkner were writers he ‘‘liked the most’’ because they are ‘‘saying important things’’ (Kinnamon and Fabre 10). In turn, Malraux admired Wright’s work and helped to introduce his fiction to French readers. Wright and Malraux were members of the Congress for Cultural Freedom which was formed in Berlin in 1950 to defend artistic and cultural freedom during the Cold War. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michael Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Oxford: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Lewis, R. W. B. Malraux: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1964. Madsen, Axel. Malraux: A Biography. New York: Morrow, 1976. Malraux, Andre´. Anti-Memoirs. Paris: Gallimard, 1967.

‘‘THE MAN WHO KILLED A SHADOW’’ The story was written shortly after Wright arrived in Paris in May 1946. A French translation soon appeared in the October 4, 1946 issue of Les Lettres Francaises. It appears in English in the Spring 1949 issue of Zero, an English language literary magazine published in Paris. It was included in Eight Men, published by World Publishing Company in 1961.

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The germ of the story was an actual crime which Wright found out about through NAACP attorney Charles Hamilton. He gave Wright the court records of the trial of Julius Fisher, a black janitor from Washington, DC who killed a white female librarian after she called him a ‘‘black nigger’’ (Rowley 319) because she thought he had failed to clean her desk. He instinctively slapped her in the face, causing her to scream and sending him into a panic, culminating in his strangling her. Wright, who had a life-long fascination with violent crime, read the court records with great interest and later wrote to Houston that the woman’s scream had ‘‘set off ’’ Houston and that ‘‘A woman’s scream to a southern Negro is not only a scream; it is a scream of a woman calling for a ‘lynch mob’ ’’ (Rowley 319). The plot of ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ closely parallels the actual events of the Julius Fisher case. Wright’s imagination was triggered by this actual incidence of violence just as it had earlier been catalyzed by the Leopold and Loeb and Robert Nixon cases when he wrote Native Son. Saul Saunders, the protagonist of Wright’s story, resembles Fisher in several striking ways. He too is a janitor from Washington, DC who is insulted by a white female librarian who calls him ‘‘a black nigger’’ (Wright 163) for failing to clean under her desk. Like Fisher, he reflexively slaps her and then panics when she screams. (Unlike Fisher who uses one method of killing, strangling, Saul kills his victim by first bludgeoning her with a piece of firewood, then strangling her, and finally silencing her by slitting her throat with a knife.) The two stories conclude in the same way, with Fisher and Saunders sentenced to death for their crimes. As was the case in Native Son, Wright was much more interested in probing the reasons for such terrible violence rather than simply describing the grisly outer events which are detailed in the court records. Wright meticulously traces the reasons for his character’s irrational behavior back to the social environment which formed him as a child growing up in a segregated town not far

‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ from Washington, DC. In ’’a world split in two, a white world and a black one,’’ racial fears separate blacks and whites by ‘‘a million psychological miles’’ (Wright 157). People living in such a society regard each other as ‘‘shadows’’ and ‘‘strangers’’ (Wright 157) rather than human beings with common feelings and aspirations. And this is particularly true with regard to contact between black men and white women. Saul, therefore, discovers at an early age that any contact between him and white women, real or perceived, would result in terrible punishments for him. Indeed, he comes to understand that a white woman’s scream ‘‘was like hearing your death sentence’’ (Wright 159). Saul, therefore, faces the same problem encountered by Bobo in ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ when a white woman sees him and his friends swimming naked and screams in horror. It is also the same problem which Bigger Thomas experiences when he and a white girl are in her bedroom and her mother enters the room. He accidentally smothers her, not because he wants to kill her, but because he wants desperately to stop her from making any sounds, especially a scream. Each of these black men instinctively fear that such a sound from a white woman would result in their being lynched. So Saul will do anything to silence the white woman because he is driven by ‘‘shadows’’ of fear arising from the deepest levels of his subconscious mind. When he kills the white librarian, he feels no remorse or guilt since he has been conditioned by a segregated culture to perceive her as a ghostly ‘‘shadow’’ rather than a person. He is not even sexually tempted by her salacious behavior because he sees her as a nameless, abstract fore rather than a flesh and blood woman. (Ironically, by not responding to her grossly sexual overtures when she exposes her groin to him, he complicates his problem by further enraging her, causing her to insult him verbally and thus initiate a chain of irrational actions which neither of them can control.) The story not only parallels the Julius Fisher case but also some aspects of Wright’s own life. As Margaret Walker has pointed out, the story is a vivid example of her belief that all of Wright’s

work is biographical because he was throughout his career ’’writing and rewriting one story, the story of himself ’’ (Walker 331). Julius Fisher, like Wright, was deprived of his father at an early age and was raised by a series of relatives, particularly his grandmother who discouraged him from pursuing an education. Like Wright, he led a transient life, living in a ‘‘parade of dirty little towns’’ (Wright 158). As a result, he developed no strong connections either to a particular place or a group of people. Both Wright and Fisher were loners who were threatened by a suspicion that their world was ultimately an ‘‘incomprehensible nothingness’’ (Wright 158). And both were instilled at an early age with a deep fear of the white world which they perceived as a monolithic, hostile force rather than a community of individual human beings. Wright, like Fisher, was confronted by a frightening experience in which he found himself in a sexually provocative situation with a white girl. As he revealed to the distinguished psychiatrist, Dr. Frederic Wertham, he worked as a young man for a white family in Jackson, Mississippi and was terrified when he was asked to bring firewood to an upstairs bedroom and opened the door to the wrong room only to discover the young daughter of the family partially undressed. He was reduced to stark terror, dropped the wood, and fled. But his fictional counterpart is physically paralyzed when he realizes that the white librarian wants to have sex with him and uses a piece of firewood to bash her head. ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow,’’ like poems such as ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ and stories like ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ can be seen as Wright’s attempt to exorcize his own ‘‘shadows,’’ his own demons which afflicted him from childhood. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern University Press, 1969. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wertham, Frederic. ‘‘An Unconscious 249

‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ Determinant in Native Son.’’ Journal of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychotherapy (July 1944), 111–115. Wright, Richard. Eight Men. New York: Pyramid Books, 1961.

‘‘THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND’’ A novella which has an important, indeed pivotal, place in the Wright canon because it signals a movement away from the political themes found in earlier work such as Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son and initiates the second phase of Wright’s career in which he centers books like Black Boy/American Hunger, The Outsider, and Savage Holiday in an existential vision of life. Started in June 1941 when Wright was debating whether he should remain in the Communist Party and completed after he had left the party in 1942, it has an interesting and problematic publication history. Wright initially conceived of the novel as a story about African-American religious experience and tried to publish it as a separate book, but Harpers rejected it. He placed excerpts in the Spring 1942 issue of Accent and then published the second half of the manuscript in the 1944 issue of Cross Section edited by Edwin Seaver. The commonly-accepted text which has been used for many years by Wright scholars and teachers was included in Eight Men, an anthology Wright had assembled in his final year and was published shortly after his death. But as Hazel Rowley has noted, ‘‘The complete novel has never been published’’ (Rowley 263) even though this short novel is regarded as one of Wright’s most skillfully written and significant fictions. Part of the inspiration for the entire novel came from Wright’s contemplation of the importance of religion in his grandmother’s life. But he was also inspired to write this novelette about police brutality when his friend Herbert Newton was savagely beaten by New York policemen who objected to his activities as a communist organizer. Wright’s imagination was also piqued by a story published in a 1941 issue of True Detective

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which described the activities of a white man living under the streets of New York who would surface each night to assume the life of a burglar. Wright was also strongly influenced by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. He regarded the Russian novelist as a major influence on his own writing, and once observed in an interview that Dostoevsky was his ‘‘model’’ (Kinnamon 214). He also revealed to Margaret Walker that he considered Dostoevsky ‘‘the greatest writer who ever lived’’ (Walker 75). Like Dostoevsky’s nameless antihero, the protagonist of Wright’s short novel, Fred Daniels, is reduced to marginal status by a repressive society which regards him as barely human. Both characters withdraw into underground worlds which are metaphors of the inner self where they discover surprising human resources within themselves but are finally unable to translate their new awareness into significant action in the aboveground world. The story begins when Fred is accused of a murder he did not commit and, after being beaten severely by the police, escapes into the sewers beneath the streets of New York. Once underground, he develops a lucid vision of how the aboveground society works and this knowledge endows him with a sense of existential freedom leading to the development of a new sense of self. He becomes a conscious rebel, stealing valuable items from people, all the while being protected by the invisibility which his underground status makes possible. But his newfound power and autonomy is lost when he is overcome with the guilt which is a residual effect of his earlier conventional self, and he returns to the police station to confess his crimes. Even though the police now realize that he is innocent of the murder they had earlier accused him of committing, they murder him when he brings them back to his underground abode. Sensing that he has a new kind of knowledge of how the social system works, they believe that ‘‘You’ve got to shoot his kind. They’d wreck things’’ (Wright 74).

Mannoni, Octave Missing from Wright’s novella is the hope created by the Marxist values and possibility of revolution which can be found in earlier works such as Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. There is no character like Boris Max who can raise Fred Daniels’ consciousness with Marxist ideology and point to the possibility of the ‘‘bright and morning star’’ of revolution which might provide hope for the future. The existential vision at the heart of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ is metaphysical, not political, in nature and becomes the thematic basis of the work Wright would produce for the rest of his career. Wright’s interest in marginalized underground protagonists also inspired subsequent African-American writers to write closely related texts such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Watkins, Patricia. ‘‘The Paradoxical Structure of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ Black American Literature Forum (Winter, 1989), 767–783.

MANNONI, OCTAVE (1899–1989) A French psychiatrist and former colonial administrator in Madagascar, he published in 1950 Psychologie de Colonisation, a study of the psychological damage created by European colonization of Africa and Asia. Mannoni argued that European men went to Africa and Asia not only to become wealthy and powerful but also to find a cultural space which would exercise their repressed instincts which were forbidden in western societies. In so doing, European colonizers not only did immeasurable harm to the people whom they dominated but also crippled themselves emotionally. When the book was translated into English in 1955 under the title Prospero and Caliban: The

Psychology of Colonization, Wright reviewed it for The Nation in their October 20, 1956 issue. His review was titled ‘‘Neurosis of Conquest’’ and argued that European colonialism had resulted in a ‘‘procession of shattered cultures, disintegrated societies’’ (Wright 320) in Africa and Asia. He praised Mannoni’s book as a penetrating study of how colonialization had produced ‘‘personality distortions of millions of black, brown, yellow and white people’’ (Wright 321). Wright agreed that European control of African and Asian societies had disempowered non-white people, stripping them of their identities and forcing them to see themselves in terms of western values which diminished their importance as human beings. He also agreed with Mannoni’s conviction that Europeans, in dehumanizing others, had also dehumanized themselves, receiving a ‘‘psychic wound’’ (Wright 321) from their exploitation of colonized people. Mannoni’s ideas coincided with Wright’s thinking in books such as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and Black Boy. In those books, the impotence of oppressed people damages them at the core of their being, but the power assigned by white racists also inflicts profound moral and psychological damage on them as well. The Daltons in Native Son, for example, are morally and spiritually blinded by the power they use to exploit black people for their own economic gain, and they pay a steep price for this. The system of segregation described in Uncle Tom’s Children and Black Boy makes the American South a kind of colony which morally damages both the oppressed and the oppressor. Wright, who saw himself as psychically wounded by the kind of racism described in Mannoni’s book, concludes his review by emphasizing ‘‘Imperialism is turning out to be a much more morally foul bit of business than either Marx or Lenin had imagined’’ (Wright 331). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Neurosis of Conquest.’’ The Nation 18 (October 20, 1956), 330–31.

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March on Washington, 1940

MARCH ON WASHINGTON, 1940 After a Selective Service Act was passed in the United States in the summer of 1940, the possibility increased dramatically that America would eventually enter the war in Europe against Germany. Many African-American leaders were greatly troubled by this, realizing that U.S. armed forces were rigidly segregated and war industries discriminated against blacks, offering them mostly low-paying, menial jobs. Governmentsponsored job training programs refused to accept Negroes and over a quarter of a million new defense jobs were closed to African Americans. There were only four black units in the U.S. armed forces, with only one of them trained for combat. A. Phillip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the most powerful black leaders in America, decided to protest such widespread racial discrimination by organizing a massive March on Washington in late 1940, demanding an end to Jim Crow policies in the U.S. military and war industries. President Roosevelt, fearing that such a march would alienate southern Democrats and also worried that it might trigger serious violence, tried to dissuade Randolph from holding the march in a series of White House meetings. But, when Randolph stood firm on his demands, Roosevelt defused the situation by issuing Executive Order 8802 forbidding racial discrimination in war industries. Randolph, satisfied that Roosevelt was serious about racial reform in America, postponed the march indefinitely. Wright knew Randolph from his days as a political activist in Chicago and considered him ‘‘a truly exceptional man’’ (Rowley 253) and an important leader. He strongly supported Randolph’s March on Washington but wanted its agenda to be made more militant by opposing America’s entry into the war. (As a communist, Wright saw the war as an imperialist struggle between two capitalist powers and believed American blacks had little to gain from it.) When Wright attended the 1940 NAACP Convention 252

in Houston in January 1941 to receive the Spingarn Medal, he delivered a speech entitled ‘‘Not My People’s War,’’ which articulated his reasons for opposing American entry into World War II. At that same convention, Randolph announced that the March on Washington would be postponed, greatly disappointing Wright. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Not My People’s War.’’ New Masses. no. 39 (June 17, 1941), 8–8, 12.

MARXISM The economic and political theory which is the foundation of communism, it envisions the destruction of capitalism by a people’s revolution which will ultimately result in the creation of a classless society free of social injustice and economic exploitation. As a young man living in Chicago during the depths of the Great Depression, Wright was strongly attracted to Marxism and joined the Communist Party in 1954. He saw Marxism and communism as providing systematic solutions to the racial, social, and political problems afflicting the modern world. As he revealed in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ his radical leftist involvements in the 1930s provided him with ‘‘the first total emotional commitment of my life’’ (Wright 117), a new faith to replace the old beliefs shattered by his traumatic experiences in both the Jim Crow South and the urban North. Marxism helped Wright to develop both as a man and a writer since it gave him a coherent philosophical vision that intellectually stabilized him in a world that seemed to be falling apart. It also provided him with an imaginatively potent view of human solidarity, ‘‘a common vision that bound us all together’’ (Wright 141) which he needed for his psychological well being, putting an end to the alienation he had felt since early childhood. Moreover, Marxism supplied him with a carefully laid out program of political

McCarthyism action that promised to transform society with a revolution of the proletariat. From the beginning, however, Wright harbored some personal doubts about Marxism and communism. As a strong individualist who guarded his right as an artist to examine life freely, he felt uncomfortable, to some degree, with an ideology which would limit his vision. As an American black man, he sometimes felt that the all-too-homogeneous ‘‘classless society’’ envisioned by Marxism failed to account for the racial differences he perceived on a daily basis. Even when he was a committed member of the Communist Party in the 1930s, therefore, he was never a doctrinaire Marxist. In his 1937 essay ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’’ he stresses that ‘‘for the Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point’’ in his examination of reality, providing the ‘‘bare skeleton’’ of experience and not its ‘‘flesh’’ (Wright 60). Realizing that ‘‘No theory can take the place of life’’ (Wright 61), the black American writer must rely on his own lived experiences which can sometimes be at odds with the abstractions of political theory. As Daniel Aaron has pointed out, by the time Wright was composing Native Son, he was ‘‘living a kind of double intellectual life’’ (Aaron 44). One part of him was truly a ‘‘Black Marxist’’ (Aaron 44) who believed that communism was a powerful weapon in the struggle for social justice and he had written many poems, stories, and essays consistent with Marxist theory. But there was also a ‘‘private side’’ (Aaron 44) of Wright which had difficulty reconciling the abstractions of Marxism with the concrete realities he knew as an African-American man. This split can be seen vividly in the ending of Native Son where Marx’s ideological commitments blind him to Bigger as a person, and the two men are presented as inhabiting two different planes of existence rather than being united, as Marxist theory would have them, as brothers in the struggle for justice and equality. By 1942, the tension between Wright’s personal and ideological visions had become so great that he left the Communist Party. But for many

years he continued to believe in several aspects of Marxist thought. In Michel Fabre’s words, he became ‘‘a non-Communist revolutionary’’ (Fabre xix), a politically engaged writer who was deeply opposed to capitalism’s exploitation of working-class and poor people. During his long exile in Paris, for example, he became strongly involved with Pan-Africanism, a movement led by Marxists such as George Padmore and communists like Aime´ Ce´saire. In the final seven years of his life, he developed a strong friendship with Frantz Fanon, a black Marxist who was actively involved in the Algerian struggle for independence from France and who wrote The Wretched of the Earth which became part of the foundation for Marxist liberation movements throughout the world. And when Wright published White Man, Listen! in 1957, he considered it written from ‘‘a Marxist perspective’’ while being ‘‘anti-Communist’’ (Fabre 403). Wright’s library contained several of Karl Marx’s books, including Capital, Selected Works, The Communist Manifesto, and The Civil War in the United States. He began reading Marx’s works while a member of the John Reed Club in the 1930s. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. ‘‘Richard Wright and the Communist Party.’’ in Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives. David Ray and Robert Farnsworth (eds.). Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing.’’ New Challenge 11 (Fall 1937). Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1965.

MCCARTHYISM Specifically, the term refers to the anti-communist hysteria that swept through the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, culminating in the senate hearings held by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). These hearings focused on intellectuals, artists, and government officials who had affiliations with radically leftist 253

McCullers, Carson organizations in the 1930s and who were suspected of being agents of and sympathizers with the Communist Party during the Cold War. On a more general level, McCarthyism refers to the hysterical investigation of the government’s alleged opponents, making highly publicized accusations against these people without having adequate supporting evidence. One of the reasons that Wright left the United States to take up permanent residence in France in 1947 was his understanding that a strong conservative reaction against leftist thinkers and activists would sweep the United States in the Cold War period. He saw this as a distinct threat to his artistic freedom as well as a threat to his life as a black man in a society dominated by ideologically driven white government officials. His fears were well supported by subsequent history as many prominent black artists and activists, including Paul Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Langston Hughes, had their reputations sullied and their careers damaged by the McCarthyism of the 1950s. While living in Paris in 1953, Wright was visited by one of McCarthy’s top investigators, David Schine, a State Department official who questioned him about people he knew when he was a member of the John Reed Club. Wright then resolved never to testify before HUAC, telling Chester Himes, ‘‘I’ll never testify. I’ve written everything I have to say about my communist affiliations’’ (Himes 198–99). He saw HUAC’s hearings as ‘‘suppression of the individual’’ and likened its hearings to the ‘‘Moscow show trials’’ of the 1930s (Rowley 373). Although his exile in France protected him from McCarthy’s hearings in the United States, Wright was the subject of careful surveillance by the FBI during World War II and throughout his years abroad. He was placed on the bureau’s ‘‘Security List’’ in 1944 and a detailed file was kept on him until his death in 1960. The Central Intelligence Agency also had a keen interest in Wright and kept him under surveillance throughout the 1950s.

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Wright is often criticized for leaving the United States and abandoning his roots, thus weakening the quality of his fiction. But, in view of the harsh treatment he would have received during the McCarthy period, if he had returned to the United States, it is easy to see why Wright remained in exile. Wright was well aware of how Paul Robeson’s career was damaged by McCarthyism and felt strongly that his writing would suffer if he submitted himself and his family to the witch hunt conducted by McCarthy and other reactionary forces dominating so much of American political life from the end of World War II to the late 1950s. Selected Bibliography: Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980. Himes, Chester. The Quality of Hurt. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

MCCULLERS, CARSON (19 February 1917–29 September 1967) Born Lula Carson Smith in Georgia, from an early age she was plagued by devastating health issues which impacted heavily upon both her life and writings. Embodying the so-called ‘‘Southern Gothic’’ stream, her genuinely great and enduring works—the novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and the short stories—focus on alienation through grotesque or eccentric figures somewhat like those in Flannery O’Connor and, to a less extreme degree, in Katherine Anne Porter and Eudora Welty. Yet ultimately McCullers provides an affirmative perspective on the twisted and crippled characters who populate her work, attesting her awareness of an intense private world that transcends the decadent South in which her fiction is set and outstrips the encroachments of a dark and cruel universe. Before they had met, Richard Wright gave McCullers the highest praise in a 1940 review, presenting her strengths as ‘‘unique and individual . . . , more natural and authentic than . . .

Meadman, Dhimah Rose Faulkner.’’ Later, she no less warmly inscribed to him a copy of Reflections in a Golden Eye in 1941. That year these two residents of February House in Brooklyn Heights explored common backgrounds and shared interests: both had escaped the South as youths and both wrote about adolescent flight from race or gender constraints. But by 1943, Wright expressed alarm at his housemate’s penchant for self-destruction and was already distancing himself from her, from Steven Middagh Street, and ultimately from the United States. Their paths crossed again later in Paris, where Wright saw her at home and visited her at the American Hospital in Neuilly after her second stroke. But he and others from her past were cautious in extending a friendship with the young woman whom Louis Untermeyer had dubbed ‘‘the flower of evil.’’ In her unfinished autobiography, McCullers evokes her relationship with Wright in more very positive terms. Roy Rosenstein Selected Bibliography: Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers. New York: Carroll and Graf, 1975. Dews, Carlos L. Illumination and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1999. Savigneau, Josyane. Carson McCullers: A Life. Trans. Joan E. Howard. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Tippins, Sherill. February House. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Inner Landscape.’’ New Republic 103 (August 5, 1940), 195.

MCGEE, WILLIE (1915–1951) Willie McGee was a thirty-six-year-old black man from Laurel, Mississippi, who had a four-year affair with a white woman, Mrs. Troy Hawkins. When they were surprised in bed by her traveling salesman husband, she accused McGee of rape. He was arrested, tortured, and forced to sign a confession which he later repudiated. He was brought to trial and was sentenced to death by an all-white jury after several minutes of deliberation. The verdict was appealed and human rights organizations around the world protested his treatment and the court’s decision. President

Truman granted a stay of execution, but, due to the concerted efforts of the governor of Mississippi, he was executed in the electric chair on May 8, 1951. Wright followed the case closely since it evoked the most painful memories of his growing up in Mississippi. He protested the racism and injustice of the case in an article ‘‘Behind the McGee Case’’ which was published in the human rights newspaper, Le Droit de Vivre, and he also enlisted the support of the Franco-American Fellowship in trying to prevent the execution of McGee. The fellowship, in conjunction with the International League Against Racism, collected money for McGee’s wife and four children. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

MEADMAN, DHIMAH ROSE A white, Russian-Jewish ballet dancer and modern dance teacher whom Wright married on August 12, 1939. She was a member of the Communist Party and met Wright in New York in 1938 when the two were involved in party activities. She was fond of keeping her background mysterious, sometimes identifying herself as a Russian Jew and at other times claiming she was of Egyptian descent. She likewise kept her birth date ambiguous, locating it as early as 1900 and at other points placing it as late as 1907. Wright was attracted to her for several reasons. A divorced woman who had acquired some fame as a dancer and who studied ballet in Russia, she led a bohemian life which Wright admired. Lawrence Jackson has described her as a ‘‘glamorous, independent, high-profile woman’’ (Jackson 235), and Hazel Rowley has observed that ‘‘she represented the things to which he had aspired: travel, worldliness, and sophistication’’ (Rowley 176). Moreover, as a member of the Communist Party, she would be viewed by Wright as someone who shared his social vision 255

Memphis, Tennessee and supported his beliefs as a politically-engaged writer. They were married in the sacristy of the Episcopal Church on Convent Avenue in Harlem with Ralph Ellison as the best man and his first wife Rose as a witness. After the wedding they lived with Dhimah’s mother and baby son from a former relationship in a large and fashionable apartment on Hamilton Terrace in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem. Later that year, they moved to Crompond, New York, near Peekskill, where they were part of the Mohegan Colony, a group of political rebels and bohemian artists that included Zionists, anarchists, communists, and ex-communists. After Native Son was published on March 1, 1940, the Wrights used some of the substantial royalties which the book generated to take a belated but prolonged honeymoon in Mexico. Accompanied by Dhimah’s mother, son, and pianist, they sailed in early April, making a brief stop in Havana and arriving in Vera Cruz. They eventually settled in Miraval, a colony of Americans in Cuernevaca where they rented a luxurious ten-room villa, complete with a large swimming pool and several servants. Wright was initially happy with their life in Mexico, enjoying the opportunity to get away from his hectic existence in New York so that he could have ample time to work on his second novel, ‘‘Little Sister.’’ While in Cuernevaca he also met Herbert Kline, an old friend from Chicago, who was collaborating with John Steinbeck on a film documentary, The Forgotten Village. Wright’s keen interest in film was intensified and he began imagining converting Native Son into a motion picture. Wright was also stimulated by what he perceived was an absence of racial discrimination in Mexico, although he later became troubled by the extreme poverty and violence he observed when he ventured very far from Miraval. But the most serious problem Wright experienced in Mexico was the sudden dissolution of his marriage in less than a year. He grew to resent his wife’s luxurious lifestyle and her harsh

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treatment of servants, both of which clearly contradicted her leftist sympathies and ideological commitments. According to Constance Webb, he developed a ‘‘growing distaste’’ for her expensive habits and came to see her as ‘‘indolent, slothful, and bourgeois’’ (Webb 188). Then too, he must have certainly been uncomfortable with her mother and pianist sharing their honeymoon villa. After eleven weeks in Mexico, Wright and Dhimah went their separate ways, with her returning to New York and him traveling through the American South where he had a brief reunion with his father in Natchez, Mississippi, and where he eventually went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina to begin work with Paul Green on making a stage version of Native Son. When Wright returned to New York in late June, ten days after his wife had arrived there, he stayed with Jane Newton in Brooklyn while Dhimah and her son went back to Hamilton Terrace. By autumn 1940, Wright had all of his belongings removed from the Hamilton Terrace apartment and divorce proceedings began in the late summer of 1940. Wright married Ellen Poplar on March 12, 1941. For the remainder of his life, he refused to publicly discuss his brief marriage to Dhimah Meadman and said very little about their relationship even to close friends and his wife. Dhimah, likewise, maintained a long silence about her marriage to Wright and refused to grant interviews to Wright’s biographers. See also, Wright, Ellen. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: Emergence of Genius. New York: John Wiley, 2002. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE Wright spent two extremely important parts of his life in Memphis. When he was five years old his family moved from Natchez, Mississippi to

Memphis, Tennessee Memphis and spent two years there. He returned to Memphis when he was seventeen and lived there for another two-year period before departing for Chicago in December, 1927. His first stay in Memphis constituted one of the most painful times in Wright’s childhood, while his second period in that city was a pivotal moment in his life because it enabled him to take the first steps in freeing himself from the worst features of southern racism and injustice. As Margaret Walker has observed, ‘‘Memphis served for Wright as a kind of way station, or halfway house, between the rural South and the urban North’’ (Walker 40). As such, it provided Wright with an intermediate step in freeing himself as a man and a writer from what he described in Black Boy as the hell of the Deep South. In 1914, Wright’s family moved from a predominantly rural life in country towns like Jackson and Natchez to the ‘‘strange city’’ (Wright 11) of Memphis where his father took a job as porter in a drugstore and his mother worked as a cook. The chronic family problems which Wright would experience for the remainder of his childhood began when his father deserted the family to take up with another woman and his mother began to develop the serious health problems which would plague her for the rest of her life. His father became a ‘‘stranger’’ (Wright 11) to him, and his mother, beset with serious financial difficulties and illness, could do little to nurture or control Wright. As a result, he became a street urchin wandering through the tough parts of Memphis, begging for food and sometimes entering the ‘‘smoky and noisy depths’’ (Wright 23) of saloons. By the time he was six, he had become a ‘‘drunkard’’ (Wright 23) hustling for drinks. When his mother’s physical condition worsened, he and his brother Leon were placed in a Methodist orphanage. In the summer of 1916, he was sent to his grandmother’s house in Jackson, and in the fall, his mother had recovered to the extent that she could take him and his brother Leon to Elaine, Arkansas where her sister Maggie lived with her husband Silas Hoskins.

Wright’s Dickensian life in Memphis as a small child left deep emotional scars which would last a lifetime. From a very early age, he lived in great fear that he would be left alone in a dark underworld populated by strangers. As Hazel Rowley has observed, his traumatic experiences as a child in Memphis taught him that ‘‘men could not be trusted and women by themselves were weak and afraid’’ (Rowley 7). In White Man, Listen! (1957) Wright described himself as one of ‘‘the lonely outsiders’’ who lived on the ‘‘margins’’ of life and who ‘‘seek desperately for a home for their hearts’’ (Wright v). This deep alienation and anxiety began in Memphis. Wright returned to Memphis in late fall 1925 in an attempt to liberate himself from the painful life he had known in Mississippi and to eventually move to the North where he hoped to establish a new life. Although Memphis at the time was a rigidly segregated city with a long history of racial violence and was famous for being ‘‘the murder capital of the world’’ (Kinnamon 9), it offered Wright release from the puritanical restrictions of his grandmother’s home in Jackson and also provided him with better opportunities for self-education. 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 co-worker who was not threatened by a young black man’s desire to educate himself, Wright withdrew from the Memphis Public Library two books 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 irrational prejudice and an equally irrational fear of modern freedom and individualism. Moreover, Wright found in A Book of Prefaces a reading list of modern

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Mencken, H. (Henry) L. (Louis) 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’’ (Wright 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’’ (Wright 284) he had experienced in the South. Such books could provide Wright with ‘‘a sense of freedom’’ which he needed to liberate himself from ’’southern darkness’’ (Wright 282). 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’’ (Wright 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 ’’ (Wright 294–95), helping him to understand and artistically shape his own experiences in vital, coherent ways. The Wright who left for Chicago in December 1927, therefore, was quite different from the young man who entered Memphis two years earlier. He now had a better idea of who he was and what he wanted to be. Armed with new knowledge and empowered by a deepened, expanded consciousness, he was no longer a ‘‘genial slave’’ (Wright 298) but a person en route to a ‘‘new life’’ (Wright 296) as a rebel and a writer. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. 258

MENCKEN, H. (HENRY) L. (LOUIS) (12 September 1880–29 January 1956) One of the most influential critics of American literature of the 1920s and 1930s, Mencken played an important role in Wright’s development as an artist and social critic. At the end of Black Boy, Wright describes an important moment in his life when he becomes intrigued by Mencken when he sees him denounced in a Memphis newspaper. Fascinated by anyone who has thus drawn the ire of a southern white man but lacking the money to buy any of Mencken’s books and also lacking a library card necessary to borrow such books, he convinces a white co-worker to lend him his library card and then forges a note in this man’s name authorizing a ‘‘nigger boy’’ to withdraw two of Mencken’s books, a Book of Prefaces and Prejudices. Reading these books proved to be a pivotal experience for Wright because each book became a doorway which led him to ‘‘new ways of looking and seeing’’ (Wright 272). Not only was Wright shocked by the lucidity and honesty of Mencken’s prose, but he sensed a kindred spirit in Mencken who mocked all of the things which the nineteen-year-old Wright was rebelling against: southern backwardness and prejudice, American hypocrisy, and Victorian pietism. Not only did Mencken clearly identify the social ills which troubled and infuriated Wright, he also used words as ‘‘weapons’’ (Wright 272) which could be used to fight against an oppressive social environment. Moreover, these two books provided Wright with a list of modern authors which constituted a kind of program of self education for the young Wright. Wright soon began reading poets, novelists, and philosophers which he discovered through Mencken, including Joseph Conrad, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Emile Zola, Henri Bergson, T. S. Eliot, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Theodore Dreiser. These were writers who would continue to have importance for Wright throughout his career, supplying him with ideas, techniques, and

Minus, Marian visions which would inspire his greatest work. Such reading provided him with ‘‘a new hunger’’ (Wright 274) to leave the Jim Crow South and to go to New York and Chicago where he, like Mencken, could be a writer who could not only lucidly diagnose the problems of modern society but also use his art as a potent means of transforming the world. Selected Bibliography: Rodgers, Marion Elizabeth. Mencken: The American Iconoclast. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1968. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper/Collins, 1991.

MICHAEL REESE HOSPITAL A large Jewish hospital on the South Side of Chicago in which Wright worked as an orderly from 1933 to 1934, it provided him with a vivid picture of human suffering and exploitation. He got the job through Mary Wirth, the caseworker for the Wright family and the wife of world-famous sociologist Louis Wirth. His job consisted of a series of unpleasant menial tasks, including scrubbing and disinfecting floors, cleaning the cages of laboratory animals, and feeding guinea pigs. But his most repugnant job was to hold dogs used in laboratory experiments while doctors severed their vocal cords. The dogs’ mute suffering, like his mother’s paralytic condition, became for Wright a metaphor of what he called in Black Boy ‘‘paralysis of will and impulse’’ (Wright 190). In a broader sense, Wright came to see his experiences at the Michael Reese Hospital as a metaphor of how black people were marginalized and consigned to an underworld condemning them to economic exploitation and discrimination. Black workers at the hospital were given the lowest paid, most demeaning jobs, and they were not allowed to mix with white workers and patients. Indeed, they were all but invisible in their basement rooms and were not treated much better than the lab animals whose cages they

cleaned. The underground, which is such a prominent setting in Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and The Outsider, therefore, derived not only from Wright’s reading books like Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground but also his own lived experiences. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

MINUS, MARIAN Wright met Marian Minus in 1936 when the two were members of the South Side Writers Group, a loose organization of black novelists, playwrights, and poets who were committed to portraying the lives of the black masses from a leftist perspective. Minus, a graduate of Fisk University who was pursuing an advanced degree in anthropology at the University of Chicago, became one of Wright’s close friends and the two developed a romantic relationship before she left for New York in the spring of 1937. The relationship fizzled when Wright joined her in New York later that year and discovered that Minus, who always ‘‘dressed mannishly’’ (Walker 9), was a lesbian. While in New York, the two collaborated with Dorothy West in the development of New Challenge, a leftist journal which was a revival of an earlier publication, Challenge. Unlike its predecessor whose editorial policies were in keeping with the celebratory spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, New Challenge was a project arising from the problems of the depression and had a strong political emphasis. It featured the work of young Marxist writers and other writers who, while not communists, had pronounced socialist tendencies. The first issue included Wright’s ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’’ a bold new statement about the responsibilities of the African-American writer to use literature as a political lever by focusing sharply on the problems faced by ordinary black people. The issue also published poems by Owen 259

‘‘Miracle of Nationalism on the African Gold Coast, The’’ Dodson, Sterling Brown, and Frank Marshall Davis. Marian Minus’s contribution to this issue was a review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. New Challenge projected a second issue which included a story by Ralph Ellison, but the journal folded for a number of reasons. First of all, Wright, Minus, and West quarreled over editorial control as the two women became uncomfortable with Wright’s aggressively communist stance. (Wright was also angered when he read the masthead of the first issue only to discover that he had been demoted to associate editor while Minus and West claimed for themselves the position of co-editors.) And although New Challenge was reviewed favorably in the leftist press, particularly the Daily Worker and the New Republic, its sales were meager. Finally, the Communist Party, which Wright had hoped would add the journal to its officially sanctioned publications, refused to offer its support, largely because of the rift between Wright, Minus, and West. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘MIRACLE OF NATIONALISM ON THE AFRICAN GOLD COAST, THE’’ This essay derives in part from Wright’s visit to the Gold Coast as a guest of Kwame Nkrumah from June–August 1953. It was delivered as a lecture in Europe and was later included as one of the four essays comprising White Man, Listen!, published by Doubleday in October 1957. Wright stresses from the beginning of this essay that the transformation of the Gold Coast from a British colony to the independent nation of Ghana was a critically important development in twentieth-century history since it created the possibility of Third World liberation in a relatively nonviolent way. In this sense, it is the story not only of liberated people of color but also a story which ‘‘involves you, you white men of Europe’’

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(Wright 107) because it provides western whites with an alternative to racial war which could threaten the foundations of western life. In the first section of the essay, Wright traces the history of the freedom movement in the Gold Coast to a clandestine meeting in 1948 of six black militants known as ‘‘The Secret Circle’’ to the achievement of status as the independent nation of Ghana in 1957. Through a series of well orchestrated boycotts, demonstrations, and strikes, this organization led by Nkrumah was able to overturn British rule, thus ending over a century of colonial domination which stripped the nation of its natural resources and reduced ninety percent of the population to poverty. Colonialism had created a social ‘‘void’’ (Wright 116) for black Africans by destroying its traditions and social institutions. The native people were thus ‘‘quarantined’’ (Wright 117) in their own land, stripped of power and reduced to the level of marginalized outsiders. Wright saw the leaders of this revolution in much the same way as he saw himself, as part of what he termed in the inscription to White Man, Listen! A ‘‘tragic elite’’ (Wright v) who were caught between a black world and the white world of the West but who fully belonged to neither world. Speaking of Nkrumah and his followers, he claims that they lived in two worlds ‘‘compounded half of Europe, half of Africa’’ while simultaneously ‘‘standing outside of both worlds’’ (Wright 121). These British and American educated Africans ‘‘thought’’ in western terms, applying Marxist ideas to the problems of their homeland but ‘‘felt’’ (Wright 121) in African terms, identifying with their people and bitterly resenting how the West had damaged their cultures. For Wright, their true allegiance was to a third perspective shaped by the new world they were attempting to create but could only dimly imagine. For Wright, the true ‘‘miracle’’ of the Gold Coast in 1957 was its beginning to emerge as a modern nation, throwing off the yoke of colonial rule and also casting aside its tribal past. Wright

Mississippi River Flood of 1927 felt that it was all right for Ghana’s leaders to dress in traditional African clothing, but they had to reject the superstitions, tribal customs, and religious factionalism which would condemn the nation to feudal conditions. He therefore applauded Nkrumah’s desire to use ‘‘the techniques of the twentieth century’’ (Wright 111), employing science and technology to build a modern industrialized nation. Wright concluded the essay by urging the people of Ghana to reject their ’’ancestor-worshipping tendencies’’ and ‘‘religious weakness’’ (Wright 133) as they addressed the pressing problems of disease, ignorance, and poverty. He believed that this would be possible only if Ghana could develop an industrial economy and could be governed by a political system centered in western rationalism, personal freedom, and individualism. Wright ultimately directed whites to become missionaries ‘‘right in the heart of the Western world’’ by explaining to their own people ‘‘what they have done to Africa’’ (Wright 135). And he stressed that the Western civilization has much to gain if nations like Ghana succeed and also much to lose if developing nations in Africa and Asia fail. The ‘‘miraculous’’ and largely nonviolent revolution in Ghana is perceived by Wright as a far better alternative than the nationalism and militarism which might otherwise develop throughout the Third World. Selected Bibliography: Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday and Company, 1964.

MISSISSIPPI RIVER FLOOD OF 1927 Called ‘‘The Great Flood,’’ it occurred in May 1927 and is considered one of the worst natural disasters in southern history. It flooded 26,000 square miles of land, killed 214 people, drove 637,000 people from their homes, and destroyed $236 million in property. It covered a vast area, flooding western

Tennessee, southwest Illinois, and large parts of Mississippi and Louisiana. It was commemorated in several blues songs such as Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘‘Risin’ High Water Blues,’’ Sippi Wallace’s ‘‘The Flood Blues,’’ and Joe Pullum’s ‘‘Heavy Water Blues.’’ It also inspired literary treatments in William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee and William Faulkner’s ‘‘Old Man.’’ Wright left Memphis, Tennessee for Chicago in December 1927, several months after the Great Flood had overwhelmed parts of Memphis, and he had vivid first-hand knowledge of its devastating power. As a child growing up in Memphis; West Helena, Arkansas; and Greenwood, Mississippi, he observed the regular spring floods and was fascinated by their suddenness, violence, and destruction. As Margaret Walker has noted, these natural calamities left a lasting impression on his imagination and were ‘‘as intriguing to him as lynchings’’ (Walker 17). They provided strong evidence to him of the extraordinary violence which could be unleashed in the natural world and served as an objective correlative of the equally terrible outbursts of violence which he saw in his social environment. He wrote two stories which are set in the Great Flood of 1927, ‘‘Down by the Riverside,’’ which appeared in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and ‘‘Silt’’ which was originally placed in the August 24, 1937 issue of New Masses and later was included as ‘‘The Man Who Saw the Flood’’ in Eight Men (1961). Both stories use the flood as a symbol of a naturalistic environment which overwhelms the central characters with sudden violence arising from racial fear, hatred, and injustice. ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ focuses on Brother Mann, a black man who steals a boat during the 1927 Mississippi flood to take his pregnant wife to the hospital so that she can deliver their baby. On the way, he encounters the boat’s owner and shoots him to death in self-defense. Mann reaches the hospital only to find that his wife has died. He is then compelled by white men to help out in rescuing flood victims and actually saves the lives of

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Moscow Show Trials the family of the man he has earlier killed. The story concludes on a note of bitter irony when the people he has saved turn him in to the police and he is killed by the police in a futile attempt to escape. Brother Mann’s death, like the flood, is the result of a chain of events which run out of human control, inevitably destroying lives. ‘‘The Man Who Saw the Flood’’ begins shortly after the 1927 flood has receded, but, ironically, the black family of sharecroppers only face a new set of problems when they return home. The flood, which crested at eight feet on their land, has wrecked their house, destroyed their crops, and killed their livestock. Everything is covered with a yellow silt which forms in ‘‘spider web fashion’’ (Wright 89). The silt becomes a metaphor of the social environment which traps blacks in a ‘‘web’’ of racism, injustice, and violence. While the black family is devastated by what the flood has done and want to abandon their wrecked land, they realize that they are trapped by the $800.00 debt which they owe the white owner, Mr. Burgess, and will be jailed if they are caught escaping. The story concludes with Burgess paying them a visit, reminding them of their debt, and further binding them to his land by loaning them more money. The system of sharecropping, ironically, proves even more devastating to blacks than the flood as it never recedes and continues to overwhelm its victims, drowning them in debt and medieval peonage. Selected Bibliography: Wilson, Reagan and William Ferris (eds.). Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Harper, 1938. Wright, Richard. Eight Men. New York: Pyramid Books, 1961.

MOSCOW SHOW TRIALS A series of spectacular public trials which drew world-wide attention and took place from 1936 to 1938. Their purpose was to identify and punish persons in the Soviet Union who were judged disloyal to Josef Stalin and who therefore were

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deemed enemies of the state. These trials were part of Stalin’s ‘‘Great Purge’’ to eliminate his political enemies. This purge started in 1936 when Sergei Kirov, a high-ranking Communist Party official was assassinated, thereby triggering Stalin’s paranoia about threats to his rule and precipitating three highly publicized trials to root out and destroy anyone whom he felt was an actual or potential dissident. It is estimated that over a million people were arrested during the ‘‘Great Purge,’’ half of whom were executed. These trials were focused mainly on old Bolsheviks whom Stalin mistrusted or felt threatened by, seeing them as people who might diminish his power. It is important to note that many Russians during this period were executed without the benefit of any trial. In 1937 and 1938, military tribunals condemned seventy percent of all Soviet officers above the rank of colonel, thereby diluting Soviet military expertise on the eve of WWII. Thousands of ordinary citizens, intellectuals, artists, and party bureaucrats were also sent to forced labor camps in Siberia, many of them never to return. The show trials were elaborate instruments of public propaganda designed to instill terror in the Soviet population as a way of consolidating absolute power in Stalin’s hands which exceeded the power of even the most autocratic czars. People were convicted of crimes before their trials after elaborate confessions were extracted from them, usually through physical torture or psychological brainwashing. The trials consisted of elaborately staged hearings which culminated in defendants debasing themselves before the judges, begging forgiveness from party officials, and declaring total allegiance to the state. High ranking government officials such as Grigori Zinoviev and Mikhail Tomsky, as well as heroes from the revolution such as Nikolai Bukharin, were submitted to public censure and condemned to death. Many historians rank Stalin’s ‘‘Great Purge’’ and the show trials with some of the twentieth century’s bloodiest and most terrifying political crimes such as the Holocaust, Mao

Motley, Willard Tse-tung’s ‘‘Cultural Revolution’’ and Pol Pot’s ‘‘Killing fields’’ in Cambodia during the 1970s. As news of Stalin’s extraordinary political persecution and bloodletting became known in the West, it created a crisis of belief for western intellectuals and artists. Writers on the noncommunist left, such as James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos, lost their faith in leftist revolution and either moved to the right or developed highly individualized beliefs in leftist politics, becoming maverick socialists. Committed communists like Irving Howe left the party and became fervent anti-Stalinists. Ignazio Silone and Arthur Koestler, who had left the party earlier, saw the purges and show trials as confirmations of their darkest suspicions of communism. Jean-Paul Sartre, believing that the ultimate goals of Stalin’s regime justified its brutal tactics, maintained an uneasy commitment to Stalinism well into the 1950s. The League of American Writers, which included Nelson Algren, Waldo Frank, and Langston Hughes, supported Stalin even in 1938, believing that Stalinist Russia was a necessary bulwark against the rising tide of fascism in Europe. Wright’s response to Stalinism was an interesting mixture as he struggled to maintain a faith in radical leftist politics even after he had left the party and became aware of Stalin’s reign of terror. In 1938, he signed the petition drafted by The League of American Writers which supported the show trials. In the summer of that year, he wrote an unpublished article entitled ‘‘There Are Still Men’’ which argued that the show trials were a ‘‘tactical action’’ (Fabre 193) which was a necessary expedient in strengthening The Soviet Union as it faced an eventual war with Nazi Germany. Like Sartre, Wright was in a position where he could accept dubious political means to serve what he thought were worthwhile political ends. Although he was by no means an orthodox believer, by 1939 he was still faithful to the Community Party. Even after he left the party in 1942, he continued to see the Soviet Union in relatively positive terms, envisioning it as an important counterbalance to western capitalism in the Cold

War. But by 1953, however, he had broken completely with Stalinism and became critical of Sartre for failing to do so. For the rest of his life, Wright maintained a belief in leftist values and goals but had increasing difficulty finding institutional support for them. Selected Bibliography: Conquest, Robert. The Grand Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. New York: Collier Books, 1968. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

MOTLEY, WILLARD (14 July 1909– 4 March 1965) An African-American novelist who, along with Chester Himes, Anne Petry, and William Gardner Smith, is often associated with the ‘‘Wright School’’ of black writers emerging in the 1940s. Like Wright, he saw literature as a means of identifying and protesting social problems. He also strongly resembled Wright in his consistent use of naturalistic themes and techniques. Unlike Wright, however, he wrote a series of ‘‘raceless novels’’; that is, fiction which centers on white characters who are usually from secondgeneration immigrant stock and who face many of the same problems which black people face in twentieth century American cities. Motley was a year younger than Wright and was raised in a middle class environment in the racially integrated section of Englewood in Chicago’s South Side. He published his first story at the age of thirteen in the Chicago Defender and wrote a weekly column in that newspaper under the pen name of ‘‘Bud Billiken’’ from 1922 to 1924. His plans to attend college upon graduating from high school in 1929 were destroyed by the onset of the Great Depression. He took to the road, bicycling to New York City and taking two automobile trips to the west coast, all the while doing an assortment of odd jobs and collecting material for stories and essays which he would later publish in an assortment of small magazines. Returning to Chicago, he worked at Hull House where he edited Hull House Magazine. During this time, he read widely in American literature 263

Moulin d’ Ande´, France and studied carefully the work of Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos and other novelists in the realist/naturalistic tradition. In 1935, he met Richard Wright in Chicago as the two worked on the WPA-sponsored Federal Writers Project along with Margaret Walker, Jack Conroy, Nelson Algren, and Meridel LeSueur. His literary reputation today rests upon Knock on Any Door (1947), a novel which closely parallels Native Son in character development, plot, and theme. As Robert Bone has argued, Knock on Any Door is a ‘‘lineal descendent of Native Son’’ (169) and resembles that novel so closely that it can be seen as ‘‘simply Native Son stripped of racial implications’’ (179). Although its central character, Nick Romano, is a second-generation Italian who grows up in a white neighborhood, he falls victim to many of the same environmental forces which crush Bigger Thomas, namely poverty, discrimination, and an unjust legal system. Like Bigger, he joins a gang to find a sense of belonging which his damaged family can not supply, and, like Bigger, he faces death in the electric chair after committing a murder which he falsely believes has given him a ‘‘new life’’ of psychological empowerment. The trial scenes in Knock on Any Door closely parallel those in Native Son with Nick’s defense lawyer developing a case which resembles Max’s defense of Bigger. Both lawyers defend their clients by arguing that pathological environments have necessarily produced criminal behavior. Although Knock on Any Door was both a popular and critical success when it appeared in 1947, Motley’s later work was far less successful, and his reputation as writer quickly declined. We Fished All Night (1951), a novel about the devastating effects on World War II on American cultural life, was panned by the critics and sold poorly. Let No Man Write My Epitaph (1958), although made into a Hollywood film starring Shelley Winters, Ella Fitzgerald, and Ricardo Montalban, also drew negative critical reactions. Let Noon Be Fair (1966), a posthumouslypublished novel about American exploitation of .

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Mexico, was dismissed by critics as an outdated protest novel which relied too heavily on sensationalistic scenes of sex and violence. Motley, who saw Wright as his literary model, had much in common with him. Both were raised by relatives after being abandoned by their fathers. Moreover, they envisioned their art as a protest against social injustice and a means of achieving cultural change. Each was strongly influenced by writers in the naturalistic tradition such as Dreiser and Farrell and used naturalistic techniques such as documentary research and a careful study of how environment shapes human behavior, especially criminal activity. Wright and Motley also spent the final part of their lives in exile, recoiling from the institutional racism of the United States and not wanting to be victimized by the persecution of leftists in Cold War America. Just as Wright spent the final fourteen years of his life in France, Motley spent the final thirteen years of his life in Mexico City. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Fleming, Robert. Willard Motley. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Giles, James and Jerome Klinkowitz. ‘‘The Emergence of Willard Motley in Black American Literature,’’ Negro American Literature Forum, 9 (Spring 1975): 3– 10. Grenander, M. E. ‘‘Criminal Responsibility in Native Son and Knock on Any Door,’’ American Literature, 49 (May 1977): 221–233.

MOULIN D’ ANDE´, FRANCE An old flour mill in Normandy near Rouen and Sainte-Piere du Vauvray which had been converted into a retreat for writers and artists. After Wright had sold his farm and summer home at Ailly in June 1959, he often visited Moulin d’ Ande´ to escape the pressures of his life in Paris. He found it a very congenial place to write and composed 4,000 haiku there. He also worked on the revisions of ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ at Moulin d’ Ande´. Wright initially vacationed there in June 1959 in order to recover from an attack of amoebic

Myrdal, Gunnar dysentery, a disease he probably contracted in either Africa or Indonesia. Feeling cramped in his small Paris apartment and deeply troubled by his failing health and declining literary reputation, Wright sought tranquility at Moulin d’ Ande´. At this point in his life he was experiencing ‘‘increasing moral and spiritual solitude’’ (Fabre 488) as his wife and children had relocated to England and British officials refused to grant Wright an extended or permanent visa. Moreover, his mother had recently died and close friends Edward Aswell and George Padmore had also recently passed away. The two main literary projects which Wright worked on at Moulin d’ Ande´ reflect his troubled spirit and deeply divided consciousness. ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ is a bitter account of the political intrigues and personal animosities which Wright had grown to hate about his life in Paris, but his haikus are altogether introspective, exploring his personal feelings and spiritual musings. According to Michel Fabre, Wright worked on both projects ‘‘relentlessly and like a monk in a cell’’ (Fabre 512), perhaps realizing that time was running out for him. Unfortunately, Wright’s novel was never published and the manuscript still rests in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. A few of Wright’s haikus found their way into anthologies after his death, but a collection did not appear until 1998 when Haiku: This Other World, edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Tener, was published. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hakutani, Yoshinobu and Robert Tener (eds.). Haiku: This Other World. New York: Arcade, 1998.

MYRDAL, GUNNAR (6 December 1898– 17 May 1987) A Swedish political scientist who published in 1944 the groundbreaking work An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. The product of six years of intensive research which was funded by a $250,000 grant from the

Carnegie Foundation, it is widely regarded as one of the books which helped to transform American perceptions of race and laid the intellectual and sociological foundation of the civil rights movement. Myrdal’s book was a pioneering study which concluded that American racial problems and policies were not rooted in the alleged inferiority of black people but were instead caused by a massive system of white supremacy imposed upon African Americans. An American Dilemma therefore refuted the long-held views of social Darwinists who saw segregation as the natural outgrowth of unalterable genetic differences between the races. It also challenged the views of gradualists like Robert Park who argued that slow social change was the best that African Americans could hope for since American racial attitudes were so deeply embedded in a fundamentally-static social environment which made impossible more dramatic and quicker racial reforms. Myrdal reversed traditional American thinking about race by defining our racial difficulties as a ‘‘white problem,’’ not a ‘‘black problem.’’ He called upon whites to change the political, economic, and social systems which oppressed blacks and relegated them to the status of second class citizens who were denied the opportunities and possibilities of American life. He predicted that the federal government would have to intervene to ensure that African Americans would be able to vote in southern states. He also envisioned educational reform as an essential means of moving America toward a more racially equitable society, arguing that separate school systems laid the foundation of racial discrimination by denying black people an equal opportunity for the kind of education they would need to be fully integrated into American life. When the historic Brown vs. Board of Education was handed down in 1954 eliminating racial segregation in American schools, it based many of its assumptions on An American Dilemma. Myrdal’s research also played an important role in laying the philosophical foundations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. 265

Myrdal, Gunnar After completing An American Dilemma, Myrdal returned to Sweden to serve in parliament and as commerce minister from 1945 to 1947. He then moved to Geneva, Switzerland to become secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, a position he held for ten years. He later engaged in a ten-year research project on Asian culture which resulted in the 1968 publication of Asian Drama, a massive study which claimed that western and eastern economic and political systems were intrinsically opposed to each other. He received the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974. Wright greatly admired An American Dilemma and in a July 20, 1944 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher characterized the book as ‘‘the first honest and objective study of the Negro in our society’’ (Rowley 289). He felt that non-Americans were often more lucid and incisive in their study of American social problems because they could view them dispassionately and did not fear negative repercussions about their work from their fellow countrymen. Wright did not meet Myrdal until June 1951 when he was invited by Myrdal and his wife to Geneva, commencing what Michel Fabre has described as a ‘‘fast friendship’’ (Fabre 349) between the two men which would last for the remainder of Wright’s life. The two were in essential agreement on America’s racial dilemmas, although Wright was much less optimistic than Myrdal about non-violent ways of reforming American society. They also shared the conviction that racial problems in America were integrally

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connected to global issues and that true solutions to these problems had to be finally worked out in an international context. It was Myrdal who suggested that Wright do intensive research on Spanish culture, a project which resulted in the publication of Pagan Spain in 1956. Wright dedicated the book to Myrdal and his wife Alva. Myrdal was intrigued with Pagan Spain, admiring its ‘‘flashes of insights, incisive impressions by the stranger’’ (Rowley 485) and encouraged Wright to pursue further his research on Spain. Myrdal also wrote the introduction to The Color Curtain, a book which touched on his own deep interest in Asian culture. His introduction describes Wright as a ‘‘good reporter’’ and ‘‘scrupulously honest artist’’ (Myrdal 6–7) who offers important insights into the tensions between eastern and western cultures because of Wright’s status as an American black man who is freed from ‘‘the irrationalism of both East and West’’ (Myrdal 7). He characterizes Wright as a person who grew up not far removed from slavery and ultimately became a ‘‘free and lonely intellectual’’ (Myrdal 8) whose unique perspective enabled him to develop a ‘‘deep and spontaneous understanding’’ (Myrdal 8) of modern culture. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Myrdal, Gunnar. ‘‘Foreword’’ in The Color Curtain by Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

N NATCHEZ, MISSISSIPPI Wright spent the first three years of his life in and around Natchez. He was born on September 4, 1908 on Rucker’s Plantation near Roxie, Mississippi which is 25 miles southeast of Natchez (Walker 14). Wright’s paternal grandparents were from Traveller’s Rest, a plantation near Rucker’s. At the time of his birth, Wright’s maternal grandparents lived in Natchez. After Wright’s brother Leon was born in 1910 and Wright’s father was having difficulty making a living as an itinerant farm worker, Wright’s mother took him and his brother to live with her parents in Natchez. They lived with the Wilsons until 1913 when they, along with Wright’s father, moved to Memphis, Tennessee in search of steadier, more lucrative employment. At the time Wright lived there, Natchez was a town of 12,000 residents, 50 percent of whom were African Americans. It was an important port on the Mississippi River, a center of ‘‘the most flourishing cotton trade on the Delta’’ (Fabre 8). Its elegant pre–Civil War homes were nostalgic reminders of the city’s prosperous past when antebellum Natchez had ‘‘more wealth . . . than any other American city outside of New York’’ (Rowley 1). But as Margaret Walker has noted, by Wright’s time, the city had ‘‘long since fallen on poorer days’’ and the black population lived

in ‘‘absolute poverty and squalor’’ (Walker 15). The Wrights lived in such a harsh environment when the father worked as a sharecropper in rural areas outside of Natchez and it was economic hardship which forced the move to Natchez in 1910. They eventually moved to Memphis three years later to find better economic opportunities. When Black Boy opens, Wright is living with his grandparents in Natchez. His early years in and around that city were the inspiration for the beautifully lyrical prose poem in Black Boy when Wright celebrated the joys of nature and experienced ‘‘the vague sense of the infinite’’ as he gazed at the ‘‘yellow dreaming waters of the Mississippi River from the verdant bluffs of Natchez’’ (Wright 8). But even here, Wright undercuts his romantic perceptions of an apparently idyllic world by describing a troubling experience which brings him close to death. His autobiography opens with him playing with matches and setting fire to the curtains of his grandmother’s house. After he is punished with a severe beating from his mother who ‘‘had come close to killing’’ (Wright 8) him, he resolves to run away from home. The opening scenes in Black Boy, therefore, take a childhood experience from Natchez and make it a powerful epiphany which telescopes the entire book and, indeed, much of Wright’s life. Many of the key episodes in the book become variations on this scene in which Wright is traumatized, 267

National Negro Congress silenced, and ‘‘lost in a fog of fear’’ (Wright 7). The only strategy that provides him with some relief is flight in hopes of finding a new life. As an adult, Wright returned to Natchez on one occasion when he stopped there in 1940 on his way back from his honeymoon in Mexico. He was struck by the poverty, illiteracy, and disease which he observed in Natchez and realized that very little had changed there since his early childhood. And the fire at the Rhythm Club in Natchez which had taken place a short while before the visit reminded him of the city’s racism and segregation. This nightclub, which catered to blacks, had not been examined by fire inspectors and had become a massive fire trap when the owners were allowed to lock the doors and bar the windows in their efforts to prevent gate crashers from entering the wooden building. When a fire broke out and was fed by Spanish moss used to decorate the dance floor, 209 black people lost their lives. (Wright would later make this disastrous fire a central scene in his 1958 novel, The Long Dream.) Wright was also troubled during his 1940 visit to Natchez when he tried to secure his birth certificate but discovered that no birth records were kept before 1912, another sign of the city’s southern backwardness. But perhaps the most sobering and troubling aspect of Wright’s visit to Natchez was his meeting with his father whom he had not seen since Nathan had abandoned the family in 1913. Wright found him working as a sharecropper in Stanton near where Wright was born. He was struck by how much his father had physically aged from his hard life as a farm laborer and how his father’s life had been harshly circumscribed by the environment he had experienced in the Natchez area. He described him as a ‘‘creature of the earth’’ and a ‘‘black peasant’’ (Wright 41) whose life had been blighted by the rural South but who had been unable to find a better alternative in the city. Although he detected physical resemblances between himself and his father, Wright saw himself as someone who had escaped from the world which ‘‘chained’’ and ‘‘imprisoned’’ his father and

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declared ‘‘we were forever strangers’’ (Wright 40). His journey north to Chicago and New York, despite its many sufferings, had brought him well beyond the southern world which had crippled his father. Wright never returned to Natchez after this troubling visit in 1940. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.?>

NATIONAL NEGRO CONGRESS The National Negro Congress, which held three important meetings between 1936 and 1940, was an attempt by African-American leadership to form a black united front, similar to the communist ‘‘Popular Front,’’ which was designed both to unify black political groups and broaden their influence by connecting them with the American labor movement. A ‘‘nationwide federation of black organizations’’ (Naison 176), it centered on three basic issues: 1) support for organized labor, 2) resistance to fascism, and 3) fighting discrimination in jobs and housing. Ralph Bunche, A. Phillip Randolph, and Alain Locke were instrumental in its founding. Although some of its members were communists, its membership went well beyond party ranks and included many black liberals and moderates. The first meeting of the National Negro Congress was held in Chicago on February 14, 1936, drawing 5,000 people. Randolph was named the first president of the organization and communists Abner Berry, James Ford, and Benjamin Davis were named to its executive committee. In keeping with the goals of the ‘‘Popular Front,’’ which hoped to increase black membership in the party, communist presence at this first meeting was quite restrained, as ideological agendas were toned down and coalitions between a wide assortment of black groups was encouraged.

Native Son Wright was named a delegate to this first meeting and chaired a panel called ‘‘Negro Artists and Writers and the Changing Social Order.’’ The panel included Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes, two men who would form lasting friendships with Wright. Wright reported on the congress for New Masses, enthusiastically praising it as a sign of ‘‘new hope’’ (Rowley 116) for American blacks. He also was assigned by New Masses to cover the second National Negro Congress held in Philadelphia in October 1937 and the third and final meeting in Washington, DC in April 1940. Selected Bibliography: Naison, Mark. Communists During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States: From Depression to World War II.. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

NATIVE SON As Irving Howe has stressed, ‘‘The day Native Son appeared, American culture was changed forever’’ since the novel revealed long repressed truths about racial relations in the United States and ‘‘made impossible a repetition of the old lies’’ (Howe 35). 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 which 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 which have afflicted the nation from the beginning of its history and which threaten to plunge it into widespread chaos and violence during the Great Depression. The shocking newness of Native Son can also clearly be 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 which 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’’ (Wright 6). 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’’ (Wright 34), Bigger again assumes the role of the cornered rat. When he is given the task of chauffeuring the Dalton’s 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’’ (Wright 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 269

Native Son the basement furnace and is forced to decapitate her in order to fit her into the furnace. Books 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 will 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. 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 environmentallyproduced 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 sensationalistic outer plot

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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’’ (Wright 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’’ (Wright 107) when he ponders his killing of Mary. Indeed, Bigger feels that ‘‘His crime seemed natural’’ and expresses ‘‘the hidden meaning of his life’’ (Wright 106). 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 ghettoes, 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 and he also explores the sexual fears at the core of segregation better than any of his predecessors. And by making Bigger a representative figure, a ‘‘native son,’’ he stressed another disturbing irony which very few other

Native Son 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’’ (Canby 2), and Sterling Brown celebrated the book as a ‘‘literary phenomenon’’ because it was the first novel about American blacks which provided a ‘‘psychological probing of the outcast, the disinherited, the generation lost in the slum jungles of American civilization’’ (Brown 18). Harry Hanson remarked that the novel ‘‘packs a tremendous punch, something like a big fist through the windows of our complacent lives’’ (Hanson 4). But several other readers were sharply critical of the novel on aesthetic and political grounds. Howard Mumford Jones found too much ‘‘dull propaganda’’ (Jones 1) 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 binding and corrosive study of hate’’ (Cohn 661) which gave a distorted picture of black American life. Jonathan Daniels saw Wright’s novel as ‘‘the story of a rat’’ (Daniels 5), 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 which reviewers responded to was to some extent a watered-down version of the novel which Wright intended and which Harpers agreed to publish in 1939. Wright’s agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., his editor, Edward Aswell, and the editorial board of Book-of-the-Month Club were uncomfortable with the manuscript which Wright 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 interracial 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 which 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 which Bigger feels toward Mary and her initiating the sexual foreplay. Wright also reduced Max’s communist speeches at Bigger’s trial, somewhat blunting the novel’s political impact. The novel which Wright intended for publication and which Harpers 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. Selected Bibliography: Brown, Sterling. ‘‘Insight, Courage, and Craftsmanship.’’ Opportunity 18 (June 1940), 185–86. Butler, Robert. Richard Wright’s Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Canby, Henry Seidel. Book-of-theMonth-Club News (February 1940), 2–3. Cohn, David. ‘‘The Negro Novel: Richard Wright.’’ The Atlantic Monthly 165 (May 1940), 659–661. Hanson, Harry. ‘‘The First Reader.’’ Morning Mercury (March 16, 1940), 4. Howe, Irving. ‘‘Black Boys and Native Sons.’’ In A World More Attractive. New York: Horizon Press, 1963. Jones, Howard Mumford. ‘‘Uneven Effect.’’ Boston Evening Transcript (March 2, 1940), 1. Joyce, Joyce Ann. Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy. Iowa City: 271

Native Son (film versions) University of Iowa Press, 1986. Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Wright, Richard. Native Son: The Restored Edition. New York: New American Library, 1990.

NATIVE SON (FILM VERSIONS) Native Son has been made into two deeply flawed films, one directed by Pierre Chenal which appeared in 1950 and the other that was released in 1986 and directed by Jerrold Freedman. Wright had a long-term interest in film dating back to his years in Chicago and New York during the 1930s. Michel Fabre has pointed out that Wright ‘‘sometimes went to three movies a day’’ (Fabre 200) and was especially drawn to the film noir genre which focused on hardboiled gangsters and used brilliant lighting effects. Harry Birdoff, who met Wright in 1941 when Native Son was being adapted for the stage and whose wife was Wright’s secretary, remarked in a personal remembrance that Wright had very little interest in Broadway theatre but was fascinated with films because he thought that ‘‘peoples’ lives are like the movies’’ (Farnsworth 81). Thomas Cripps in a brief essay ‘‘Native Son in the Movies’’ also stressed Wright’s keen interest in films, viewing that medium as something which could not only make large profits for him but also could greatly widen his audience and thus enable him to better use his art as a means of social protest and political reform. Cripps adds, however, that Wright was deeply ‘‘suspicious and fearful of Hollywood’’ (Farnsworth 101), realizing that the bottom line for commercial directors and producers was economic gain, not artistic integrity. Wright was particularly eager to see Native Son, a novel which employs many cinematic techniques, converted into a film. And when that book achieved such dramatic success when it appeared in 1940, Wright was contacted by several people who were interested in converting it into a play or a film. He collaborated with Paul Green on a staged version of the novel and also combined with John Houseman and Orson

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Welles on another theatrical version which had a successful run in New York in 1941. Paul Robeson approached Wright in 1940 about producing a film of Native Son but little came of this idea. Hollywood producer Ben Hecht in 1947 suggested to Wright that a commercial film be made of the novel, but Wright emphatically rejected the offer when he discovered that Hecht wanted to present Bigger Thomas as a white man in an all-white cast, thus negating the novel’s disturbing racial themes. In a 1950 interview in Crisis, Wright declared that filming Native Son ‘‘was a dream I held close to my heart and it was quite powerful’’ (Pudaloff 157). So when Pierre Chenal, a French director living in Argentina since the Nazi occupation of France, approached Wright in 1948 about doing a film of Native Son which would be free of Hollywood restraints, Wright responded enthusiastically to the offer. He spent the better part of the next three years working on the film both as a script writer and an actor playing the lead role of Bigger Thomas. Although he had earlier resolved not to return to the United States after exiling himself in Paris, he went to New York in August 1949 to discuss the film with his agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., and work out details with Chenal. A week later, he went to Chicago with Chenal and spent several weeks shooting external scenes on the South Side. On September 22 he boarded a boat for Argentina where the picture’s internal scenes would be photographed, and he arrived in Buenos Aires on October 11, 1949. He spent most of the next year making the film which was finally completed in June 1950. In order to accommodate the demands of Cold War censors in the United States and elsewhere, the novel underwent substantial changes as it was translated into film. Its leftist politics were toned down considerably as the trial scenes in which Max expounds communist ideology were greatly shortened and Jan was portrayed as a ‘‘labor leader’’ rather than a communist organizer. The film’s emphasis became psychological rather than

Native Son (film versions) political as Wright developed a series of dream sequences which would probe the inner reaches of Bigger’s mind. The book’s frank treatment of interracial sex was also muted and its graphic violence was greatly reduced. Throughout the work in Argentina, Wright began to have serious doubts about the project. He quarreled with producer Jaime Prados about the contract and had difficulty with Chenal who wanted to depart from the novel more than Wright was comfortable with. But by midsummer 1950, ‘‘a rough cut of the picture’’ (Farnsworth 108) was finished and Wright left Argentina without viewing or approving the final print of the film. However, when it premiered in Buenos Aires in 1951, he was generally pleased with it and encouraged by the positive reviews. He was, however, deeply disturbed by what became of the film when it was given to a small New York distributor, Classic Films, Inc. In order to make it more palatable to an American audience during the Cold War, the distributors cut the film by thirty minutes, greatly reducing its impact. Wright felt strongly that this cutting ‘‘had ruined the picture’’ (Farnsworth 108) and gradually lost interest in the entire project. He eventually instructed his Paris lawyers to have his name removed from the film. What Hazel Rowley has described as the ‘‘mangled version’’ (Rowley 394) of the picture opened in New York’s Criterion Theatre on June 16, 1951 and was widely panned by the critics. Later that summer, it was screened in Los Angeles and was featured in the Venice Film Festival, but it received faint praise at best by American critics. Because of its aesthetic liabilities and the fact that it was so poorly distributed by a less than competent company, the film was not viewed by many Americans. As Cripps observed, ‘‘Outside of New York, few people, even in ghetto movie houses, had an opportunity to see the picture’’ (Farnsworth 110). Although Wright had initially ‘‘anticipated large profits’’ (Fabre 335) from the film when he began work on it in 1949, it finally resulted in a net financial gain for him of only a few thousand dollars.

The 1986 film starring Oprah Winfrey as Mrs. Thomas, Matt Dillon as Jan, Carroll Baker as Mrs. Dalton, Elizabeth McGovern as Mary Dalton, and Geraldine Page as Peggy was much more successful in terms of being widely distributed and generating solid profits. But, like its fifties counterpart, it was artistically flawed and was poorly received by the critics. Bigger was played by a virtually unknown actor, Victor Love, who was unable to move very far beyond the external features of Bigger’s character. Whereas Wright was careful to construct ‘‘two Biggers’’ (Wright 252), an external self engaged in irrational violence and an internal self which undergoes substantial moral and psychological growth, Low managed to convey only the outer qualities of Bigger’s character. He appears, for the most part, as a stunned victim of environment rather than the complex human being Wright developed in the novel. The film also oversimplifies several other characters from the novel. Mr. and Mrs. Dalton are portrayed as innocent victims of an unjust social system rather than people who are complicit in that system’s evils when they make substantial profits as slum lords. Max’s role in the film is greatly reduced from his role in the novel as he is never given the opportunity in the film’s attenuated court scenes to develop adequately his social visions and political warnings. Bessie is also given short shift in the film as her character is reduced to a witless sex object rather than Wright’s more sympathetically drawn character. Bigger’s killing of her is excised from the film. The two filmed versions of Native Son fail for curiously opposite reasons. The fifties version, perhaps fearing reprisals during the McCarthy era, de-emphasizes the novel’s powerful political and social vision and stresses Bigger’s inner life. But the surrealistic techniques used in the film are so overdrawn and gimmicky that they fail to bring the viewer convincingly into Bigger’s consciousness. But the eighties film, while restoring Bigger’s outer environment with skillful and realistic photography, fails to probe, in any significant way, Bigger’s complex inward life. As a result, it 273

Native Son (the plays) keeps the viewer on the outside of Bigger, reducing him to a case history or a victim of environment. Neither film does what Wright does masterfully in his great novel, make us see both the dehumanizing environment and the richly conceived human being who is forced to live in that environment. While Wright in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ revealed that ‘‘Bigger as I saw him, was a snarl of many realities’’ and had ‘‘many levels of life’’ (Wright 450), the two films of Native Son manage to capture only a part of Wright’s wonderfully complex character. Selected Bibliography: Cripps, Thomas. ‘‘Native Son in the Movies.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by Robert Farnsworth and David Ray. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Pudaloff, Ross. ‘‘Celebrity as Identity: Native Son and Mass Culture.’’ In Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, edited by Henry Louis Gates. New York: Amistad Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times, New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ in Native Son: The Restored Text. Wright, Richard. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

NATIVE SON (THE PLAYS) The story of Native Son becoming two distinctly different plays is a curious and tangled tale. It began when John Houseman, the director of the Mercury Theatre and former director of the Federal Negro Theatre in Harlem, read Native Son in the spring of 1940 when he was working on the script of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Houseman was deeply impressed by the novel and was struck immediately by the possibility of adapting it for the stage. He asked a friend to pay a visit to Wright who was vacationing in Mexico so that they could discuss securing the stage rights to Native Son. Wright, who greatly admired Houseman’s earlier production of an allNegro version of Macbeth, was eager to work with Houseman, even though Theodore Ward and Paul Robeson had also expressed a desire to convert Native Son into a play. 274

As pleased as Houseman was to secure the rights to develop a staged version of Wright’s novel for the Mercury Theatre, he was somewhat troubled to discover that Wright had already agreed to collaborate with established playwright Paul Green to write the script. Even though Houseman regarded Green as ‘‘the first white playwright to write sympathetically of Negro life in the South’’ (Houseman 89), he had strong reservations about Green’s suitability for working with Wright on a project which would call for an unusual amount of cooperation and temperamental similarity. To begin with, Green’s outlook was decidedly rural while Native Son was a profoundly urban work. More importantly, Houseman realized that Green’s deeply religious sensibility was in sharp contrast to Wright’s secular, aggressively leftist temperament. He doubted whether Green would either understand or have much sympathy for Wright’s ‘‘violent, revolutionary work’’ (Houseman 89). Houseman had also worked with Green on earlier projects with the Federal Negro Theatre in Harlem and knew that Green could be very difficult to work with since he had a tendency to refuse advice from directors and producers and also delayed productions with last minute script changes. Houseman’s doubts about what he would later call ‘‘an uneasy collaboration’’ (Houseman 91) between Wright and Green were confirmed when he drove Wright to Chapel Hill, North Carolina where Wright and Green would spend five weeks working together on the script. He noticed that Green, while personally gracious to Wright, was professionally condescending to his younger, less experienced colleague. As he later revealed in an essay written in 1971: . . . he could not have been more courteous, thoughtful, and hospitable in his treatment of his black guest. But having granted him social equality, he stopped. From the first hour of their ‘‘discussions’’ it became clear that he was incapable or unwilling to extend this equality into the professional or creative fields. Whether from his exalted position as a veteran playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner or from some innate sense

Native Son (the plays) of intellectual and moral superiority (aggravated by Wright’s communist connections), Paul Green’s attitude in the collaboration was, first and last, insensitive, condescending and intransigent. (Houseman 90)

Houseman’s apprehensions intensified when he read the contract which Green negotiated with Wright. It gave Green the right to invent new characters, delete existing characters, and substantially alter the plot. He also reserved the right to downplay the novel’s political militance by treating communist characters comically. Most tellingly, however, was the clear understanding that he would write the script and Wright would serve only as an advisor. After the five week collaboration between Wright and Green in North Carolina, a preliminary script was completed which Houseman considered ‘‘a deliberate betrayal’’ (Houseman 94) of Wright’s novel. Green, who sharply disagreed with both Wright’s determinism and Marxism, had converted Native Son into a strange kind of religious allegory in which Bigger Thomas triumphs over his environment by achieving a spiritual victory through Christian suffering. Green concludes the play in a truly bizarre manner with Bigger indulging in delusions of himself as ‘‘a black God, single and alone’’ (Houseman 3) while a Bible toting minister proclaims ‘‘I am the resurrection and the life’’ (Houseman 93). Green also made many other changes from the novel. To soften Bigger’s character he reduced his violence and how that violence is perceived by the audience. Bessie dies not by Bigger’s hand but is murdered by the police. The killing of Mary Dalton is not rendered directly on stage but is conveyed through a rather foggy dream sequence. Green also made extensive use of music, dance, and expressionistic sets to ameliorate the shocking effects of several of Wright’s most naturalistic scenes. When Houseman received this working script from Green he became exasperated and thought seriously of withdrawing from the project. But he eventually phoned Wright and offered to work with him to develop a script which would be

much more faithful to the style and substance of Native Son. Without Green being informed of their activity, they worked together over a three week period, ‘‘transfusing the blood of the novel into the body of the play’’ (Houseman 95). They made the play’s ending consistent with the book’s conclusion, sometimes quoting it ‘‘word for word’’ (Houseman 98) and concluding it with Bigger clutching the bars of his cell while staring angrily at the audience. Houseman staged the play creatively to suggest the dark and menacing nature of Bigger’s urban world. The stage was framed by drab yellow bricks to suggest an entrapping ghetto environment. Recorded sounds of police sirens were played from offstage during the blackouts required for scene changes. And when Bigger is captured by the police, he fires his gun directly at the audience as policy cry out ‘‘Come out, you black bastard’’ (Rowley 241). Wright attended several rehearsals and was quite satisfied with the new script and Welles’s brilliant directing. But when Green came to a rehearsal shortly before the play’s opening, he was enraged at the new script and demanded that the one he wrote be restored. When Houseman insisted that this would not be possible in view of the approaching premiere and, when Welles began to bully him, Green walked out, refused to attend any of the play’s performances, and never had any further dealings with Wright, Welles, or Houseman. Native Son finally became two very different plays. The performed version which Wright wrote and Houseman helped him to shape remained essentially true to the novel’s style and vision. However, the printed version published by Harper and Sons, which had gone into galleys before Houseman was informed of it and which was published a few days after the play’s premiere, honored Green’s intentions, drastically changing the novel’s plot and employing a wide variety of experimental techniques to portray Bigger in heroic terms as a modern Christ figure. Houseman and Welles were deeply offended by the book and demanded that their names and the name of the Mercury Theatre be removed from the dust 275

Naturalism jacket. Green was equally unhappy with the staged play which he regarded as a ‘‘bastard’’ which had been ‘‘mutilated’’ (Rowley 246). Wright, however, was pleased by the Mercury Theatre production of Native Son and was extremely grateful to Houseman for his assistance. In a note to Houseman, he expressed ‘‘gratitude for the enormous help you gave me with Native Son. ‘‘If it had not been for your willingness to give so generously of your time, I doubt gravely if Native Son would ever have seen the boards of Broadway’’ (Houseman 100). The play itself was a modest success. It had 115 performances over a 15-week period and then closed when Welles had to return to Hollywood to work on The Magnificent Ambersons. It was revived later that summer under a reduced budget and a greatly simplified staging and would also be performed in Chicago and a number of other eastern cities. But the interest in a Hollywood film version of Native Son which Wright hoped the play would spark never materialized. (Hollywood moguls were hesitant to work with a racially sensitive film with an integrated cast and at one point suggested an all-white version of the novel which Wright emphatically rejected.) Reviews of the Mercury Theatre production of Native Son were mixed but generally positive. Even though a small group of dogmatic communists briefly picketed the play because they objected to Wright straying too far from the party line in Native Son, the Daily Worker hailed the play as a ‘‘theatrical masterpiece’’ whose ‘‘angry message’’ made it an important ‘‘political document’’ (Kinnamon 103). The New York Times had high praise for Canada Lee’s portrayal of Bigger Thomas and the Christian Science Monitor saw the play as a bold new direction in theatre. John Mason Brown in the New York Post, however, felt that it fell well short of achieving the novel’s power. Lewis Kronenberger’s review in PM questioned the wisdom of attempting to adapt Native Son for the stage. And the critic for the Journal American faulted the play for being excessively propagandistic.

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Wright’s troubled collaboration with Paul Green is another vivid example of the painful difficulties he experienced when his work was filtered through a white consciousness nervous about his bold and honest vision of African-American life. Green, like the Book-of-the-Month Club editors who wanted textual revisions of Native Son and Black Boy, was unable to understand Wright’s world and the techniques he needed to make that world compelling in art. As a result, the stage version of Native Son was at best a modest artistic success and soon fell into obscurity. The printed version of the play which Green constructed remains a curious travesty. Selected Bibliography: Houseman, John. ‘‘Native Son on Stage.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Kinnamon, Keneth. A Richard Wright Bibliography: Fifty Years of Criticism and Commentary, 1933–1982. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1988. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

NATURALISM A mode of modern literature that combines a scrupulously realistic style with a deterministic vision of life. Naturalistic literature usually focuses on harsh settings such as modern war, slum life, and extreme conditions of nature such as storms, floods, and drought in order to illustrate the naturalistic thesis that environmental forces are stronger than and usually overwhelm human consciousness and free will. The protagonists of naturalistic literature are usually victims of environmental forces such as social conditioning, heredity, economic pressure, biological compulsion, and chance. For most of Wright’s early career he was strongly influenced by naturalistic theory and practice, and in Black Boy he declared, ‘‘All my life had shaped me for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel, and I could not read enough of them’’ (Wright 274). He was inspired both in

Ne´gritude Memphis and Chicago by naturalistic novelists such as Emile Zola, George Moore, Frank Harris, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane. Throughout his career, he expressed great admiration for American naturalist, Theodore Dreiser, often citing him as a strong influence on his own writing. In a 1941 interview, he characterized Dreiser as ‘‘the greatest writer this country ever produced’’ (Kinnamon 38). A number of reviewers and critics over the years have pointed out similarities between Wright’s fiction and Dreiser’s work, particularly the affinities between Native Son and An American Tragedy. It would be a mistake, however, to simply label Wright as a ‘‘naturalist.’’ Even his early work such as Native Son allows for the significant exercise of free will and consciousness and the fiction following Native Son, most notably ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ Black Boy, and The Outsider, is existential, rather than deterministic, in outlook. And as a stylist Wright used throughout his career gothic and modernist techniques which were quite different from the carefully mimetic, sometimes photographic, styles used in classic naturalistic fiction. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘The Function of Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ Black American Literature Forum. 18 (fall 1984), 100–05. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Critical Essays on Native Son. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969.

NE´GRITUDE A movement begun in the 1930s by Frenchspeaking black intellectuals, writers, and activists, it is generally characterized by a rejection of colonialism, a refusal to assimilate into white culture, and a celebration of black culture, especially as it is rooted in African traditions and beliefs. It enthusiastically promoted pride in being black and became one of the philosophical foundations for several twentieth-century black liberation

movements. Its principal founders were Aime´ Ce´saire, a poet and playwright from Martinique, Le´opold Senghor, a Senegalese poet, and Le´onGontrao Damas, a French Guyanese poet. Because he was radically opposed to colonialism and supported the liberation of black people from white domination throughout the world, Wright was interested in certain aspects of Ne´gritude and help to organize and maintain Pre´sence Africaine, a journal which was deeply committed to promulgating the principals of Ne´ gritude. But as Michel Fabre has pointed out in ‘‘Wright, Ne´gritude and African Writing,’’ Wright ‘‘was not a believer in ‘Ne´ gritude’ (Fabre 192) because he was suspicious of it as an ‘‘ideology or mystique’’ (Fabre 202) which oversimplified the problems facing modern black people. As a western rationalist, he was uncomfortable with Ne´gritude’s tendency to valorize traditional African religions and tribal customs. As an American black man, he saw very few African survivals in African-American culture and felt himself an outsider when he visited Ghana in 1953. As Fabre has stressed, he ‘‘tended to stress differences, rather than similarities between Afro-American and African cultures’’ (Fabre 192). At the Congress of Negro Writers and Artists held in Paris in 1956 which was organized by Pre´sence Africaine, Wright questioned many of the ‘‘assumptions held by the partisans of Negritude’’ (Fabre 435), arguing that its valorization of the African past, ancient religions, and tribal customs were a hindrance to African liberation and advocated that emerging African nations modernize along western lines, becoming industrialized, independent countries. He believed that by using western technology Africa could use the tools of the West to free itself of the West. His remarks were not well received, and Wright later confessed in a letter to Daniel Guerin that the conference left him ‘‘terribly depressed’’ (Fabre 441). In the years following the conference, he reduced his involvements with Pre´sence Africaine, believing that it was ‘‘no longer working for its original goal . . . the liberation of African culture’’ (Fabre 489). 277

Nehru, Jawaharlal Wright responses to Ne´gritude resemble his earlier reactions to Marcus Garvey’s ‘‘Universal Negro Improvement Association.’’ Although he greatly admired the powerful racial pride and outspoken resistance to white racism exhibited by both movements, he was too much a western rationalist and American to subscribe to their racial mystique or separatist ideology. As he said in his prefatory remarks to White Man, Listen! Wright came to see himself as one of the ‘‘lonely outsiders’’ who were part of a ‘‘westernized an tragic elite’’ poised out ‘‘the cliff like margins of many cultures’’ (Wright vii), caught between the West and the Third World. Or as Fabre has noted he was from the early 1950s onward poised ‘‘halfway between integration and Negritude’’ (Fabre 211). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Fabre, Michel. ‘‘Wright, Negritude, and African Writing.’’ In The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. White Man Listen! Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1957.

NEHRU, JAWAHARLAL (14 November 1884–27 May 1964) A close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru played a key role in India’s struggles for independence from Britain during the 1930s and 1940s. He became the leader of the socialist wing of the Indian National Congress and was named the first Prime Minister of India on August 15, 1947, an office which he maintained until his death. He was born to a prominent Indian family and was educated in England at Harrow and Trinity College. In the 1920s, he became a prote´ ge´ of Gandhi and was imprisoned for three years as a result of organizing non-violent resistance to British colonial rule. He was throughout his career a dedicated socialist who in his eighteen years as Prime Minister of India used a planned economy to direct India’s economic growth.

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Wright who often compared the condition of American black people to colonized people in the Third World, saw Nehru as ‘‘a great man’’ (Fabre 466) who had successfully thrown off the yoke of British oppression and was making India into a successful modern nation. He admired Nehru’s commitment to socialism and viewed Nehru as a political leader who had skillfully combined the best qualities of East and West. In a letter to Nehru dated October 9, 1950, Wright explained that India’s struggles with colonialism were emblematic of the difficulties faced by oppressed people all over the globe: ‘‘The situation of oppressed people the world over is universally the same and their solidarity is essential, not only in fighting oppression, but also in fighting for human progress’’ (Fabre 387). As Wright prepared to attend the Bandung Conference which Nehru had played such a key role in organizing, he wrote a letter to Nehru requesting permission to interview him and also sent along a copy of Black Power. In an hourlong interview with Nehru at the conference the two discussed the role which socialism should play in the development of previously colonized nations. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

NEW ANVIL A leftist journal created in 1939 by Jack Conroy after an earlier version, Anvil became defunct when it was absorbed into Partisan Review edited by Phillip Rahv. Like its predecessor, New Anvil was conceived as a magazine which focused on the experience of American workers and sought to publish fiction and essays from working class writers, particularly from the Midwest. Independent of Communist Party dogma and editorial interference, it was broadly proletarian in outlook. Published in Chicago from March 1939 to August 1940 under Conroy’s editorship, it went

The New Challenge

THE NEW CHALLENGE

from Chicago to New York in 1937. As its title suggests, The New Challenge was intended as a bold departure from earlier concepts of Negro art and sought to define a new black aesthetic which was consistent with the harsh realities of the ‘‘Great Depression’’ and the more militant and political outlook of a younger generation of African-American writers. It was particularly critical of the literature produced during the ‘‘Harlem Renaissance,’’ viewing such work as flawed by a romantic portrait of black experience which was directed at what it felt was a mainly white audience. After its first brilliant issue which featured work by Wright, Sterling Brown, Owen Dodson, Frank Marshall Davis, and Margaret Walker, the journal folded due largely to the personal frictions between Wright and his co-editors. The centerpiece of the collection was Wright’s ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’’ which called for a new black literature arising from the black masses and inspired by Negro folk art as it was expressed in the blues, spirituals, and oral tales. Wright encouraged African-American writers to employ a Marxist perspective and to envision their art as a weapon in the struggle for economic and racial justice. But he also cautioned black writers not to produce propaganda, stressing that ‘‘Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life’’ (Gates 1384–85). For Wright, African-American art must arise from lived experience and the actual culture of black people in America and could not be fully grasped by a system of political and philosophical abstractions. Like Fire, the magazine produced by a previous generation of ‘‘Harlem Renaissance’’ militants, The New Challenge had a brief publication life of only one issue but it had a substantial impact on subsequent black literature since it crystallized an important new direction in African-American literature which would inspire the ‘‘Wright School’’ of novelists who flourished in the 1940s and 1950s.

A journal which Wright co-edited with Dorothy West and Marian Minus shortly after he moved

Selected Bibliography: Gates, Henry Louis and Nellie McKay. The Norton Anthology of African American

out of business largely because the onset of World War II redirected American leftists from promoting a workers’ revolution to joining the fight against fascism. Conroy gave up his duties as editor of New Anvil to work for the WPA and also to collaborate with Nelson Algren in writing pamphlets which supported the war effort. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961 Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in America, 1900– 1954. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956. Suggs, John Christian. ‘‘Jack Conroy.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1981. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1982.

NEW CARAVAN New Caravan was an anthology of contemporary writing published in New York by W.W. Norton Inc. Edited by noted scholars Lewis Mumford, Alfred Kreymborg, and Paul Rosenfeld, it published Wright’s ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ in November 1936. Placing this story in such a prestigious publication was an important step forward in Wright’s early career. Although he received only a fifty dollar royalty for the story, Wright was greatly encouraged by its favorable reviews. It also marked the first time he was able to place his work in a book and it was also his first publication in a non-communist white press. Wright wrote ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ in Chicago, along with several other stories which would eventually be included in Uncle Tom’s Children. The success he experienced in placing his work with an important New York publisher quickened his resolve to move to New York in May 1937. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

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New Masses Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1997. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

NEW MASSES A weekly leftist journal founded in May 1926 which became an important vehicle for the discussion of radical politics and its relationship to art, literature, and culture. During the 1930s it became strongly linked to the Communist Party and published the work of American communists such as Richard Wright, Michael Gold, Granville Hicks, and Howard Fast. It became a monthly magazine entitled Masses and Mainstream in 1948 under the editorship of Samuel Sillen. Its contributing editors included John Howard Lawson, Howard Fast, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Paul Robeson. The predecessor of both of those magazines was The Masses, a socialist journal which appeared in 1911 and became defunct in 1918 when it was suppressed by federal authorities as seditious. In April 1917, the U.S. Post Office banned it from the mails. Max Eastman was its editor from 1912 to 1918, and its contributing editors included John Reed, Floyd Dell, Louis Untermeyer, and George Bellows. Wright wrote many pieces for New Masses and found this magazine very congenial to his political, social, and literary views. From July 1935 to August 1939, he published the following poems in New Masses: ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise,’’ ‘‘Hearst Headline Blues,’’ ‘‘Old Habit and New Love,’’ ‘‘We of the Streets,’’ and ‘‘Red Clay Blues’’ (coauthored with Langston Hughes). His story ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ appeared in the May 10, 1938 issue of New Masses. His essay warning against American involvement in World War II, ‘‘Not My People’s War,’’ was published in the June 17, 1941 issue of New Masses. And he wrote two book reviews for that magazine, ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears,’’ a review of Waters Turpin’s These Low Grounds and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (December 1937) and ‘‘Adventures and Love in 280

Spain,’’ a review of The Wall of Men by William Rollins (March 8, 1938). Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rideout, Walter. The Radical Novel in the United States. New York: Hill and Wang, 1956.

NEW YORK Margaret Walker has argued that the critical turning point in Wright’s career as a writer came in 1937 when he left Chicago after living there for ten years and went to New York to devote himself more fully to writing fiction (Walker 109). Although he had finally secured stable, reasonably well-paid work when he was given a permanent position in the Chicago Post Office, he decided to risk everything by turning down the job and relocating to New York, partly because he had lost confidence in his communist co-workers in Chicago but mainly because he realized that New York was the best place for an ambitious young writer. As Hazel Rowley has pointed out, New York in the late 1930s was ‘‘the literary and political capital of the United States’’ (Rowley 121) and Wright wanted to take full advantage of it. In New York, he would be able to contact the publishers, agents, and fellow writers he needed to push his career to the next level. In Chicago, Wright had considered himself a proletarian poet who had published a number of poems in leftist journals such as Anvil, New Masses, and Left Front. But he brought to New York four completed novellas which would comprise the 1938 edition of Uncle Tom’s Children and he had a draft of ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ which would soon be included in two prestigious anthologies, Best Short Stories of 1939 and Fifty Best American Stories (1914–1939). Most importantly, he was in the initial stages of imagining Native Son. So he was on the cusp of dramatic changes in his personal and creative life, and the New York environment would help to catalyze these changes.

New York According to Walker, Wright’s work for the Federal Writers’ Project in New York was ‘‘the springboard that catapulted [him] to literary success’’ (Walker 115). His membership in that WPA organization qualified him to enter his story ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ in Story magazine’s contest for fiction writers who worked in federally sponsored projects. When Wright’s story won first prize in this extremely prestigious magazine’s contest in 1938, a number of significant possibilities opened up for him which would have profound effects on his subsequent career. The editors of Story magazine sent the entire manuscript of Uncle Tom’s Children to Edward Aswell, an important editor at Harper and Brothers. This not only initiated a fruitful professional relationship and important friendship that would last for most of Wright’s life, but it also propelled him into the national spotlight as promising young writer when Harper accepted the book and published it in 1938. Shortly after winning Story magazine’s prize, Wright also engaged Paul Reynolds, Jr. as his literary agent and thus began a long-term relationship with one of the country’s oldest and most important literary agencies which had numbered writers such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. G. Wells among their clients. After being in New York for only two years, Wright had gone from being an obscure Marxist poet to a promising new voice in American literature. New York, which in 1937 was the largest city in the world and a powerful engine of American modernism, provided Wright with many new experiences and forms of work which would greatly assist his development as a writer. Shortly after arriving there, he assisted Dorothy West and Marian Minus to found New Challenge, a leftist journal which published his essay ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ and put him in contact with Owen Dodson and several other young writers. Wright’s work as Harlem editor of the Daily Worker helped him to hone his skills as a prose writer and do elaborate research on black urban life which would prove quite useful as he composed Native Son. His job with the Federal Writers Project also provided him with rich

opportunities to do serious research as he wrote the Harlem portions of two WPA books, New York Panorama and The New York City Guide. Never one to settle down for long in a single place, Wright lived in many locations during his ten-year stay in New York. When he arrived there in May 1937 he stayed briefly with friends in Greenwich Village. He then moved to Harlem where he stayed for a while in the YMCA and a furnished room in the Douglass Hotel on 809 St. Nicholas Avenue. By early 1938, he rented a room on West 143rd Street and later that year moved to Brooklyn where he stayed with two friends he knew from Chicago, Jane and Herbert Newton. He had a room in all three of the Brooklyn locations which they occupied that year on 175 Carlton Street, 87 Lefferts Place, and 522 Gates Avenue. While living with the Newtons, he composed most of Native Son, completing a rough draft of the novel in October 1938. He completed the book on June 10, 1939 while living again in the Douglass Hotel with his friend Ted Ward occupying a room next door. Wright married Dhimah Meadman in August 1939 with Ralph Ellison serving as his best man, and he lived with her, her mother, and two children in their fashionable Hamilton Terrace apartment in Harlem. After a disastrous honeymoon in Mexico and a quick divorce, Wright returned to New York in 1940 and moved back with the Newtons in their apartment on 343 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn. He married Ellen Poplar on March 12, 1941, and they lived for a short time on 473 W. 140th Street and eventually rented a large six room apartment on 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn. They shared this apartment with Carson McCullers and other writers, living there for a two-year period. It was at this time that Wright completed his autobiography American Hunger which eventually appeared as Black Boy in 1945. By this time, the Wrights had a young daughter, Julia, and they decided to buy a threestory brick townhouse in Greenwich Village on Charles Street. Although they had hoped that ‘‘the Village’’ would be a better place for them as a racially mixed couple and would provide their 281

Newton, Herbert daughter with better educational opportunities, they were bitterly disillusioned by the racial discrimination which they experienced and sold their Charles Street townhouse in 1947. After spending a summer on Long Island, the Wrights decided to leave the United States and live in France. Wright’s ten-year stay in New York, while immensely successful from the standpoint of his writing, was therefore not without problems. New York in the late 1930s and throughout the 1940s was a segregated city and Wright suffered many racial insults which hurt him deeply and disillusioned him about life in the United States. To secure a home in Greenwich Village, he and his wife had to set up a bogus corporation called the Richlieu Company which would deal with banks and realtors without identifying him as a black man. Wherever he lived in New York ,City he had to have his hair cut in Harlem because barbers throughout other parts of the city refused black patronage. Wright and his wife were careful not to hold hands as they walked on city streets for fear of drawing racial hostility. On one occasion when Wright and his friend, Constance Webb, tried to be served in a ‘‘Village’’ restaurant they were rebuffed crudely by a waitress who loaded their cups of coffee with salt. Wright was most deeply troubled by the treatment which his young daughter Julia received. He had difficulty placing her in schools, and once when she was shopping with Constance Webb in the Bergdorf Goodman department store, she was denied access to the ladies room and was forced to wet her pants before reaching home. As Michel Fabre has pointed out, even bohemian, cosmopolitan Greenwich Village was a rough place for black people in 1947 as gangs of white youths in the spring of that year roamed the streets ‘‘molesting interracial couples’’ (Fabre 312) and breaking into restaurants to taunt black patrons. So in 1947 the Wrights left New York and sailed to France in search of a life which was more humane and just than they could find in the United States. Richard Wright returned to New York briefly on only two occasions, when he went

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there in August 1949 to make arrangements with Paul Reynolds, Jr. on the filming of Native Son, and later in 1950 when he returned from Argentina, he visited Constance Webb and C. L. R. James. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

NEWTON, HERBERT A communist organizer and activist whom Wright met in Chicago in 1935 and worked with throughout the 1930s. Wright became close friends with Newton and his wife Jane, becoming part of a circle of young writers and activists who gathered in the Newton home on Prairie Street. After Wright and the Newtons relocated to New York in 1937 to assume new duties for the Communist Party, Wright boarded with them in their Brooklyn home. According to Michel Fabre, their ‘‘quiet household’’ became a ‘‘spiritual home’’ (Fabre 168) for Wright, a congenial place for him to write a substantial amount of Native Son. Herbert Newton was one of the most respected black organizers for the Communist Party both in New York and Chicago. He spent two years in Moscow studying Marxism-Leninism and was widely admired by his leftist colleagues for his courage and organizational skill. He organized the ‘‘Negro Forum’’ in Washington Park, aggressively resisting the efforts of the Chicago police to close down this opportunity for young blacks to speak freely on a wide variety of social and political issues. In 1941, he was severely beaten by New York police for leading a picket line protesting the firing of 15,000 W.P.A. workers. He gained national attention in 1930 as a member of the ‘‘Atlanta Six,’’ a group of communists (including one named Mary Dalton) who were arrested for circulating leaflets demanding an end to lynching. The group was threatened

Nietzsche, Friedrich with death in the electric chair under a Georgia law forbidding ‘‘insurrection’’ but were released when national attention was brought to the matter. Wright admired both Herbert Newton and his wife, relying on them as confidants in his personal and professional life.

he refused to act on three pieces of her advice: (1) eliminate the murder of Bessie Mears on the grounds it was gratuitously violent and (2) soften the portrayal of the Communist Party, and (3) change the name of Mary Dalton since it was taken from an actual person whom Wright knew and disliked.

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

NEWTON, JANE

NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH (1844–1900)

Wright’s friend, confidante, and literary advisor, they met in Chicago when both were involved in a variety of leftist and communist activities. Her husband Herbert was a communist organizer who was the only black member of the ‘‘Atlanta Six,’’ a group of activists arrested in Georgia in 1930 for campaigning against lynching and he was almost sent to the electric chair under that state’s ‘‘insurrection’’ law. Wright greatly admired the Newtons not only for their political boldness but also their courage in maintaining an interracial marriage in times when such unions were discouraged, punished, and in many states were made illegal. The Newton household on Prairie Street was a gathering point for young writers and party workers, providing Wright with a circle of friends with whom he could share his artistic and political interests. When the Newtons left Chicago in 1937 after spending six months in the Soviet Union, Wright resumed his friendship with them and moved into their Brooklyn home in 1938. Once more, Wright became part of a group of like-minded people, forming what Michel Fabre has described as ‘‘Wright’s new spiritual family’’ (Fabre 168). This was the period when Wright was working intensively on Native Son, and he often discussed the book with Jane Newton, inviting her to read the manuscript and seeking her advice on a number of important problems. Although he accepted and implemented some of her suggested revisions,

A nineteenth-century German philosopher who asserted ‘‘God is dead’’ and constructed a world view which negated all religious systems, particularly Christianity. He developed the idea of the Superman (Ubermensch), a heroic figure who transcended conventional morality and took upon himself an absolute freedom which transcended human law. Wright first heard of Nietzsche when he read H. L. Mencken’s Prefaces, a book which described him as an important modern thinker. Wright began an informal study of Nietzsche in Chicago and his interest in his work was rekindled in France when Wright became seriously interested in existentialism. Nietzsche’s thinking in many ways laid the groundwork for existentialist thought since it stressed man’s enormous freedoms and responsibilities in a non-transcendent universe. Wright’s personal library contained four scholarly studies of Nietzsche: Gerald Abraham’s Nietzsche, M. H. Mugge’s Nietzsche: Who He Was and What He Stood For, H. H. Reyburn’s Nietzsche: The Story of a Human Philosopher, and Janko Lavrin’s Nietzsche: An Approach. Nietzsche’s influence on Wright can be seen in much of Wright’s fiction and non-fiction. Wright was clearly drawn to the German philosopher’s rejection of Christianity and all other forms of institutional religion. Bigger in Native Son, Cross Damon in The Outsider, and Wright himself in Black Boy/American Hunger see conventional religion as a means of social control of black 283

Nixon, Robert people and take a particularly low view of Christianity’s emphasis on nonviolent acceptance of injustice in this world in hopes of better treatment in the hereafter. Several of Wright’s protagonists can be seen as aspiring to the status of a Nietzschean ‘‘superman’’ through superior consciousness and strong will. Cross Damon, for example, can justify his murders because he considers himself above the law. And Bigger Thomas feels a Nietzschean will to power when he kills Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears. Wright’s anti-heroic protagonists such as Fred Daniels of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ and Erskine Fowler of Savage Holiday enjoy very temporary Nietzschean thrills when they willfully break laws and indulge in the illusion that their superior powers of perception endow them with a special status. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson and London: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

NIXON, ROBERT In May 1938, Robert Nixon, an 18-year-old black youth, along with an accomplice, Earl Hicks, broke into the apartment of a white woman, Mrs. Florence Thompson, in an attempt to rob her possessions. The robbery turned sour when Mrs. Thompson discovered them and was murdered by Nixon, who panicked and beat her to death with a brick. Although no evidence was produced to document rape, Nixon was accused of rape and murder. The case immediately became sensationalized by the Chicago papers, which were particularly harsh in their treatment of Nixon whose skin was darker than Hicks’s skin and who showed little remorse for the crime or fear of the police. The Chicago Tribune, for example, depicted Nixon as ‘‘very black—almost pure Negro,’’ a ‘‘jungle Negro,’’ and compared him to the ‘‘giant ape’’ of Poe’s ‘‘Murders in the Rue Morgue.’’ Other

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Chicago papers presented Nixon as a ‘‘sex fiend,’’ a ‘‘moron slayer,’’ and a ‘‘black ape.’’ Nixon’s trial lasted only a week and he was convicted of murder after the jury deliberated for an hour. He was represented by a team of NAACP lawyers, headed by Ulysses S. Keys and also a white attorney, Joseph Roth, who worked for the International Labor Defense. Nixon’s lawyers were successful in winning for him several reprieves but he was finally executed in the electric chair in June 1939. Wright, who was in the planning stages of Native Son and had done some preliminary writing of the novel when Nixon was arrested, became fascinated in the case, sensing in Nixon’s story an extraordinary parallel to Bigger Thomas’s narrative. Both were young black men who were born in the Deep South and had been exposed at an early age to racial injustice and violence. And both had killed white women in moments of hysterical fear. Wright immediately wrote to Margaret Walker in Chicago and asked her to send news clippings of the Nixon case to him, which she did for over a year. And in November 1938, Wright went to Chicago to do research on Nixon, talk to his lawyers, and request an interview in prison with Nixon. As he reveals in ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ Wright used news stories from The Chicago Tribune in Native Son to give that novel increased verisimilitude. Like Dreiser, Wright was keenly interested in actual events which would provide his fiction documentary proof that would give realistic authority to his writing. The Nixon case, the Loeb/Leopold murders, and the Clinton Brewer case were of great interest to Wright because they not only provided him with deepened insight into criminal behavior but also could be used to remind his readers that he was not dreaming up sensationalistic violence to titillate them but was reporting on what happened in real life. But, as Keneth Kinnamon has convincingly argued, Wright used documentary experience as a creative writer, not as a historian or journalist. Instead of merely reporting on ‘‘the facts,’’ he

Nkrumah, Kwame altered them and reshaped them to suit his literary purposes. Although we never get the inside story on Robert Nixon and thus are not able to see the human meanings behind his terrible violence, Wright, in Native Son, stresses the huge gap between Bigger’s outer actions and his human motives, his inner self. Bigger then becomes a person who is forced by environment into monstrous actions but he is not a monster. Wright also greatly altered the actual events of Nixon’s trial when he wrote the trial scene in Native Son. Bigger is represented by a single lawyer, Boris Max, instead of the team of lawyers who represented Nixon in order to give sharper focus to the court room drama and provide indepth character development to Max. Wright also injects socialist ideology into Max’s speeches which were not present in the speeches given by Nixon’s attorneys to deepen the novel’s social and political themes. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Demonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

NKRUMAH, KWAME (21 September 1909–27 April 1972) Born in 1909 in Kfroful, an Nzima town in the extreme southwest of the Gold Coast, Kwame Nkrumah became the first prime minister of newly independent Gold Coast in 1957, founding the modern state of Ghana. Nkrumah is widely regarded as one of the most important political theorists of African revolution, PanAfricanism, African socialism, and philosophical ‘‘African Personality.’’ From his Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957) to Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-colonization (1964) to Neocolonialism: The Last Stages of Imperialism (1965), Nkrumah’s many works provide a blueprint for postcolonial freedom and for the unification of Africa, as well as all non-aligned countries in the anti-imperialist struggle. ‘‘Nkrumaism’’ was, for some, emblematic of self-governance in

a new Africa; for others, it stood for autocratic one-party socialism. Like other postcolonial leaders such as Julius Nyerere and Le´opold Senghor, Nkrumah was a philosopher-president, an energetic leader and prolific writer. First a teacher, a lecturer in the United States with degrees in philosophy and education from Lincoln University and University of Pennsylvania, he gained international renown as a voice in the Pan-Africanist Congresses in the forties by publishing works such as Africa Must Unite (1963). Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party and the nation of Ghana were held to be models of political change in a new Africa, backed by the Organization of African Unity, of which Nkrumah was a founding member since its inception in 1963. By 1964, however, Ghana was facing serious economic troubles, and Nkrumah had outlawed opposition, declaring himself president for life. Two years later, a military coup d’e`tat took over Ghana while Nkrumah was on a diplomatic visit to China and Vietnam, and he was forced into exile in Guinea, under the auspices of President Se´ kou Toure´ , never again to return to Ghana. At the suggestion of Dorothy Padmore, wife of Pan-Africanist George Padmore, during lunch at his Paris apartment, Richard Wright visited Ghana in 1953. By this time, Nkrumah had already been asked by British colonial authorities to lead the government. Wright’s travelogue Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos, published the following year, features a photograph of Nkrumah as its frontispiece. While Nkrumah welcomed him in his month-long visit to the Gold Coast during the heady days of the dawn of independence, Wright found Nkrumah a compelling yet enigmatic leader. ‘‘And, of course, only a native African could do what Nkrumah had done,’’ Wright commented in Black Power. ‘‘Five hundred years of European barbarism had made it impossible for any European alive to claim the kind of frenzied assent from these black millions that Nkrumah claimed’’ (35). More than Wright’s other non-fiction works, Black Power remains a controversial book even 285

Norman, Dorothy today. Beginning with a brief, sweeping account of the Euro-American exploitation of Africa, Wright, who had recently renounced his formal ties with the Communist Party, linked colonialism, capitalism, and missionary work, in the vein of Aime´ Ce´ saire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1955). However, the personal narrative shows that Wright consistently was shocked by what he perceived to be ‘‘backward’’ aspects of African culture, and he employed the term ‘‘tribal’’ as a synonym for pre-modern. Black Power ended with a long letter to Nkrumah in which Wright claimed that ‘‘African life must be militarized! . . . not for war, but for peace; not for destruction, but for service; not for aggression, but for production; not for despotism, but to free minds from mumbojumbo’’ (110). Due to Wright’s moments of condescension towards Ghanian culture, a certain distance was maintained in the meetings between him and Nkrumah depicted in Black Power. Nkrumah’s Dark Days in Ghana (1969) recounts the circumstances of the coup d’e`tat that sent him into exile and describes his thwarted endeavors to develop Ghana. A long section of Wright’s letter from Black Power serves as the epigraph, which closes with Wright’s view on the educational and developmental regime Nkrumah had to ‘‘impose,’’ a point of agreement between the two men. Michael Janis Selected Bibliography: Wright, Richard, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954. Nkrumah, Kwame. Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. New York: Nelson, 1957. Nkrumah, Kwame. Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for De-colonization. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970. Nkrumah, Kwame. Dark Days in Ghana. International Publishers, 1969.

managed his gallery, An American Place, for several years. Her home on East Seventieth Street in New York became a gathering place for avantgarde artists and intellectuals. She wrote a regular column for The New York Post and developed a journal, Twice A Year, A Semi-Annual Journal of Literature of the Arts and Civil Liberties which was published between 1938 and 1948. The journal covered a wide variety of topics, including racial discrimination, Supreme Court decisions, and Nazi war atrocities. It also published the work of distinguished American photographers as well as literary and social criticism. A long-time member of the India League of America and a friend of Indira Gandhi, she spent her later life studying Eastern philosophy and religion while working to improve social conditions in India. Wright met her in 1944 at a party honoring Theodore Dreiser and the two became close friends. Norman introduced him to philosopher Hannah Arendt, theologian Paul Tillich, painter Marc Chagall, as well as French intellectuals Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir. When Wright had difficulty securing a visa to visit France in 1947, Norman used her influence on his behalf, writing a letter to the State Department which enabled Wright and his family to live in France. They remained close friends during Wright’s exile in France, maintaining a long correspondence. Wright published several essays in Twice a Year, including an introduction to Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright. New York: Putnam’s, 1968.

NORMAN, DOROTHY (1905–1985 ) A journalist, writer, activist, and photographer, Dorothy Norman was a staunch supporter of liberal causes and a champion of the arts. In 1927, she became lovers with the important American photographer, Alfred Steiglitz, and 286

‘‘NOT MY PEOPLE’S WAR’’ An essay published in the June 17, 1941 issue of New Masses which states Wright’s reasons for opposing America’s entry into World War II and encourages African Americans not to support

‘‘Note on Jim Crow Blues’’ the war. It originally appeared as a speech entitled ‘‘What We Think of Their War’’ which Wright delivered at the opening session of the Fourth American Writers Congress on June 6, 1941. As a communist, Wright opposed the war because he viewed it as a struggle between capitalist nations which were intent on either maintaining or extending their imperialist powers. And because of the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939, Wright, like other communists, did not see Nazi Germany as a threat to Soviet Russia. But Wright had other strong objections to the war because he was an American black person, and ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ stresses these objections. He points out the absurdity and hypocrisy of the American government asking black people to serve in a segregated army to oppose Hitler’s racist dictatorship. He called upon Americans to solve their own racial problems, particularly in the South, before it undertook a war of liberation of oppressed people in Europe. Wright argued that Negroes in America should focus their attention on fighting racial oppression and economic injustice at home before committing themselves to the fight against related forms of injustice abroad. Wright also reminded black Americans of the shabby treatment they received in their own country when they returned home from fighting in World War I. He underscored this point by citing the recent lynching of a black soldier in Georgia. The Communist Party supported Wright’s anti-war speech at the American Writers Congress and their journal New Masses eagerly accepted ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ for publication just eleven days later. But when Hitler violated the nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union just two weeks after Wright’s speech, the party completely changed its policy toward World war II, now regarding it as a ‘‘people’s war’’ against fascism. So when Wright wanted to give a version of ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ as his acceptance speech for the Spingarn Medal on June 27, 1941, party officials pressured him not to deliver the speech and to substitute for it biographical remarks of a nonpolitical nature. Wright was upset by this

interference, regarding it as yet another way in which communist officials threatened his integrity by muffling his voice as an African-American writer. He was especially aggrieved that ideological promptings from Moscow were putting the campaign against American racism on the back burner in an effort not to offend the United States which the party now viewed as an ally against German fascism. He reluctantly did not present ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ as his acceptance speech for the Spingarn Medal but this incident deepened Wright’s disaffection with communism and was one of the contributing factors to his leaving the Communist Party in 1942. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ’’Not My People’s War,’’ New Masses, 110.39 (June 17, 1941), p. 8–9, 12.

‘‘NOTE ON JIM CROW BLUES’’ At John Hammond’s request, Wright composed in 1941 a brief introduction to Josh White’s record album, Southern Exposure, a series of songs attacking southern segregation. Wright supported White’s music with a description of his own painful experiences growing up in the Deep South. In his brief essay on the blues, Wright described them as ‘‘the spirituals of the city’’ (Fabre 238) and emphasized how they grew out of the experiences of ordinary black people. Unlike most students of blues music who argued that they are essentially personal and non-political, Wright stressed that the ‘‘blues indict the social system’’ (Fabre 238) by subtly exposing the ironic gap between American ideals and the actual historical record. Shortly after producing Southern Exposure, Hammond produced a recording of a blues song Wright had written, ‘‘King Joe.’’ This celebration of Joe Louis’ boxing victories featured Paul Robeson singing to the accompaniment of Count Basie’s orchestra. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. 287

Nutt, Howard

NUTT, HOWARD A poet and leftist organizer whom Wright met when the two were members of the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club. Nutt, along with Abraham Chapman, Nelson Algren, and Abe Aaron, became one of Wright’s close friends. When Nutt published Special Laughter, a collection of poems, in 1940 he asked Wright to provide an introduction to the book. Wright responded by writing a long letter which Nutt then used as the book’s introduction. Wright praised Nutt’s homely realism which can use ‘‘words out of the streets and taverns and endow them with significant meaning and form’’ (Fabre 225). He approves of Nutt’s ‘‘poking . . . rebellious fingers into the mouldy fabric of daily experience’’ (Fabre 226) to examine the actual lives of poor people,’’ anonymous millions’’ (Fabre 224) whose lives go unreported in America’s official literature.

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Wright also regards the humor of Nutt’s poetry as one of its strengths. Characterizing Nutt as ‘‘a Mark Twain of the Twentieth Century’’ (Fabre 227), he admires his grimly ‘‘special laughter’’ as an effective way of satirically exposing the frauds and injustices of American life. By ‘‘draping’’ his social protests in ‘‘the guise of humor,’’ Nutt can expose the ‘‘awful secrets’’ (Fabre 226) of American life, revealing ‘‘the horrible truth’’ (Fabre 227). Wright concludes his introduction to Special Laughter by stressing the affirmative vision of Nutt’s poetry. While exploring ‘‘the Midwestern muck,’’ it ‘‘poignantly’’ reveals ‘‘specks of beauty’’ (Fabre 227) in the lives of ordinary Americans. Selected Bibliography: Wright, Richard. ‘‘Introduction to Special Laughter.’’ In Richard Wright: Books and Writers, by Michel Fabre. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990, pp. 225–27.

O ‘‘OBSESSION’’ Unlike most of the poems which Wright published in the mid-1930s which were political in vision, ‘‘Obsession’’ focuses a matter of grave personal importance for Wright, lynching. Wright, whose uncle Silas Hoskins was murdered by whites who grew jealous of his business success and whose friend had a brother who was castrated when he was caught in delecto with a white woman, saw lynching as the ultimate nightmare for African-American men. He regarded it as the South’s most heinous instrument of social control, a warning to black men that if they violated the codes of the segregated South they would face the most horrible of deaths. ‘‘Obsession,’’ which was published in the February 1935 issue of Midland Left, can be seen as a kind of companion poem to ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ which appeared later that summer in Partisan Review. Both poems depict Wright as imaginatively experiencing a lynching as a form of exorcism which was necessary for him to free himself, both as a man and a writer, from the psychic wounds he had received by growing up in Mississippi, a state which had more lynchings in the twentieth century than any other state. The narrator of ‘‘Obsession’’ regards lynching as a ‘‘haunting American symbol’’ which has ‘‘dwarfed and paled all other symbols.’’ It has

become an obsession for him which threatens to blind him with fear and reduce him to paralysis, a person ‘‘Listening helplessly to the groan of my black brothers.’’ The lynching is much more than the brutal death and mutilation of individual black men but has become for him a ghastly cultural ritual designed to enslave all black Americans with terror. The poem is broken into three parts. The first section presents the narrator as a passive victim of southern terror as he admits that he is in the grips of an ‘‘obsession’’ in which lynching is an ‘‘outlining for my life’’ and the ‘‘center of gravity’’ of his being. In the second stanza he asks ‘‘how long’’ will he be imprisoned by his fear and impotence as he listens helplessly to the anguished cries of lynched men. As he contemplates these black men, he imagines himself being lynched, as he stands on ‘‘tip-toe’’ with muscles aching and his nails biting into the flesh of his palms. The concluding stanza, however, suggests a very measured hope as he acknowledges that he is black and feels unified with his black ‘‘brothers.’’ Significantly, the poem does not end with him cowering in fear or imagining himself swinging from a rope. It concludes instead with him standing on a ‘‘deep rock’’ ready ‘‘to face the world.’’ In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright saw his chronically ill mother as embodying the 289

‘‘Old Habit and New Love’’ ‘‘meaningless pain and endless suffering’’ (Wright 117) which the white South had inflicted on black people. When he later worked in a Chicago hospital and observed the devocalized dogs used for laboratory experiments, he regarded these animals as ‘‘symbols of silent suffering’’ (Wright 359) which African Americans also faced in the North. His task as a man and a writer is ‘‘to wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering’’ (Wright 118). In writing ‘‘Obsession’’ and ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ Wright was taking the first steps toward becoming a free man by giving voice to his deepest fears and the suffering of his people. ‘‘Obsession’’ begins, significantly, with Wright resolutely declaring twice ‘‘Yet again I must speak of it,’’ rejecting the code of silence which southerners used to avoid the issue of lynching. Wright can then face his own demons by removing the ‘‘red splotch’’ of fear from his eyes. The ‘‘rock’’ he stands on at the end of the poem is his art which enables him not only to face reality but master it through consciousness and language. Margaret Walker has argued that ‘‘nineteen years in the deep and violent white South had permanently scarred Wright with a psychic wound of racism’’ (Walker 42). It was Wright’s triumph to transform this wound from a crippling obsession to a liberating art which enabled him to stand on solid ground and face the world. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper, 1991.

‘‘OLD HABIT AND NEW LOVE’’ Although not as angrily political and programmatic as many of the poems which Wright placed in leftist journals during the 1930s, ‘‘Old Habit and New Love’’ can nevertheless be seen as proletarian literature because it focuses on the personal dreams and aspirations of working class people. Published in the communist journal New Masses in their December 15, 1936 issue, it is written in

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long flowing lines of free verse and has a quietly reflective tone which is quite unusual in Wright’s early poetry. It contrasts sharply with his much more strident and harshly ironic poems such as ‘‘Transcontinental,’’ ‘‘A Red Love Note,’’ ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan,’’ and ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise.’’ It begins by contrasting a man’s rather grim work environment of ‘‘rusty levers’’ and ‘‘chilled flywheels’’ with his human longings, his ‘‘ache for marriage’’ which will make him ‘‘whole.’’ But this man’s dream has been made ’’dingy’’ by his habit of routine work, a life centered in his "lonely machine.’’ However, in the poem’s visionary conclusion, the narrator imagines a better future, a new ‘‘dawn’’ where workers will be on equal ground with everyone and will not only control the ‘‘world’s tools’’ but will also be ‘‘drafting the hope prints’’ of a rejuvenated society. The dingy ‘‘old habits’’ will be replaced by ’’a new love’’ which will enable them to enjoy the ‘‘green earth.’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

OLIVER, PAUL (25 May 1927– ) An English student of African-American music who published in 1960 an important study of blues entitled Blues Fell This Morning. The book surveys the history of blues and contains fragments of 350 lyrics organized according to important blues themes. Wright, who wrote the book’s Foreword, thought highly of Oliver’s work both for its thorough research into the historical and cultural forces which shaped blues music and also for its careful analysis of blues themes. In an interview given only a few months before his death, he claimed ‘‘It’s a fine book and worth a lot’’ (Kinnamon 221). Earlier that year, he had written his friend Margrit de Sablonie`re: ‘‘Paul Oliver wrote it and it is very good. It is an indictment

Outsider, The of racial conditions in America shown through the Negro’s songs, something a little on the line of my ‘Literature of the Negro in the United States’ ’’ (Fabre 620). Wright’s Foreword pays homage to the blues as a form of music which, paradoxically, probes both the extraordinary pain of African-American life while also transcending it ‘‘through sheer force of sensuality’’ into ‘‘an exuberant affirmation of life, of love, of sex, of movement, of hope’’ (Oliver v). He sees the blues as a potent and triumphant art form which expressed the resilience of black Americans as they were able to construct a richly human culture in a society designed to deprive them of humanity. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Oliver, Paul. Blues Fell This Morning. London: Horizon Press, 1960.

OUTSIDER, THE This novel is the most ambitious piece of fiction to come from the ‘‘existentialist’’ phase of Wright’s career when he exiled himself and his family in France and engaged in a serious study of the works of thinkers such as Soren Kierkegaard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Simone de Beauvoir. The novel was begun on Long Island in 1947 shortly before Wright left for Europe, was completed in draft form during his six-month stay in England in 1952, and was published by Harper on March 16, 1953. It was the first book Wright published since the appearance of Black Boy in 1945, ending what Hazel Rowley has called ‘‘an eight-year publishing hiatus’’ (Rowley 376), the longest dry spell of Wright’s career. Wright saw The Outsider as a new direction in his art which rejected the highly politicized perspectives of Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son as well as the preoccupation with specifically American racial problems which centered all of

his work from his early poetry to Black Boy. As he revealed to William Gardner Smith, an African-American novelist whom he knew in Paris: The break from the U.S. was more than a geographical change. It was a break with my former attitudes as a Negro and a Communist—an attempt to think over and redefine my attitudes and my thinking. I was trying to grapple with the big problem—the problem and meaning of western civilization as a whole and the relation of Negroes and other minority groups to it. (Fabre 366)

The Outsider took longer to write than any other of Wright’s books, as it was composed sporadically over a six-year period. His initial problem consisted of assimilating complex existentialist texts such as Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread, which provided The Outsider with its inscription, and Camus’s The Stranger and The Myth of Sysiphus, which gave him ideas about existential freedoms which go to the heart of the novel’s themes. He then struggled to find a suitable literary form which could embody and dramatize these concepts. He also experienced serious difficulties finding time to write the book since a wide variety of political involvements drew heavily from his time and energy. When he moved to London in early 1952, he was able to devote himself full-time to his writing and completed a long first draft of the book in six months. But his editor John Fischer and his agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. were sharply critical of the manuscript’s huge bulk and urged him to cut it by twenty-five percent. Wright agreed to make the changes and by the time the book was published, Wright eliminated 36,000 words from the first two books and made deep cuts in the other two sections as well. As Fabre observes, ‘‘Wright had probably never before had taken into account so many of the suggestions of his agents and editors’’ (Fabre 368). A brief plot summary of The Outsider reveals how different this novel is from his earlier work because its major thrust was broadly metaphysical 291

Outsider, The rather than narrowly political or racial. Its central character, Cross Damon, is indeed black but his problems center around philosophical notions of freedom and existential concepts of selfhood rather than specifically Marxist or ‘‘Negro’’ issues. He suffers from what the existentialists would call an ‘‘inauthentic’’ life; that is, an existence which is imposed upon him by an ‘‘absurd’’ environment which causes him to marry a woman he does not love and have three sons to whom he feels unrelated. Moreover, he feels shackled to a pregnant mistress he has little genuine feeling for, and a domineering mother who inspires painful ambivalence. 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 god-like, 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. Reviewers 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

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of Wright’s work, disapproved of what he called Wright’s ‘‘roll in the hay with existentialism’’ (Bontemps 15) 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’’ (Rugoff 14). 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’’ which was the trademark of his earlier fiction (Prescott 2). 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’’ (Hansberry 7). Wright was particularly stung by the anonymous review in Time which he considered a ‘‘low blow’’ (Fabre 369). This reviewer bashed The Outsider for faulty plot construction, a bombastic style and concluded that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, published a year earlier, was a superior novel. Reviews such as this deeply troubled Wright, feeding his doubts about his work and his sense of being upstaged by a younger generation of black American writers. Selected Bibliography: Bontemps, Arna. ‘‘Three Portraits of the Negro.’’ The Saturday Review, 36 (28 March 1953) 15–16. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hansberry, Lorraine. Untitled Review. Freedom, 14 (April 1953) 7. Prescott, Orville. ‘‘Books of the Times.’’ The New York Times (18 March 1953), 29. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times.

Outsider, The New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Rugoff, Milton. ‘‘Richard Wright’s New Novel of Negro Life in America.’’ New York Herald Tribune Book Review (22 March 1953), 4. Singh, Amritjit. ‘‘Richard Wright’s The Outsider: ‘‘Existentialist Exemplar or Critique?’’

College Language Association Journal 27 (June 1984), 357–70. Tate, Claudia. ‘‘Christian Existentialism in The Outsider.’’ College Language Association Journal 15 (June 1982), 250–72.

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P PADMORE, DOROTHY (?–1966) The English wife of George Padmore, whom Wright regarded as one of the leading figures in the Pan-African movement, which was committed to unifying black people all over the world and freeing black Africa from colonial rule. Constance Webb characterizes Dorothy Padmore as a ‘‘vital woman who assisted her husband in all aspects of his work’’ (Webb 324). She helped to support their marriage financially by working as a full-time secretary in the day and often spent evenings typing her husband’s manuscripts. The Padmore’s small apartment on Cranleigh Street in North London was a gathering point for a wide variety of radical leftists and Pan-Africanists, including Kwame Nkrumah, Eric Williams, and Jomo Kenyatta. Wright met the Padmores when he and his wife Ellen visited London in 1947 when they were returning to the United States after their first trip to Paris. The Wrights and the Padmores had much in common and developed a long and meaningful friendship. All four had been deeply involved in radical leftist politics of the 1930s and were disillusioned with communism while still maintaining a belief in the need for a revolution from the left. And as interracial couples at a

time when such unions were frowned upon and sometimes persecuted, they drew strength from each other’s marriages. They visited each other frequently in Paris and London during the late forties and throughout the fifties. During a 1953 visit to Paris, Dorothy suggested that Wright visit the Gold Coast where their friend Kwame Nkrumah was Prime Minister and was working to free his country and form an independent black nation which would become Ghana in 1957. Dorothy, who had visited Ghana and had an in-depth understanding of its politics and history, helped Wright plan his trip and advised him on many important matters. Her husband helped Wright secure a passport from the British and encouraged him to write a book about his experiences in the Gold Coast which would become Black Power. After George Padmore’s death in 1959, Dorothy continued her friendship with Ellen and Richard Wright. She visited Wright in Paris in September 1960 several months before his death, and the two discussed Nkrumah’s growing problems in Ghana. Selected Bibliography: Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: The Biography of a Major Figure in American Literature. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

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Padmore, George

PADMORE, GEORGE (1902–1959) Considered one of the fathers of the African liberation movements of the 1940s and 1950s, Padmore was born Malcolm Nurse in Trinidad in 1902. He came from a black middle class family, as his father was a schoolmaster, and he was educated at private schools. At age 22, he immigrated to the United States, planning to study medicine. These plans abruptly changed, however, when Nurse joined the Communist Party soon after his arrival in the United States and took the party name of George Padmore. Like many black intellectuals of his times, he regarded the Communist Party as one of the few political organizations that were willing to address racial problems in America and colonialized countries in Africa and Asia. He was strongly drawn to Marxist theory which transcended racial and class lines while envisioning a classless society. He was also impressed by the party’s eagerness to put blacks in positions of authority, and he rose quickly in party ranks. In 1929, Padmore went to the Soviet Union and became head of the Negro Bureau of the Communist International Labor Unions (ITUC-NW) and served also as secretary of the Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. Both groups were organized by the ‘‘Comminterm’’ to agitate and mobilize blacks in the United States and the colonial world. He also founded and edited Negro Worker, the journal of the Negro movement in the party. Padmore, however, became disillusioned with communism in the early 1930s when the party cut back on its anti-colonial programs to gain a greater acceptance of the Soviet Union by western powers. The ITUC-NW was disbanded in 1933, and Padmore soon resigned from all ‘‘Comminterm’’ activities. He was officially expelled from the Communist Party in 1934. From this point, Padmore’s political focus shifted from communism to Pan-Africanism, a series of movements designed to promote African unity and eliminate colonialism from Africa. He wrote extensively on Pan-African themes,

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publishing books such as How Britain Ruled Africa (1936), and Pan Africanism or Communism? (1956). He also published widely in western journals, gave many lectures, and formed study groups for colonial students in London. His small apartment on Cranleigh Street became a center for those interested in the struggle against colonialism. C. L. R. James and Eric Williams were frequent visitors. In 1944, Padmore helped to found the Pan African Federation and a year later he organized the Pan African Conference in Manchester, England. W. E. B. Du Bois was named chairman of the conference and participants included Marcus Garvey’s widow and Kwame Nkrumah, an African nationalist from the Gold Coast who helped to free that country from colonial rule and become Ghana in 1957. Padmore developed a deep friendship with Nkrumah and was one of the people who encouraged him to return to Africa after World War II to lead black nationalist movements. Padmore came to see Ghana as in the vanguard of African liberation, and in 1957, he was invited there to attend its independence celebrations. He stayed for nearly two years, becoming one of Nkrumah’s closest political advisors. Ironically, there was some resistance to his presence by political leaders in Ghana who viewed him as an outsider who did not understand their traditions. In 1958, Padmore organized a meeting in Accra of the heads of independent African states and he accompanied Nkrumah on several African tours. However, his health deteriorated and he was forced to return to London where he died in 1959. His ashes were buried in Accra at Nkrumah’s request. Richard Wright, on C. L. R. James’s request, met Padmore in London in 1946, and the two soon became close friends and intellectual colleagues. They had much in common as both became deeply involved with communism as young men only to become bitterly disillusioned with the party when they realized it had inhibited their mental freedom and betrayed its

Pagan Spain: A Report of a Journey into the Past commitments to black people. But both remained what Michel Fabre has described as ‘‘noncommunist revolutionaries’’ (Fabre xix) after leaving the party. In 1946, Wright, who had met Nkrumah in 1940, was becoming greatly interested in Pan-Africanism and Padmore eagerly nurtured this interest. It was Padmore who encouraged Wright to go to the Gold Coast in 1953 and helped plan his trip and secure his visa. Wright at this time shared Padmore’s enthusiasm for that country, seeing it as a model for other African nations freeing themselves from colonial domination. He saw the Gold Coast, and later Ghana, as ‘‘an excellent example of a nation in transition from a feudal culture to a pre-industrial civilization’’ (Fabre 387). Like Padmore, he believed that it should modernize, freeing itself of both its colonial and tribal pasts and become an industrial nation. Padmore encouraged Wright to compose a book about his experiences in the Gold Coast which eventually became Black Power. Although this book drew mostly negative reviews, Padmore praised it enthusiastically. Although Wright’s initial impressions of the Gold Coast squared with Padmore’s positive vision of that nation, he eventually was disappointed with the Gold coast and cut short his visit there. As Fabre has stressed, he was struck by ‘‘the psychological gap between the country of his ancestors and himself ’’ (Fabre 393). He was discouraged by the physical backwardness of the country and had little use for its tribal customs. Like Padmore, he was a westerner who was viewed as an outsider by many Africans. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Power. New York: Harper, 1954.

PAGAN SPAIN: A REPORT OF A JOURNEY INTO THE PAST Since reading Hemingway’s fiction and becoming intensely interested in the Spanish Civil War

during the 1930s, Wright had been fascinated by Spanish culture. But he hesitated to visit that country because he feared repercussions for the anti-Franco statements he had made as a communist. As Michel Fabre has pointed out, Wright ‘‘had been haunted by [Spain’s] spiritual legacy’’ (Fabre 409) and by the mid-1950s wanted to write a book about ‘‘the Spanish soul’’ (Fabre 411). He made three trips to Spain in 1954 and 1955 to do careful research on Spanish history and culture. Between August 15, 1954 and September 9, 1954, he drove 4,000 miles through Spain in his Citroen, visiting Barcelona, Madrid, Cordoba, Seville, and Granada. He returned to Spain on November 8, 1954 and stayed there until midDecember when he went back to Paris to spend the Christmas holidays with his family. Between February 20 and April 10, 1955, he made a third trip to Spain, studying its religious traditions and folk life. He began writing the book February 1956, and by March of that year, he had produced a manuscript of 537 pages. Paul Reynolds, Jr., his agent, was sharply critical of it, finding it ‘‘overwritten, too long, and too contentious’’ (Rowley 475). Wright made substantial cuts and revisions and it was finally published by Harper in February 1957. It sold poorly but was, for the most part, favorably reviewed. Granville Hicks described the book as ‘‘an honest and searching account’’ (Reilly 297) of Wright’s unique response to Spain. Saunders Redding characterized it as ‘‘an interesting—indeed, fascinating book’’ which provided a powerful account of Wright’s ‘‘tragic sense of life’’ (Reilly 299). But Roi Ottley, an admirer of Wright’s fiction, found Pagan Spain, like Wright’s other travel books, a mere ‘‘writing exercise’’ (Reilly 298) which reflected Wright’s thin understanding of Spanish culture. He concluded that Wright’s talents would be better put to use exploring American racial problems like those erupting in Montgomery, Alabama. It is revealing to compare and contrast Pagan Spain with Wright’s previous book about his trip to Ghana, Black Power. Wright’s response to Spain, like his assessment of Africa, was 297

Pan-Africanism 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 bull fights 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 which 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. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Reilly, John. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Whatley Smith, Virginia. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

PAN-AFRICANISM A general term for black nationalist movements in the twentieth century which promoted black

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unity and the freeing of Africa from white supremacy and colonial rule. While PanAfricanists agreed on these two broad concepts, they differed widely on how to implement them. W. E. B. Du Bois was an early proponent of Pan-Africanism, organizing a series of PanAfrican congresses, first in London (1900) and followed by congresses in Paris (1919), London and Brussels (1921), London and Lisbon (1923), and New York City (1923). These meetings were attended largely by black intelligentsia from North America and the West Indies. Instead of proposing immediate independence of African nations, they argued for gradual self-government and racial cooperation. By 1944, however, George Padmore and several other black nationalists organized the PanAfrican Federation in London which demanded African independence and autonomy. A year later, the federation convened in Manchester, England the Sixth Pan-African Congress chaired by Du Bois and attended by radical leftists such as Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya, Kwame Nkrumah from the Gold Coast, Wallace Johnson from Sierra Leone, and S. L. Akintola from Nigeria. This congress proposed the broadest possible application of Pan-Africanist ideas in what was called the ‘‘United States of Africa.’’ In 1958, the First Congress of Independent African States met in Accra, Ghana to discuss intergovernmental cooperation between emerging African nations. Ghana, the first black British colony to free itself from colonial rule, became a center for the discussion of Pan-Africanism and Nkrumah became one of its most important spokesmen. After leaving the Communist Party in the early 1940s, Richard Wright became keenly interested in Pan-African ideas. While no longer a member of a radically leftist organization, he was what Michel Fabre called ‘‘a non-Communist revolutionary’’ (Fabre xix) on the radical left. He saw Pan-Africanism as a new and more potent means of translating into action his desires for racial justice and political change. He met

Paris, France Nkrumah in the United States in 1940 and began a long friendship with George Padmore when he visited London in 1946. He saw Padmore as at the ‘‘root’’ (Kinnamon 228) of the Pan-African movement and regarded that movement as providing him with a broader international perspective from which American racial problems could be better understood. It was Padmore who encouraged Wright to visit the Gold Coast in 1953, three years before it would free itself from British colonial rule and become Ghana. Wright shared Padmore’s belief that Ghana was in the vanguard of the liberation of black Africa and represented, perhaps, the beginning of Pan-African unity. He also saw that country as ‘‘an excellent example of a nation in transition from a feudal culture to a preindustrial civilization’’ (Fabre 387). Like Padmore, he was convinced that African nations should modernize, freeing themselves of both their tribal and colonial pasts. While Wright endorsed black nationalism as ‘‘a sweeping, powerful force’’ (Kinnamon 189), he was deeply fearful that the tribal divisions within emerging black nations would prevent them from achieving the unity desired by Pan-Africanists. Wright’s serious interest in Pan-Africanism resulted in his writing two important books, Black Power (1954), which describes his trip to the Gold Coast and The Color Curtain (1955), his report on the Bandung Conference whose purpose it was to make Pan-Africanism an even broader concept by unifying people of color from all over the globe in their struggle against colonialism. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

PARIS, FRANCE In 1946, on his first exploratory visit to the capital of France, Wright toured the city on the way to his hotel. From the outset, he was overwhelmed by its gentle beauty. While in town, he was feted not just by the government but by his publishers

(Gaston Gallimard, Albin Michel) and the literati (Sylvia Beach, Andre´ Gide, Albert Camus, Le´opold Senghor, Aime´ Ce´saire, and others). He settled in Paris definitively in 1947. Among the countless Parisian locations to which the name of Richard Wright is linked most important are perhaps Les Deux Magots, the Cafe´ Tournon, and Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery. The well-heated Les Deux Magots at 170 Boulevard St. Germain was the social center for existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir during the war, furnishing at once a workplace and a meeting place. In 1946–48, Wright also adopted it as a favorite cafe´ along with the Cafe´ Flore next door at no. 172. Sartre then lived nearby at 42 rue Bonaparte, where Wright visited him just before Sartre and Beauvoir moved to Montparnasse in 1946. It was at the Deux Magots in his first encounter with James Baldwin that Wright greeted him on his arrival in Paris in 1948 with a ‘‘Hey, boy!’’ From Chester Himes’s arrival in Paris in 1953, when he met Wright just as quickly as Baldwin had, Himes frequented several literary cafe´s, the two existentialist ones but also the two working-class ones that came to replace them for Wright and other Americans in Paris. By the early 1950s, the well-known St. Germain cafe´s had become tourist destinations, noisy and impractical for literary figures and their exchanges. Wright at first helped stake out the Monaco near his apartment on rue Monsieur-le-Prince as a haven for black expatriates (now Comptoir le Relais at no. 5). But it was ultimately at the Cafe´ Tournon a few blocks away that he came to hold court in the heart of the Latin Quarter, opposite the Luxembourg Gardens at 18-20 rue de Tournon. The Tournon was discovered by William Gardner Smith, who at one time lived in the hotel above and promoted it in his novel The Stone Face. The Tournon was popularized by the exuberant presence of Ollie Harrington, whom Wright met there soon after Harrington’s arrival in France. For fifteen years after the war, Cafe´ Tournon was a center for socializing among the black expatriate community, including picking up white women. Himes 299

Park, Robert described it as ‘‘the most notorious interracial cafe´ in Europe,’’ and it was there that he saw or met many of his black brothers, including Wright. The Paris Review founders, again including Wright, convened there. The blacks usually sat in the back, enjoying the attentions of proprietors Monsieur and especially Madame Alazard. There, the infamous shouting match between Ollie and Richard Gibson took place. It was also at the Tournon that Ollie Harrington spread unfounded rumors of foul play around the sudden death of Wright on November 28, 1960. Wright’s funeral was held and his body cremated along with a copy of Black Boy at Pe` re Lachaise Cemetery on December 3, 1960. At the insistence of Harrington and Himes, Ellen Wright opened to the public the closed ceremony, but few knew of it in time to attend. Thomas Diop of Pre´sence Africaine gave the eulogy, followed by a few remarks by other friends. The urn containing Wright’s ashes, still warm, was interred in ‘‘case 4596’’ of the columbarium at the cemetery but later moved to niche 848. Marked on a black tile in gold writing are the words ‘‘he didn’t find Wright hidden at the foot of a stairway to vaults.’’ Roy Rosenstein Selected Bibliography: Anderson, Christiann, and Monique Y. Wells. Paris Reflections: Walks through African-American Paris. Blackburg, Virginia: McDonald and Woodward, 2002. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Second edition. Trans. Isabel Barzun. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1993. Fabre, Michel, and John A. Williams. A Street Guide to African Americans in Paris. Paris: Cercle d’Etudes AfroAme´ricaines, 1996. Harrington, Oliver W. ‘‘The Last Days of Richard Wright.’’ Why I Left America and Other Essays. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993, 20–25. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Stovall, Tyler. Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam’s, 1968.

PARK, ROBERT (1864–1944) The main driving force in establishing the Chicago School of Sociology at the University of 300

Chicago, he established America’s first department of sociology in 1892, created The American Journal of Sociology in 1895, and recruited pioneering philosophers and sociologists such as John Dewey, George Herbert Mead, and Thorstein Veblen to the University of Chicago. Wright, who was strongly influenced by the Chicago School of Sociology in developing his vision of African-American urban life, met Park in 1941. The 77-year-old Park was reputed to have greeted Wright by saying ‘‘I rise in your honor, sir’’ and then asking ‘‘How in the hell did you happen?’’ (Rowley 250). Park was a political conservative who had worked for Booker T. Washington at the Tuskegee Institute and endorsed Washington’s gradualism and accommodationism. He was therefore stunned by the fact that Wright had triumphed over a social environment that Park had believed too overwhelming to permit the dramatic growth he observed in Wright. Although Wright certainly rejected Park’s excessive emphasis on the environment’s power to control and shape the individual, he was influenced by Park’s concept that ‘‘marginal men’’ are equipped with special powers of vision which enable them to lucidly see the dynamics of the social world which most people are blind to. Wright’s fiction is filled with marginal figures such as Bigger Thomas, Fred Daniels, and Cross Damon whose status as outsiders provide them with penetrating vision. Selected Bibliography: Capetti, Carla. ‘‘Sociology of an Existence: Richard Wright and the Chicago School.’’ MELUS,12 (summer 1985), 25–43. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

PARTISAN REVIEW Partisan Review was originally founded in 1934 as the official journal of the New York branch of the John Reed Club under the editorship of Phillip Rahv. In its beginnings, therefore, it was closely linked to the radical left, having a strongly Marxist orientation and publishing the work of young

‘‘Personalism’’ socialist and communist writers. On the prompting of the Communist Party, it was merged in 1934 with Jack Conroy’s Anvil, becoming Partisan Review and Anvil. It ceased publication after a few years because of the personal and ideological wrangling among its editorial board, many of whom had begun to object to its radically leftist agenda. It was revived under the name Partisan Review in 1937 by a new board of editors who took a strongly independent stand on political and social issues. The new version of the magazine was edited by Rahv and drew the support of important American intellectuals such as Mary McCarthy, Dwight McDonald, James T. Farrell, and F. W. Dupee. Over the years, Partisan Review has published fiction by many outstanding American writers. Saul Bellow’s early stories found their way into the journal and some of Farrell’s Studs Lonigan was serialized there. Critics such as Richard Chase and Lionel Trilling, who would help to shape the literary standards of American scholars in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, played important roles in the development of the journal. Wright, whose leftist principles and membership in the Communist Party would have drawn him naturally to the Partisan Review in its early days, published work in that journal and at one time was listed as an associate editor of Partisan Review and Anvil. ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ Wright’s powerful poem about lynching, appeared in the July–August 1935 issue of Partisan Review. His review of Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder was published in the April 1936 issue of Partisan Review and Anvil. He also wrote a letter defending his friend Meyer Levin against the charge of being a reactionary which was printed in the June 1936 edition of Partisan Review and Anvil. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

PE`RE LACHAISE CEMETERY One of the most famous and most visited cemeteries in the world; it is located in the 20e arrondissement in the eastern suburbs of Paris and contains the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years, including Richard Wright. The cemetery was established by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in 1804. Today there are over 300,000 bodies buried in Pe`re Lachaise. Some of the important figures buried there are Honore´ de Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Georges Bizet, Eugene Delacroix, Gustave Dore´, Marcel Proust, Georges Seurat, Gertrude Stein, and Oscar Wilde. Richard Wright’s remains were cremated and his ashes deposited in Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery on Saturday, December 3, 1960. His wife wanted a closed ceremony but was persuaded by Ollie Harrington and Chester Himes to have what Hazel Rowley has described as ‘‘a small commemorative service’’ (Rowley 525) attended by Wright’s family and a few friends. Thomas Diop gave the funeral eulogy and some of Wright’s friends spoke briefly. The extremely high regard which the French had for Wright is vividly demonstrated by his historical resting place at Pe` re Lachaise, a place where some of France’s most distinguished citizens are honored. Selected Bibliography: Richard Wright: the Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

‘‘PERSONALISM’’ An unpublished essay which Wright wrote sometime before ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ appeared in the fall 1937 issue of New Challenge. In this essay, Wright tries to reconcile his desire to remain true to Marxist theory, which is collectivist in outlook, and his strong desire to remain true to his vision of life as an individual AfricanAmerican man. According to Constance Webb,

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Peterson, William he delivered this paper in July 1936 at the Midwest Writers’ Conference. Whereas ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ worked out a successful balance between Wright’s personal vision and his broader commitment to Communist Party ideology which party officials found acceptable, ‘‘Personalism’’ has elements in it which Daniel Aaron has characterized as ‘‘heretical’’ (Aaron 43). In this short essay, Wright clearly emphasizes the personal over the political and this perhaps explains why the essay was never published in leftist journals such as New Challenge, New Masses, or Anvil. Wright defines ’’Personalism’’ as a means of social protest which expresses itself ‘‘in terms as individual and personal as possible.’’ It ultimately goes beyond a desire to ‘‘move’’ people to external action and instead forces them ‘‘to take sides for or against certain moral issues’’ (Webb 138). According to Webb, Wright’s communist associates in Chicago responded to his essay and speech with considerable suspicion, sensing in it a form of individualism which they felt was at variance with the collectivism of Marxist principles. Party leaders, however, did not comment on the speech, for fear of alienating Wright whom they now regarded as a valuable resource for organizing American blacks. ‘‘Personalism’’ clearly reveals that even in Wright’s early years as a communist, he felt a tension between party discipline and his personal convictions. This tension would grow for the remainder of the 1930s and early 1940s until it reached a breaking point in 1942 when he left the Communist Party. As he revealed in American Hunger, communism ironically took on many of the repressive features of southern life against which he had earlier rebelled: ‘‘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’’ (Wright 119). Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. ‘‘Richard Wright and the Communist Party.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan

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Press, 1971. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: The Biography of a Major Figure in American Literature. New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

PETERSON, WILLIAM He was one of Wright’s teachers at SmithRobertson school who remembered Wright fondly as an avid reader and an exceptionally bright young man. When Margaret Walker interviewed Peterson and O. B. Cobbins, who also had taught Wright at Smith-Robertson, they characterized him as ‘‘a very intelligent boy who was always reading novels, magazines, and newspapers’’ (Walker 27). Each recalled Wright as a student who would stay inside the school reading while others were outside playing during recess. Peterson later taught at the newly opened Lanier High School for blacks which Wright briefly attended before leaving for Memphis in 1927. He befriended Wright and was one of the few people at this point in Wright’s life who encouraged his reading and writing. Shortly after Wright left Jackson for Memphis, Peterson relocated to Florida where he taught for many years. He returned to Jackson in 1947 and, two years later, took a position as an English professor at Jackson State College. He retired in 1967 at the age of seventy. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

PHOTOGRAPHY OF RICHARD WRIGHT Richard Wright, an accomplished amateur photographer, saw the medium as a powerful communicative tool. One of his photographs appeared in the first edition of 12 Million Black Voices, the photo-text book Wright published with Edwin Rosskam in 1941, and in the 1950s Wright photographed extensively for three non-fiction book projects: Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954), The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1955), and

Plessy v. Ferguson Pagan Spain (1956). Despite Wright’s wishes and efforts, only a few pictures appeared in the Dutch and English editions of Black Power, and none were published in any editions of Pagan Spain or The Color Curtain. The photographs are held today in the Richard Wright papers at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and they are available on the Beinecke’s website. They include about 600 prints of the Gold Coast on the eve of independence, constituting Wright’s most complex and fully realized photographic project; about seventy prints, negatives, contact prints, and collected images made in Spain; and negatives of a number of portraits of attendees at the Bandung Conference. Wright developed a sophisticated understanding of photography from his work with Farm Security Administration (FSA) editor and photographer Edwin Rosskam. The FSA, a New Deal agency aiding poor farmers, sent over a dozen accomplished photographers crisscrossing the country during the years 1935–1939; their thousands of photographs, now at the Library of Congress, helped to publicize rural poverty and the agency’s measures to ameliorate it. Rosskam proposed to the novelist in 1940 that he author a book recounting African-American history using text and FSA photographs. Wright viewed the FSA archives in 1940, working with Rosskam to select images for early chapters on rural life. In April 1941, he spent two weeks on Chicago’s South Side with Rosskam and FSA photographer Russell Lee; Wright and sociologist Horace Cayton guided the photographers as they made over 1,500 images there; nineteen were selected to illustrate the final chapters of 12 Million Black Voices on migrants’ city life. This coverage, the first in-depth representation of an African-American urban community over which blacks themselves had some control, presents a vibrant, multifaceted city within a city, even as it specifies the suffering caused by overcrowding and unemployment. The photographs Wright made in Africa and Spain—and his ideas about their use—testify to lessons learned in the Chicago work. Like the FSA photographers, Wright approached

documentary photography as a communications mode that could reveal important social truths rather than a transparent record of spontaneous events. Like other African Americans, he was aware of photojournalism’s ideological potential, so that he embraced black-controlled photography as a way to counter the multitude of degrading stereotypes regularly produced in mainstream media. Wright used his Gold Coast and Spanish photographs as aides-memoires in composing his texts, but his uniquely visual record of an African society in transition is an achievement in its own right. In the process of reconceiving himself as a European-dwelling ‘‘Western man of color’’ when he visited the continent, Wright used an emphasis on spaces, structures, and social dynamics to show, especially, Gold Coast cities as hybrid societies galvanized by both tribal, village customs and Western notions of progress. The photographs, enlivened by Wright’s nostalgia, are very different from then (and still)—conventional western representations of African people. Wright’s photographic legacy includes specific images, but it consists as well of the nuanced appreciation and critical practice the author brought to this powerful medium of representation and persuasion. Wright never doubted that photography could—and must—serve the interests of people of color. Maren Stange Selected Bibliography: Smith, Virginia Whatley, ed. Richard Wright’s Travel Writing: New Reflections. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Stange, Maren. Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, 1941– 1943. New York: The New Press, 2003. Stange, Maren. ‘‘ ‘Not What We Seem’: Image and Text in 12 Million Black Voices,’’ in Ostendorf, Berndt, et al., eds., Iconographies of Power. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Press, 2003.

PLESSY V. FERGUSON A landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision made in 1896 which laid the legal foundation for the system of southern segregation which became formalized in the late nineteenth century and 303

PM flourished until it was dismantled by the civil rights movement of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In making this decision, the Supreme Court affirmed the ‘‘separate but equal’’ principle in public transportation facilities throughout the United States. It thus authenticated the ‘‘Jim Crow’’ laws which had been developing in southern states during the 1880s and 1890s. These laws kept the races separate in all aspects of public life including education, restaurants, transportation, rest rooms, funeral parlors, and even cemeteries. Moreover, these laws also applied to many aspects of private life, forbidding sexual contact and marriage between the races. The case originated in 1892 when Homer Plessy challenged Louisiana’s laws requiring special separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads. Plessy, a mulatto who was seven-eighths white and one-eighth black, refused to give up his seat in a whites-only railroad car and move to a colored section in a train bound from New Orleans to nearby Covington, Louisiana. He was arrested under Louisiana’s Jim Crow Act of 1890. Four years later, the Supreme Court heard the case and voted 7 to 1 against Plessy. The majority opinion by Justice Henry Brown rejected Plessy’s claim that enforced segregation put a ‘‘badge of inferiority’’ on black people and also argued that social prejudices could not be eliminated by legislation. It concluded that the only way ‘‘social equality’’ could be achieved between the races was through the natural acceptance of this principle by all people involved and ‘‘the voluntary consent of individuals.’’ The Plessy v. Ferguson decision helped to create the social world in which Wright was raised. As a young man growing up in the brutally segregated states of Mississippi, Arkansas, and Tennessee, he encountered a society in which the races were separated in a nearly total way, and harsh penalties were imposed on anyone who broke the color barrier or challenged white supremacy in any way. This scarred Wright psychologically at an early age, and almost all of his writing is an

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attempt to come to terms with the traumas of segregated life and to find alternatives to it. The South depicted in Wright’s fiction and autobiographical works is seen by Wright as a naturalistic trap and a Dantean hell for both its black victims and its white victimizers. A world of physical walls separating people from each other and psychological walls dividing individuals from their true natures, Wright’s South is a cauldron of fear and hatred erupting regularly in terrible violence. As an adult, Wright sought many different alternatives to the segregated South. He went North to Chicago at age nineteen hoping to find the American dream of people united in a free democratic society only to discover new and subtler forms of segregation in the urban North. He then was strongly attracted to Marxism and communism, sensing in them ‘‘a common vision which bound us all together’’ (Crossman 141) in a classless society. Eventually despairing of leftist politics’ ability to deliver on its ideological promises, he went to France in search of a society which would embrace him as a man and an artist. His search for community later in his life also drew him to Pan-Africanism and other ideologies which promise to recover a ‘‘home’’ for dispossessed blacks in Third World nations. Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam Books, 1952. Dollard, John. Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Garden City, New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957. Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in The Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.

PM A daily newspaper started in New York in 1941 by Wright’s friend, Roger Pippett. It was liberal in outlook and was intended to serve as an alternative to conventional newspapers and magazines which the editors of PM considered too conservative. Contributors included Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin. Max Lerner served as one of its editors.

Poetry of Richard Wright Wright, who tried in the early 1940s to launch a magazine whose editorial policies resembled PM’s stance but was unable to raise the funds necessary to bring such a project to fruition, had cordial relations with PM’s editors and contributed several essays and book reviews to it. His PM reviews include Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen (March 11, 1945), Alger’s Collected Novels (September 16, 1945), Arthur Miller’s Focus and Chester Himes’s If He Hollers, Let Him Go (November 25, 1945), and E. M. Forster’s Aspects of The Novel (March 16, 1947). In addition, he was interviewed by PM about the ‘‘Harlem Riot of 1943’’ and his impressions of France when he returned there in 1947. His enthusiastic praise of Stein’s Wars I Have Seen in PM led to his forming a friendship with her. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Jackson, Lawrence. Ralph Ellison: The Emergence of a Genius. New York: John Wiley, 2001.

POE, EDGAR ALLAN (19 January 1809– 7 October 1849) Nineteenth-century poet, short story writer and literary critic who invented the detective story and brought to a high degree of excellence the gothic tale, two fictional modes which fascinated Wright throughout his career. According to Michel Fabre, ‘‘Poe was certainly an early major influence’’ (Fabre 14–15) on Wright whose first stories ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’ and ‘‘Superstition’’ were in the gothic mode of Poe. But Wright used Poe-esque techniques in much of his major work, for example in the surrealistic urban landscape of Native Son, the claustrophobic below ground setting of ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and the narrative of detection in The Outsider. Dismembered corpses and ghastly violence abound in Wright’s work as they do in Poe’s short fiction and poetry. Indeed, the mysterious white cat in Native Son has been compared by a variety of critics to its equally creepy counterpart in Poe’s ‘‘The Black Cat.’’ And the ghostly white females who are not

uncommon in Poe’s poetry and tales also can be found in modified form haunting Wright’s work. Poe would have been an important literary antecedent of Wright for a variety of reasons. Both writers were drawn to gothic settings which not only evoked mood but also served as mindscapes reflecting the inner thoughts and subconscious drives of their central characters. And Poe’s interest in abnormal psychology, especially as it applies to criminal behavior, would certainly have touched deep chords in Wright’s sensibility. Most important for Wright, though, was Poe’s vision of life as extended nightmare. Whereas Poe had to dramatize this vision by resorting to fantasy, Wright always insisted that such nightmare was a central part of a black America’s actual life. As Wright chillingly stressed in the final sentence of ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ ‘‘And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him’’ (Wright 5). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. ‘‘Black and White Cat: Wright’s Gothic and the Influence of Poe.’’ Poe Studies 4 (1971), 17–19. McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.’’ Saturday Review 22 (June 1, 1940), 4–5.

POETRY OF RICHARD WRIGHT An interesting irony in Wright’s career can be found in the fact that although his major achievement as a writer was in prose, his entire career was bracketed by his writing of poetry. Excluding the publication of ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’ in a Jackson, Mississippi newspaper when Wright was sixteen, Wright’s first serious publication consisted of a series of poems which appeared in the mid-1930s in a variety of leftist journals such as Left Front, The Anvil, Midland Left, International Literature, New Masses, and Partisan Review. And at the very end of his career he wrote some 4,000 haiku poems, selecting 811 of them for publication. The nineteen leftist poems which Wright published between 1934 and 1939 are collected in Michel Fabre’s 1985 book, The World of Richard 305

Poetry of Richard Wright Wright, but, aside from ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ they have received little critical attention, and only a few have been reprinted. Fabre’s essay ‘‘From Revolutionary Poetry to Haiku,’’ which originally appeared in the Autumn 1970 issue of Studies in Black Literature, remains the best study of Wright’s early verse. As Fabre stresses, this early proletarian poetry has genuine importance because as apprentice work it vividly reveals ‘‘the major tendencies of Wright’s imagination’’ (Fabre 34). Centered in Marxist ideas which Wright would refine in Uncle Tom’s Children, ironize in Native Son, and reject in Black Boy/American Hunger, these poems became a kind of foundation upon which much of Wright’s subsequent writing rests. As Fabre stresses: At this stage of its development, Wright’s art already rests on a solid culture base in which we can distinguish several distinct sources: a Protestant tradition incubated under the aegis of his intransigent grandmother; a wide and eclectic reading; a vital knowledge of American folklore; a keen sensitivity to nature and a truly elemental imagination. (Fabre 39)

The image of fire which pervades much of Wright’s early poetry, is a vivid example of how Wright’s ‘‘truly elemental imagination’’ worked. Fire, which Keneth Kinnamon has described as ‘‘a central metaphor of Wright’s creative imagination’’ (Kinnamon 15), is used in Wright’s poetry sometimes as an image of destruction and at other times as a means of purification. ‘‘Obsession’’ and ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ describe lynchings where fiery explosions of racial hatred result in black men being burned alive. ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ imagines Marxist revolution as a ‘‘red stream of molten anger’’ which will ‘‘blister’’ the ‘‘rottening walls’’ of capitalism. This poem claims that a corrupt society will be purified by ‘‘the hot cleansing breath’’ of revolution. ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ pictures revolution as ‘‘a red clap of thunder rising from the very depths of hell.’’ Wright’s mature work is likewise pervaded by powerful images of fire. Uncle Tom’s Children

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describes two fiery lynchings in graphic detail and imagines political revolt in apocalyptic terms as hot retribution. Native Son portrays Bigger Thomas’s conscience as a raging furnace, and Black Boy/American Hunger pictures the segregated South as a Dantean Hell. It is a fire which destroys Cross Damon’s past in The Outsider, enabling him to construct a new identity and a disastrous nightclub fire in The Long Dream which traps and incinerates over a hundred people. Wright’s early poems are also filled with religious motifs which would resonate throughout his later work. Poems such as ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ look forward to a class struggle which will discredit the old ‘‘gods’’ of capitalism (money and class) and eventually produce a better society centered in the new ‘‘gods’’ of communism (brotherhood and justice). In a similar way, ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ pictures depression America as destroyed by an Old Testament deluge that will prepare the way for a new world, a heavenly classless society built on ‘‘the cleared and conquered grounds.’’ ‘‘Rise and Live’’ also takes the form of a poetic sermon exhorting oppressed people to ‘‘rise’’ from a condition of being ‘‘aliens’’ and to ‘‘live’’ in a new world which is their ‘‘home.’’ Much of Wright’s later work will make extensive use of such religious convictions. As Fabre stresses, Wright was brought up in a fundamentalist Seventh Day Adventist home and although he clearly rejected the ‘‘dogmas of his religion,’’ its ‘‘images remained engraved in his mind’’ (Fabre 40). Indeed, the experience of personal and cultural conversion running through most of his political poems plays a prominent role in his most important work. The bleak vision of southern life described in Uncle Tom’s Children is to some extent counterbalanced in its redemptive promise of a transformed society centered in Marxist faith. Bigger Thomas undergoes in Book Three of Native Son a personal conversion, transcending his previous status as a victim of a racist society and undergoing a lonely journey to existential selfhood. Black Boy/American Hunger,

Poindexter, David likewise, dramatizes Wright’s triumph over environment when he achieves a ‘‘new life’’ (296) of enriched consciousness and existential action. Wright’s later fiction often ironically inverts the experience of conversion as Cross Damon and Erskine Fowler seek new lives in acts of violence but lack the moral depth and psychological growth necessary to become new men. Wright wrote two important poems early in his career which were not focused on political issues but centered instead on a matter of grave personal concern, lynching. ‘‘Obsession’’ and ‘‘Between the World and Me,’’ which appeared in 1935, enabled Wright to confront and master the ultimate nightmare of his early life. Wright, whose uncle Silas Hoskins was lynched when whites grew jealous of his business success and whose friend’s brother was castrated for allegedly having sexual relations with a white woman, described lynching in ‘‘Obsession’’ as a ‘‘haunting American symbol’’ of racial hatred and social control. Such violence was designed to reduce blacks to what Wright described in Black Boy/American Hunger as ‘‘meaningless suffering’’ (Wright 184) because it was ‘‘silent suffering’’ (Wright 359). By articulating his feelings about lynching in these two poems Wright was able to confront his fears which threatened to reduce him to silence and he thus was able to exorcise the demons which blocked his path as a writer. He then could begin a career in prose which would enable him to ‘‘wring a meaning out of meaningless suffering’’ (Wright 118). After writing ‘‘King Joe,’’ a blues poem in honor of Joe Louis which appeared in the New York Amsterdam Star News in October 1941 and was performed by Count Basie for Okeh Records, Wright put his poetry on the back burner until 1955 when he began writing Celebration, a long free verse poem which was never completed. But four years later, in a time of serious personal difficulty and declining health, Wright surprisingly began writing haiku poems, producing some 4,000 of them between the fall of 1959 and March 1960. He collected 811 haikus for publication but died before he could place them with a

publisher. A collection of Wright’s best haiku, Haiku: This Other World was edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Tener and appeared in book form in 1998. These extraordinary three-line poems do not address the social and political issues which centered Wright’s previous writing but instead distilled Wright’s vision into an expression of pure lyrical feeling as they explore in a beautifully concrete way man’s relationship with nature. Whatever peace Wright was able to achieve in his troubled later years can be found in these lovely poems. Margaret Walker, who knew Wright in the 1930s when he was writing poetry and was emerging as a fiction writer, has observed that ‘‘It cannot be stressed enough that Wright began as a poet’’ since his ‘‘genius found its first flowering’’ (Walker 65) in poetry which presented in embryonic form many of the images, symbols and themes developed in his mature work. His early political verse was a kind of experimental testing grounds and his late haikus distilled a powerful current of personal feeling and spiritual aspiration which ran throughout his career. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper, 1991.

POINDEXTER, DAVID A militant Communist Party activist whom Wright had met in Chicago in the early 1930s when he heard him deliver fiery Marxist speeches in Washington Park’s Negro Forum. Poindexter was born in 1903 and grew up in rural Tennessee, suffering the violence, injustices and racism of southern segregation. Like Wright, he had left the South and gone to Chicago to seek a new life. He worked as a stevedore on the Mississippi and also in Chicago’s steel mills and meat packing plants. 307

‘‘Popular Front’’ Wright became a close friend of Poindexter and his family, spending a great deal of time at their house discussing politics and their lives growing up in the South. He came to see Poindexter as a representative black man, ‘‘a man living on the margins of a culture’’ who spent his life ‘‘struggling blindly between two societies’’ (Crossman 115), having been born into the medieval conditions of the rural South and also plunged into the raw modernity of Chicago’s factories and teeming neighborhoods. Intending to include Poindexter in a book of biographical sketches he wanted to write about black communists, Wright took extensive notes on their conversations. Poindexter’s vivid description of a lynching he had witnessed in his hometown is said to have inspired Wright to compose ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home.’’ Poindexter’s lively independence and tendency to challenge his superiors in meetings earned him the ire of party officials, and in 1934, he was brought to trial as ‘‘an enemy of the working class’’ who suffered from ‘‘anti-leadership tendencies’’ and ‘‘ideological fanaticism.’’ After a three hour trial filled with ideological rants from the prosecution and betrayals by his co-workers, Poindexter pled guilty to charges, utterly humiliated by party bullies. This episode left a lasting impression on Wright, deepening the suspicions which would eventually cause him to break with communism. He describes his relationship with Poindexter in both ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ and American Hunger, giving him the pseudonym of Ross. Wright depicts the trial as a grotesque ‘‘black mass’’ (Crossman 140), a miniature version of the ‘‘Moscow show trials’’ which Josef Stalin used to punish his enemies and consolidate power. Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam, 1965. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

‘‘POPULAR FRONT’’ Fearing the spread of fascism in Europe and Asia, the Communist Party in 1935 made a major 308

change in international policy, assigning secondary importance to its revolutionary agenda in favor of building coalitions with a broad range of countries which would oppose fascist governments and help to prevent world war. It called this new policy the ‘‘Popular Front Against War and Fascism’’ which remained in effect until the onset of World War II in 1939. Earl Browder, who was the Communist Party of America’s candidate in the presidential election of 1936, hoped to achieve the goals of the ‘‘Popular Front’’ by attracting middle-class and working-class Americans by using the slogan ‘‘Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism’’ (Naison 170). Advocating ‘‘an American path to socialism that deviated from the Soviet model’’ (Naison 170–71), he hoped to quiet fears that communism would destroy American values and institutions. For African-American communists, the ‘‘Popular Front’’ had unfortunate implications because it meant that the party would put specifically racial issues on the back burner so that other issues which were more appealing to a wider range of white Americans could be addressed. It assigned a lower priority to fighting racial injustice and discrimination in favor of promoting programs such as health insurance and social security. And for the black communist writer, the ‘‘Popular Front’’ had other negative consequences since poets, novelists, and playwrights were now urged by the party to avoid or de-emphasize racial subjects and themes in favor of more ‘‘universal’’ materials. Wright at first did not object to the ‘‘Popular Front’’ because he was much more concerned with another problem which he was experiencing with the party, its insistence that he spend more time on its organizing activities and less time on his writing. For example, he thought seriously of leaving the party in 1934 when communist officials wanted to send him to Russia to study Marxist theory and practice, and he rejected this offer so that he could spend more time in Chicago writing. But as time went on, Wright became increasingly uncomfortable with the pressure which his supervisors placed upon him to avoid racial

Prejudices by H. L. Mencken themes which did not bear directly upon Marxist ideology. He also was deeply suspicious of leftist critics who viewed black folk art as unworthy of serious attention because it was nonpolitical in outlook and therefore had little place in truly Marxist literature. As stressed in his 1937 essay ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing,’’ Wright envisioned African-American literature as deeply rooted in black folk culture and he stressed that Negro writing must address the unique social problems faced by ordinary black people. Although there were many reasons why Wright finally broke with the Communist Party in 1942, one of the most important factors was his disappointment over the party’s use of the "Popular Front" to abandon the ‘‘Negro question’’ in favor of more abstract and politically expedient objectives defined by Moscow. He was especially offended when his communist superiors forced him to change his acceptance speech when he received the Spingarn Medal in 1940. While he had intended to deliver a version of a paper he had earlier written for New Masses entitled ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ which argued that black Americans should refuse to serve in the segregated U.S. armed forces, he was persuaded to drop this speech in favor of a talk which would support American involvement in a war which the party had redefined as a ‘‘people’s war.’’ By this time, Wright was convinced that communism, like the southern whites he had grown up with, were blind to the real needs of black people. As he would later write in American Hunger, ‘‘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’’ (Wright 119). Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Harper, 1950. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Ottanelli, Fraser. The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

PREJUDICES BY H. L. MENCKEN A six-volume series of essays published from 1919 to 1928, it focused on Mencken’s pungent assessments of art and literature as well as his scathing critiques of modern American society. Mencken was particularly harsh in his political essays, arguing, for example, in his 1919 volume that American democracy suffocates the individual by producing a mob mentality which is ‘‘more capable of putting idiotic ideas into execution than anywhere else.’’ He also persistently attacked the American South as a grotesquely backward region characterized by ignorance, racism, and poverty. Many of the essays in Prejudices also examined the works of modern American writers whom Mencken admired. He was especially approving of realists and naturalists such as Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, and Jack London. As Michel Fabre documents in Richard Wright: Books and Writers, Wright’s library included all six volumes of the Prejudices series as well as Mencken’s other important books such as The American Language, A Book of Prefaces, In Defense of Women, Minority Report, and Notes on Democracy. Wright deeply admired Mencken’s bold criticisms of conventional American society and his courageous defense of the naturalistic and realistic literature which offended that society by exposing its weaknesses. Indeed, Mencken played a critically important role in Wright’s development as a writer since Wright was inspired to become a novelist in part because of his reading of Mencken’s work. In the late twenties, Wright became an avid reader of the American Mercury, a journal which Mencken edited. And Wright’s reading of Prejudices and A Book of Prejudices in 1927 was an event that ‘‘transformed Wright’s life’’ (Fabre 65), an awakening experience which led him to become a writer. As he reveals in Black Boy, he regarded Mencken as a role model who could use words as potent ‘‘weapons’’ (Wright 293) to strike back at a repressive society which suffocated the individual.

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Pre´sence Africaine Wright once observed that ‘‘Living in the South doomed me to look always through eyes which the South had given me’’ (Kinnamon 81), but the authors he discovered by reading Prejudices and A Book of Prejudices gave ‘‘new avenues of feeling and seeing’’ (Wright 297) which he needed to gain a truer vision of himself and his world. Writers like Dreiser, whom he would later characterize as ‘‘the greatest twentieth-century writer in American literature’’ (Kinnamon 214) provided Wright with a penetrating lens he could use to examine American reality and write coherently about it. And it was through Mencken that Wright discovered European novelists such as Emile Zola and Fyodor Dostoevsky who also provided him with literary models that powerfully influenced books such as Native Son, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and The Outsider. Reading Mencken’s Prejudices and A Book of Prejudices was therefore an important step toward achieving Wright’s ‘‘new life’’ (Wright 296) as a writer and overcoming his status as ‘‘a genial slave’’ (Wright 298). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Kinnamon, Keneth. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Scruggs, Charles. The Sage in Harlem. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

PRE´SENCE AFRICAINE This journal was started in Paris in 1946 as a forum celebrating African culture, art, and literature. Embracing the goals of both the PanAfrican and Ne´gritude movements, it was committed to ending European colonialism in Africa and encouraging black nationalism. It was founded by the pioneers of Ne´gritude movement, Le´ opold Senghor and Aime´ Ce´ saire, and became one of the most important journals promoting black liberation after World War II. It

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continues to operate as a successful journal to the present day. In the summer of 1946, Wright met Senghor and Ce´ saire and Alioune Diop in Paris and helped them to organize the journal. He was an active member of the editorial board and assisted the journal to broaden its perspective to include African-American writers and intellectuals. The journal’s first issue included a French translation of Wright’s story ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ as well as a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks. Wright also was instrumental in helping to organize the journal’s ‘‘First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers’’ held in Paris at the Sorbonne in 1956. He was responsible for organizing the American contingent to that important international conference which was imagined as a ‘‘second Bandung,’’ a continuation of the international conference held in Indonesia a year earlier. Wright’s responses to Pre´sence Africaine were a complex mixture. As Hazel Rowley has pointed out, he was ‘‘wary of the Afrocentric strain of the journal’’ and was ‘‘no Ne´gritude man’’ since ‘‘he was a Westerner and in favor of racial assimilation’’ (Rowley 363). And he was also skeptical of Senghor’s Catholicism as well as Ce´ saire’s communism. But he was strongly committed to fighting racism and eliminating colonialism and saw Pre´ sence Africaine as a potent weapon to achieve those ends. Michel Fabre has stressed that Wright’s involvement with Pre´sence Africaine and Pan-Africanism ‘‘represented a stage of his spiritual evolution just as important as his contacts with existentialist philosophy and the writers of Les Temps Modernes’’ (Fabre 320). But, as was the case with his earlier involvements with organizations such as the Communist Party, Wright was too individualistic to ever give himself completely to Pan-Africanism and eventually reduced his ties with Pre´sence Africaine. He was no longer an active member of its editorial board after 1950 and he was disappointed by the 1956 ‘‘First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers.’’ In a letter to Daniel Guerin he revealed ‘‘The Pre´sence Africaine Conference was a success

‘‘Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People, The’’ of sorts but it left me terribly depressed’’ (Fabre 441). He worried that the journal was being co-opted by the French government and was being used by the Communist Party. By 1958, Wright had ‘‘moved away from Pre´sence Africaine,’’ believing that it was ‘‘dominated by the pro-French, the pro-Catholics and the antinationalists’’ and was ‘‘no longer working for its original goal . . . the liberation of African culture’’ (Fabre 489). Wright, however, continued to maintain his friendships with Alioune Diop, Senghor, Ce´saire, and other members of the journal’s editorial board. It was Diop who gave the eulogy at Wright’s funeral in December 1960. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘PSYCHOLOGICAL REACTIONS OF OPPRESSED PEOPLE, THE’’ This essay is an expanded, polished version of a speech Wright delivered in Hamburg in 1956. Inspired by Wright’s visit to the Gold Coast in 1953 and his attendance at the Bandung Conference in 1955, it was included in White Man, Listen!, published in October 1957 by Doubleday. The central theme of this essay is to probe the ‘‘psychic wound’’ (Wright 4) caused by the colonization of Asia and Africa by western white men. This wound not only inflicted severe mental damage on oppressed people but also rendered Europe ‘‘emotionally crippled’’ (Wright 4) since it created a massive contradiction between the humanitarian ideals of European civilization and its brutal treatment of non-white people in Asia and Africa. Wright argues strenuously that unless Europe can undo this damage by assisting in the liberation of colonized people, it faces ‘‘unrest, violence’’

(Wright 2) in the Third World which could threaten the foundations of western civilization. Because European colonizers created a ‘‘procession of shattered cultures, disintegrated societies’’ (Wright 5) in the African and Asian lands which they exploited, they created a number of psychological dysfunctions for oppressed people. Chief among them is what Wright calls ‘‘Negative Loyalty,’’ the tendency for the non-white victims of colonialism to reject their traditional value systems and to become loyal to the values of their oppressors. In this way, they became mentally enslaved by a system they admired and accepted but never could belong to. This produced what Wright described as a ‘‘Frog Perspective,’’ the angle of vision of ‘‘someone from below looking upward’’ (Wright 6). As colonized people at the bottom of society ‘‘looked up’’ to the white people dominating them, they developed a profound sense of their own inferiority, further entrapping themselves in a social system which regarded them as subhuman. Wright argues that such psychological disorders have plunged non-white people in Africa and Asia into a ‘‘spiritual void’’ (Wright 34) which renders them ‘‘voiceless’’ (Wright 2). However, he sees real hope with the emergence of leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana, Jawaharlal Nehru in India, and Achmed Sukarno. These non-white men who were educated in western universities become for Wright a ‘‘tragic elite’’ (Wright v) who have freed themselves from the mental shackles of colonialism and have developed ‘‘global and humane visions’’ (Wright 27) which offer the possibility for political and economic independence for colonialized nations. Wright emphatically agrees with these leaders that the best way ‘‘to hoist the white man off [the] back’’ (Wright 24) of Europe and Asia is to modernize Third World countries, thus making them ‘‘self-reliant and secure’’ (Wright 14). In this way, ‘‘negative loyalty’’ will be converted to a pride in black nationhood and the ‘‘Frog Perspective’’ will give way to independent, self-governing people regarding themselves as equal partners in a

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Publishing History of Richard Wright, 1938–2008 rebuilt world ultimately committed to the ‘‘Unity of Man’’ (Wright 25). Wright concludes the essay by stressing that ‘‘The historical hour is late’’ (Wright 42) and that Africa and Asia are at a great crossroads. If the sane views of Nehru and Nkrumah are rejected in favor of other options which are delusional and no better than the psychological dysfunctions they might displace, real disaster could result for both the Third World and the West. Wright strongly rejects the revival of ancient religious and tribal customs proposed by many at the Bandung Conference, viewing such a romantic escape into ‘‘the warm womb of the past’’ (Wright 22) as likely to produce disastrous tribal warfare and dysfunctional economies. This would only result in Asia and Africa being ‘‘resubjugated’’ (Wright 29) by western powers. Wright also is deeply suspicious of previously colonized nations being seduced by the psychological attractions of Marxist ideology which always promises a classless society but usually delivers a totalitarian state. Wright’s ultimate fear is expressed at the end of the essay where he imagines the two superpowers of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, vying for control of the Third World. If the struggle for liberation of colonized people in Africa and Asia fails, the political and social chaos which results could trigger a war that ‘‘can destroy much of human life on this earth’’ with ‘‘atom or hydrogen bombs’’ (Wright 43). Wright’s ultimate message for whites, which he wants them to ‘‘listen’’ carefully to, is this: The ‘‘spiritual void’’ (Wright 34) and the psychological dysfunctions created by hundreds of years of ruthless colonialism must either be repaired or an even greater ‘‘void’’ will be experienced by all of the world’s people. Selected Bibliography: Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference. Cleveland: World Publishing Co., 1956. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1964.

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PUBLISHING HISTORY OF RICHARD WRIGHT, 1938–2008 While the genius of Richard Wright’s prose has certainly solidified his place in literature, the processes in which his writings were transmitted to generations of American readerships have also greatly defined Wright’s strong presence in American and African-American literary history. A writer’s strong presence in literary history, of course, is dependent on ‘‘modes of transmission.’’ Modes of transmission, which include editing, presentation, promotion and circulation of texts, influence how, when, where, in what language, and at what costs readers might view an author and that author’s writings. In short, transmission operates as a defining link between authors’ writings and readerships. The popular and critical success of Wright’s work over the last 60-plus years correlates strongly to the publication history and transmission of his texts. A brief summary regarding the publication histories of Wright’s most noted texts reveals how his status as a major AfricanAmerican author shapes and is shaped by the transmission of his writings. Wright’s early endeavors as a poet, essayist, and short story writer laid important groundwork for his more critically acclaimed career as a novelist. In March of 1938, Harper and Brothers published Wright’s collection of short stories Uncle Tom’s Children with an initial print run of only 550 copies. Despite the seemingly unimpressive sales from Wright’s collection of short stories, what was more important, in retrospect, was the publishing relationship he was developing with the press. Two years after publishing Uncle Tom’s Children, Harper and Brothers published Wright’s Native Son, marking a defining moment in Wright’s evolving publishing career and in the larger publication history of African-American novels. The wide and lucrative success of Native Son paved the way for the broader transmission of Wright’s work providing a connection between a black novelist and a larger American and international readership. While the narrative’s focus on the central character Bigger Thomas

Publishing History of Richard Wright, 1938–2008 certainly determined Wright’s success, it was the transmission of Native Son that guaranteed Wright’s novel would be available to a far reaching readership. A selection by the powerfully influential Book-of-the-Month Club would ensure Wright ‘‘vast quantities of readers, sales of a magnitude no writer of his race has enjoyed before, and fame,’’ explained biographer Hazel Rowley. Published under the Harper and Brothers imprint and as a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, Native Son received advance promotion and the necessary backing to provide extraordinary attention to an emergent black novelist and his work. In less than a month after its March 1, 1940 publication, Native Son sold 215,000 copies, a circulation rate which transformed Wright almost instantly into a ‘‘best-selling author,’’ a ‘‘black best-selling author,’’ in fact. The commercial success of Wright’s novel surely made Harper and Brothers as well as other publishers aware of a valuable lesson. If marketed effectively, the right kind of African American-authored book could generate substantial notice and profits. Even today, Harper (now known as HarperCollins, with HarperPerennial as a subsidiary) continues to profit from the returns on Native Son as the book remains in print. During the early 1940s, the impressive financial returns from Native Son and the novel’s wide circulation greatly expanded Wright’s literary and market value. Wright’s increased value thus birthed future opportunities for him to receive significant support from Harpers, most notably with the publication and promotion of his autobiography. In short, Wright’s Native Son begot his Black Boy. The complex publishing history of Wright’s autobiography reveals how modes of transmission played a major role in shaping the reception of Wright and his narrative, even long after the author’s death. Like Native Son, Wright’s Black Boy: A Record of Childhood and Youth was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and was published by Harpers and Brothers. Before publishing the author’s work, the editors from Harper, judges from the Book-of-the-Month Club, and Wright collaborated on making major revisions to the

original manuscript. The published version of Wright’s autobiography in 1945 focused on his adolescent years in the South. In 1977, nearly two decades after the author’s death, Harper published American Hunger, a version of Wright’s autobiography focusing only on his young adult experiences in Chicago. In 1993, HarperPerennial published an unexpurgated version of Wright’s autobiography entitled Black Boy (American Hunger) which combined both sections of Wright’s autobiographies. As a result of the editorial changes to Wright’s original manuscript, three distinct versions of his autobiography, not to mention several editions of the works, were transmitted to readerships over the last 60 years. From 1953 to 1963, five different publishers contributed to the transmission of Wright’s work. Harper and Brothers published Wright’s novel The Outsider (1953) and his travel writings concerning Ghana and Spain entitled Black Power: A Record of Reaction in a Land of Pathos (1954) and Pagan Spain (1957). The publisher Avon Books presented a different view of a black writer who usually focused on African-American characters by publishing Wright’s Savage Holiday (1954), a work which ‘‘deal with just folks, white folks,’’ Wright explained to his literary agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. The World Publishing Company released The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956) and later posthumously published a collection of Wright’s short stories Eight Men (1961). In 1957, Doubleday and Company published a collection of Wright’s essays entitled White Man, Listen! and Wright’s novel The Long Dream (1958). In 1963, Walker Press posthumously published Lawd Today!, Wright’s novel that was rejected by various publishers when he first submitted it for publication in 1935. Since the time of their initial publication in 1940 and 1945, Native Son and Black Boy have been Wright’s most critically acclaimed works. The results of a survey published by Negro Digest in January 1968 announced that Wright was considered ‘‘the leading lion’’ among well-known and emergent black writers of the era. By 1973, with 313

Publishing History of Richard Wright, 1938–2008 the publication of Michel Fabre’s biography The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright, one of several extended treatments on the writer’s life and work, Wright had moved beyond the category of popular author. He was now canonical. Wright’s major works remained in print; textbooks and general anthologies routinely reprinted Wright’s short stories and excerpts from his books, and scholars regularly made Wright the focal point of essays and book-length critical studies. The 1990s were especially important for the transmission of Wright’s texts. In 1991, the Library of America series published two volumes of Wright’s writing: Early Works: Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, Vol. 1 and Later Works: Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider, Vol. 2. The publication of these two volumes prompted somewhat of a renaissance in the publishing history of Wright’s texts. During the 1990s, HarperPerennial published unexpurgated editions of Wright’s Native Son, The Outsider, Pagan Spain, Eight Men, Uncle Tom’s Children, White Man, Listen! and Black Power. With cover artwork from a series by artist David Diaz and an extended chronology on Wright included in the books, HarperPerennial designed these editions of Wright’s books as a corresponding set. In 1995, HarperCollins Children’s Books published an edition of Wright’s previously unpublished novella, Rite of Passage. Similar to HarperPerennial, during the 1990s, Northeastern University Press published editions of Wright’s Lawd Today! and The Long Dream, and the University Press of Mississippi published editions of his books The Color Curtain and Savage Holiday. Also, Anchor Books published Haiku: The Other World, a

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collection of Wright’s previously unpublished haiku poems in 1998, and Thunder’s Mouth Press published an edition of Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices in 2002. In 1998, HarperAudio reissued a 1989 audio version of Native Son as read by James Earl Jones, and in 2005, the press released an audio version of Black Boy as read by Peter Francis James. HarperCollins also issued the 60th anniversary edition of Black Boy with a new foreword by Edward P. Jones in 2005 and the previously unpublished A Father’s Law in 2008. The cover of the HarperPerennial paperback of the 60th anniversary edition (2006) incorporates a photograph of Richard Wright at age four with his brother Leon Alan who was two years younger. Ultimately, the modern productions of Wright’s texts, the continued circulation of his writings in anthologies and older editions, and the sustained critical attention his works receive from scholars make Wright one of the most widely known and critically acclaimed AfricanAmerican writers. The transmission of Wright’s writings continues to influence his popular and critical acclaim. Howard Rambsy II Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Karem, Jeff. ‘‘ ‘I Could Never Really Leave the South’: Regionalism and the Transformation of Richard Wright’s American Hunger.’’ American Literary History13.4 (2001): 694–715. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Thaddeus, Janice. ‘‘The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.’’ American Literature 57.2 (1985): 199–214.

R RACE RIOTS Richard Wright lived during a period of widespread racial violence taking collective form in hundreds of lynchings in rural areas and many large-scale riots in urban centers. Long before Wright was born, however, race riots had erupted in the United States throughout the nineteenth century, creating an atmosphere of racial intimidation and fear that was deeply woven into the fabric of American life. They were usually caused when white racists felt threatened either by the prospect of African-American political progress or economic advances and they were used as a brutal means of maintaining white supremacy. Pre–Civil War and late-nineteenthcentury violence in northern and southern cities should more properly be called ‘‘pogroms’’ or ‘‘racial massacres’’ since they were one-sided attacks by whites on defenseless blacks rather than battles between opponents who were evenly matched and mutually sought such conflict. The worst of the pre–Civil War riots took place in Cincinnati in 1829 which resulted in a mass exodus of freed blacks moving to Canada and in New York in 1863 when the ‘‘Draft Riots’’ raged on for four days and resulted in the deaths of nearly 1,200 people, most of them black. Serious riots also broke out in the South after the Civil War and were used to create a climate of terror

necessary to make black people submit to the massive patterns of segregation, political disenfranchisement, and economic exploitation which emerged in the South during the Reconstruction and late nineteenth century. A wave of racial violence swept through southern cities from 1874 to 1876 right before federal presence was withdrawn from the South as part of the ‘‘Compromise of 1877,’’ which enabled all southern states to use Jim Crow laws to create a massive system of segregation which reduced blacks to a condition not too different from the slavery which the Emancipation Proclamation had outlawed. Serious racial riots broke out at the turn of the century in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898 and Atlanta in 1906 as anything which challenged the one-party system controlled by white southern democrats was met with terrible violence. The period immediately following World War I was also a particularly bloody time in the nation’s racial history as whites, fearing the demands of returning black soldiers for social, political, and economic changes, exploded in many parts of the United States with violence toward African Americans. A series of riots broke out in twenty American towns and cities from April to October 1919 in a period which came to be known as ‘‘Red Summer.’’ The most serious of these took place in Chicago, Illinois, and Elaine, 315

Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire (RDR) Arkansas. One of the worst racial disasters in United States history occurred in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921 when whites became jealous of black business success in that city and systematically destroyed several city blocks which had become known at ‘‘the black Wall Street.’’ Substantial losses of black life and property took place in all of these post–World War I riots. In the 1930s and 1940s, a new kind of racial disturbance occurred in American cities. Whereas earlier racial clashes were triggered by whites intent on terrorizing and disempowering black people, riots taking place in Harlem in 1935 and 1943, and an uprising in Detroit in 1943, were expressions of black anger, resentment, and frustration. The object of these riots was to attack white businesses and send a message to the white power structure that African Americans were bitterly unhappy with the status quo and wanted meaningful social change. As he makes clear in ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ and Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright grew up in an atmosphere where racial violence was a constant threat and took a variety of forms, such as personal abuse, lynchings, and riots. Three years before a racial massacre took place in Elaine, Arkansas, Wright had good cause to fear the anger and brutality of white people in that small town. In 1916, he and his family moved to Elaine to live with his favorite aunt, Maggie Hoskins, and a year later her husband, Silas, was murdered by whites who had grown jealous of his business successes. Wright also had a full, clear understanding of the social, political, and economic forces which produced major riots in Detroit and Harlem in the thirties and forties. He moved to Chicago just eight years after ‘‘Red Summer’’ and saw evidence on a daily basis of that city’s capacity for racial violence. After moving to New York in 1937 to become Harlem editor of the Daily Worker, he became actively involved in two W.P.A. projects which studied the history of African Americans in New York. As a socially engaged writer and a member of the Communist Party, he was

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acutely aware of the powerful and volatile forces which caused urban riots. In Native Son, Boris Max predicts that such violence could eventually destroy America. Wright observed the 1943 Harlem riot first-hand which resulted in five deaths and 60 wounded as well as an enormous loss of property. Wright was interviewed about the riot by the New York Times and PM. In the latter interview entitled ‘‘Richard Wright Feels Grip on Harlem Tension,’’ he described the outbreak of violence as a ‘‘spontaneous outburst of anger’’ (Rowley 282) rather than a consciously planned activity that was politically motivated. (In this way, his view of the experience squares with the way it is depicted in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.) He recommended that the causes of the riot could be addressed with federal aid to Harlem and better treatment of black people in the armed forces. Wright predicted that more uprisings of an even more serious nature would certainly follow if the sources of the riots were not carefully studied and effectively dealt with. His predictions came true in the 1960s when a wave of racial riots rocked American cities. Selected Bibliography: Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in The Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998. Meier, August and Elliott Rudwick. From Plantation to Ghetto. New York: Hill and Wang, 1970.

RASSEMBLEMENT DE´MOCRATIQUE RE´VOLUTIONNAIRE (RDR) A group formed in 1948 by Jean-Paul Sartre and supported by Wright which attempted to create an alternative in Europe to American capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. For the most part, its leadership consisted of intellectuals, writers, and political activists who feared that Europe in the Cold War would be dominated by American and Soviet interests. RDR gained substantial popular support in the summer of 1948 when the Russians blockaded Berlin, creating the possibility of a third world war.

‘‘Red Leaves of Books’’ The organization held its first meeting at the Sorbonne on December 13, 1948, a conference which was entitled ‘‘The Internationalism of the Mind.’’ It featured an impressive series of speakers including Wright, Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Carlo Levi. Wright’s talk was well received and widely reported. It condemned American anti-intellectualism and Soviet censorship and called for artists to unite in the struggle for human rights throughout the world. Sartre resigned from RDR in 1949 when he felt the group had become excessively anti-Soviet. Wright remained a member of the group until 1950 when he grew unhappy with its ‘‘not defending humanism rigorously enough against the inroads of industrial civilization’’ (Fabre 355). By 1951, he was devoting his energies to founding a new group of intellectuals on the non-communist left, The Franco-American Fellowship. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘RED CLAY BLUES’’ A short poem which Wright wrote in collaboration with Langston Hughes and which appeared in the August 1, 1939 issue of New Masses. It was written while Wright was completing work on Native Son. Like ‘‘King Joe,’’ a blues poem which Wright wrote in tribute to Joe Louis and was recorded by Count Basie and Paul Robeson in October 1941, ‘‘Red Clay Blues’’ employs a classic blues structure, using stanzas which repeat the first line with variation and concluding with a third line which intensifies the effect of the first two lines. Like most blues, it avoids explicit political criticism but does articulate social protest in an oblique and ironic manner. The first two stanzas read like a conventional pastoral lament in which a black man who has migrated from the rural South to the urban North expresses a strong desire to return to Georgia. His feet are tired of the ‘‘concrete street’’ and he longs

to go back to the South. He can feel the soft red clay on his shoes. But the third and fourth stanzas complicate this apparently simple and romantic impulse by revealing that he had earlier lost his ‘‘little farm’’ in Georgia to the ‘‘landlord’’ who now owns it. The fourth stanza, like blues songs such as Leadbelly’s ‘‘Bourgeois Blues’’ and Jimmy Reed’s ‘‘Big Boss Man,’’ makes a powerful political protest by articulating the narrator’s desire to see ‘‘big storms start to blow’’ which will result in ‘‘the landlord’s runnin’ in fear and confusion.’’ Wright, who was still a member of the Communist Party when this poem was written, clearly intends these ‘‘storms’’ of revolution to result in a redistribution of land. And in 1939, one of the worst years of the Great Depression, it was not difficult to understand why landlords were panic-stricken and wondered ‘‘where they gonna go.’’ Like ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands,’’ which Wright published five years earlier in New Masses, ‘‘Red Clay Blues’’ is thoroughly Marxist in vision. The poem’s final line reiterates ‘‘I got them red clay blues,’’ but in the context of the whole poem, this sentiment acquires an entirely different meaning than it had earlier in the poem. A conventional pastoral lament now becomes a call for action, looking forward to the political ‘‘storms’’ which will disempower landlords and return the narrator’s land to him. Written in the same year as The Grapes of Wrath, Wright’s poem predicts a proletarian revolution. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes, Volume 1. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Red Clay Blues.’’ In Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry, edited by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.

‘‘RED LEAVES OF BOOKS’’ In Black Boy/American Hunger Wright stressed how his reading helped him to build ‘‘a new life’’ (Wright 296) because books such as Mencken’s Prejudices and Dreiser’s Sister Carrie ‘‘opened new avenues of seeing and feeling’’ (Wright 297) 317

‘‘Red Love Note, A’’ which helped to free him of the mental slavery imposed by the segregated South. A profoundly self-educated man, Wright continued to be a voracious reader throughout his life, regarding books as satisfying a deep ‘‘hunger’’ for knowledge which would help him to understand and master his environment. ‘‘Red Leaves of Books,’’ which was published in the April 30, 1935 issue of New Masses, vividly underscores the great importance Wright assigned to his reading. As a member of the John Reed Club of Chicago, he eagerly read from the club’s library of Marxist literature and was deeply influenced by what he read. As Hazel Rowley notes, ‘‘The John Reed Club was Wright’s university’’ (Rowley 78), providing him not only with books, journals, and pamphlets but also with a lecture series which featured British radical John Strachey, University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth, and poet Maxwell Bodenheim. ‘‘Red Leaves of Books,’’ which was written shortly after Wright jointed the Communist Party in 1934, reveals Wright’s excitement about the leftist literature he was reading at the time. The John Reed Club library supplied him with radically leftist journals such as New Masses, Anvil, Left Front, and International Literature, all of which would later publish Wright’s poetry. And as Margaret Walker has noted, he was also reading John Reed’s Ten Days That Shook the World, Gorky’s The Lower Depths, Marx’s Das Capital, and Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power (Walker 73–74). He regarded all of this Marxist literature as what ‘‘Red Leaves of Books’’ characterizes as ‘‘printed hope’’ because it gave people from all over the world an ‘‘intractable purpose’’ which they needed to change the world. Wright saw this ‘‘red’’ literature as having a special meaning for black people since it united them with dispossessed people across the globe in the struggle for a more just and humane society. In the poem, he stresses that the pages of ‘‘red’’ books must be turned both in ‘‘white palms and black palms’’ and that women and men as well as the young and the old are being transformed by such

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books. As Wright pointed out in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ his commitment to the radical left gave him both ‘‘an organized search for truth’’ (Wright 105) and a solidarity with all oppressed people, ‘‘a common vision that bound us all together’’ (Wright 117). Wright’s poem concludes with an interesting turn of meaning. As readers turn the pages of ‘‘read’’ books, they are read by these books. Such books become ‘‘calloused hands’’ which ‘‘grip’’ the reader, reinforcing ‘‘intractable purpose’’ leading to political action. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy-American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

‘‘RED LOVE NOTE, A’’ This poem, along with ‘‘Rest for the Weary,’’ were the first poems which Wright published, appearing in the January–February 1934 issue of Left Front, the official publication of the John Reed Club of the Middle West. Wright joined the John Reed Club of Chicago in 1933 and greatly benefited from the opportunities it provided him to discuss his writing and political convictions with like-minded writers and organizers from the radical left. ‘‘A Red Love Note,’’ ‘‘Rest for the Weary,’’ and ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ were the first works which Wright discussed with fellow club members. He was encouraged by Abe Aaron and Bill Jordan to publish them and sent all three to Left Front, which accepted the first two and suggested that he send the third to New Masses which published it in their June 26, 1934 issue. The publication of this apprentice work played a significant role in Wright’s development as a writer and political thinker. Encouraged by his

Reddick, Lawrence colleagues’ enthusiastic praise of his writing, he deepened his involvement with the John Reed Club, becoming a member of its editorial board and a frequent participant in its lectures and discussions. These activities gave Wright for the first time in his life a sympathetic audience for his most deeply felt ideas and he became an official member of the Communist Party in 1934. As Wright would later reveal in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ his involvement in communism gave him ‘‘the first total emotional commitment of my life (Wright 105), a new faith which would replace the old beliefs shattered by the disappointments of the Great Migration and the shocks of the Great Depression. Hazel Rowley regards apprentice writing such as ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ as important because it enabled him to achieve a balance between the angry alienation which he felt from conventional American society and ‘‘an optimism for the future which was quite new for him’’ (Rowley 77). The ‘‘revolutionary fervor’’ (Rowley 77) which Rowley claims that Wright absorbed as a communist energized his writing and gave it a new depth and coherence. ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ clearly achieves this balance between criticism of the existing society and hope for political renewal, counterpointing Wright’s bitterness about racial injustice in America with a redemptive vision of Marxist revolution. Taking the form of a love note promising a new order of things, it ironically employs the legal language of eviction to portray the ‘‘foreclosure’’ of a decadent capitalist ‘‘civilization’’ which will finally go up in ‘‘smoke’’ after it is destroyed by ‘‘a red clap of thunder’’ arising from ‘‘the very depths of hell.’’ Wright stresses that this application of justice will be swift and final, with no ‘‘postponements,’’ ‘‘court delays,’’ or ‘‘continuations.’’ Marxist revolution will thus put an end to a ‘‘bloated’’ capitalist society but such a massive social upheaval is also like a ‘‘love note’’ because it will ultimately create a just and humane society. Margaret Walker has pointed out that it is important to realize that ‘‘Wright began as a poet’’ (Walker 65) because his early poetry provided him with themes and techniques which he would

continue to refine throughout his career. ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ vividly illustrates Walker’s idea. Its bitterly ironic tone foreshadows Wright’s brilliant use of reductive irony in mature work such as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and Black Boy/American Hunger. And the ‘‘recurring images of heat and fire’’ (Walker 65) which Walker sees in early poems such as ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ are artfully threaded through his major work, becoming what Keneth Kinnamon has identified as ‘‘a central metaphor of [Wright’s] creative imagination’’ (Kinnamon 15). The ‘‘red clap of thunder rising from the very depths of hell’’ which brings ‘‘A Red Love Note’’ to such a dramatic conclusion therefore becomes a fiery image which Wright would continue to explore throughout his career. Such a powerful image resonates in various forms in much of his best writing, especially in the lynchings of Uncle Tom’s Children, Max’s concept of revolution in Native Son, and the Dantean vision of southern society as hell in Black Boy/American Hunger. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1952.

REDDICK, LAWRENCE (3 March 1910– 2 August 1995) A scholar and author born in 1910 in Jacksonville, Florida, who earned a Ph.D. degree from University of Chicago in 1939. After teaching history at several universities in the South, Reddick, beginning in 1939, served for nine years as curator of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Collection and met Wright for the first time when the curator purchased for the collection Paul Laurence Dunbar’s letters owned by Wright’s literary agent Paul Reynolds, Jr. in December 1939. Thus developed the friendship between Reddick and Wright, and, at the request of Reddick, on 319

‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ 14 March 1940, Wright gave a lecture on the creation and writing on Native Son at the Schomburg Collection. Also at Reddick’s request, Wright saved for an exhibit, ‘‘The Birth of a Book,’’ at the Schomburg Collection, the original manuscripts of 12 Million Black Voices, his Broadway play ‘‘Native Son,’’ and his song ‘‘King Joe’’ as well as copies of the bound and unbound galleys of his other books. And then, in early November 1942, Reddick showed his intention to make at the Schomburg Collection a complete collection of the works of Wright in all languages. Later in April 1944, through this friendship, Wright included Reddick in an attempt to organize what he called the ‘‘Thinking Coterie,’’ calling for the cooperation of other black intellectuals, and later in January 1945, Wright talked with Reddick and other black authors about a joint book of ‘‘The Meaning of Negro American’s Experience,’’ which was planned as a response to What the Negro Wants, published with an insulting introduction by a conservative white southerner W. T. Couch. In February 1945, in return for Wright’s kindness, Reddick gave Wright permission to use excerpts from African-American soldiers’ letters from the Schomburg Collection. After Wright left New York for Paris in 1947 and Reddick left New York for Atlanta, Georgia in 1948 as chief librarian of the Trevor Arnett Library, Reddick published ‘‘A New Richard Wright,’’ a review of The Outsider, in the March 1953 issue of Phylon. He came to Paris six years later on 5 February 1959 to see Wright with Martin Luther King, Jr. and his wife Coretta. Toru Kiuchi Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Carson, Clayborne, ed. The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. New York: Warner Books, 1998.

‘‘REST FOR THE WEARY’’ This seventeen-line poem, along with ‘‘A Red Love Note,’’ were the first poems Wright 320

published, appearing in the January– February 1934 issue of Left Front, the official publication of the John Reed Clubs of the Middle West. The John Reed Clubs, which were a national literary organization sponsored by the Communist Party, provided Wright with an important forum for his ideas and put him in regular contact with like-minded writers and activists from the radical left. In 1933, he joined the Chicago branch where he made friendships with Nelson Algren, Abraham Chapman, Bill Jordan, and Jane Newton and was elected executive secretary of the club. He became an official member of the Communist Party in 1934. Like all of the poems which Wright published in the 1930s in leftist journals such as Left Front, Anvil, and New Masses, ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ is written in a rough kind of Whitmanian free verse and is heavily weighted with Marxist ideas. It is addressed sarcastically to capitalists, ‘‘panicstricken guardians of gold,’’ whom Wright exhorts to ‘‘tremble’’ because the system which has made them wealthy and powerful is about to be destroyed by ‘‘the chaos of history.’’ Wright characterizes their ‘‘tawdry’’ lives as veneered with ‘‘tinseled pretense’’ concealing their ‘‘naked uselessness.’’ In the near future these ‘‘weary-laden tyrants’’ shall be released from their ‘‘burdens’’ by the ‘‘brawny hands’’ of working class revolutionaries who will destroy the corrupt old order, replacing it with a more just society. Apprentice works such as ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ are important not only because they reveal the political and social thinking of the young Wright but also because they lay the foundation for important themes and techniques of his mature writing. This poem, like Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and Black Boy/American Hunger is bitterly ironic in vision, cleverly inverting conventional language and meanings to show the huge gap between the abstract promises of American life and the actual facts of American history. Just as Native Son and Black Boy/American Hunger ironically invert the Alger myth and Uncle Tom’s Children demolishes the romantic assumptions

Reynolds, Paul, Jr. of the ‘‘old South,’’ ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ deflates sentimental language with hard facts. Feigning concern for the ‘‘guardians of gold’’ because these ‘‘weary’’ capitalists have ‘‘grave concerns’’ that the economic problems of the Great Depression threaten them with the collapse of their world, Wright concludes the poem with a sarcastic flourish, pointing out that the ‘‘brawny hands’’ of the workers will be all-too-happy to relieve those men of their ‘‘burdens’’ by carrying out a Marxist revolution. Margaret Walker has observed that ‘‘It cannot be stressed enough that Wright began as a poet’’ because it was in writing leftist verse that his ‘‘genius found its first flowering’’ (Walker 65). The rather simple ironies which Wright explored in early poems such as ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ would become even more disturbing and startling as he developed the richer, more complex ironies of his masterworks. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

REYNOLDS, PAUL, JR. Wright’s literary agent from 1938 to Wright’s death in 1960, Reynolds came from a distinguished Boston family whose ancestors included Paul Revere. His family’s firm, the Paul Reynolds Literary Agency, was established by his father and was one of the most prestigious literary agencies in America, numbering among its clients Paul Laurence Dunbar, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, and George Bernard Shaw. Wright and Reynolds met through Mary Folsom, one of Wright’s communist associates, who worked for Reynolds. Despite their vastly different social backgrounds and political convictions, Wright and Reynolds deeply respected each other and enjoyed a very fruitful working relationship over a long period of time. According to Margaret Walker, Reynolds became Wright’s ‘‘friend for life’’ and even a kind of ‘‘father figure’’ (119). He became,

in Hazel Rowley’s words, ‘‘a permanent fixture in Wright’s literary life’’ (144) in a career otherwise characterized by considerable instability. The first of Wright’s manuscripts which Reynolds worked with was Native Son, a book which he immediately judged as ‘‘a monumental piece of work’’ (Rowley 163), even though he had some reservations about the book and asked Wright to make substantial revisions. For example, he thought the portrayal of the novel’s white people, particularly Jan and Mary, was unrealistic and also felt that the trial scene in Book 3 was too long. Even though Wright often refused to make the revisions which Reynolds suggested, he ‘‘valued the intelligent and penetrating comments of his agent’’ (Fabre 175) and frequently implemented his advice. Together with Edward Aswell, Wright’s editor at Harper’s, the three formed close working relationships, bringing out Book-of-theMonth Club editions of Native Son and Black Boy which changed the course of AfricanAmerican literature. For reasons which are still not altogether clear, both Aswell and Reynolds responded negatively to Wright’s superb nouvelle, ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ when Wright submitted it to Harpers in December 1941, and it was rejected by that publisher. It eventually appeared in Accent in 1942. Wright and Reynolds had a long and revealing correspondence which provides valuable insights into their friendship and Wright’s work. Wright was very open to Reynolds in his discussions of political and cultural matters even though Reynolds, a conservative, often advised him to be more moderate in making political statements, particularly those critical of America, to the press. Reynolds’s letters to Wright also make it clear that he saw Wright’s removal from his native country as having negative artistic consequences. On several occasions, he reminded Wright that he had lost touch with the subject that went to the core of his vision, race relations in the United States. He therefore found Wright’s ‘‘raceless novel,’’ Savage Holiday ‘‘badly dated’’ (Rowley 472) and lacking in power and verisimilitude. He felt that Wright’s exile in France disconnected him 321

Rhythm Club Fire of 1940 from the important cultural changes taking place in America during the 1950s and Wright, therefore, had lost touch with a valuable source of literary material. Reynolds, however, was encouraged by the 1957 publication of Wright’s White Man, Listen!, a book of essays about important racial concerns in America, regarding it as an example of ‘‘the old Wright’’ (Rowley 483). And he was greatly pleased by Wright’s decision late in his career to write a novel about Mississippi which eventually appeared as The Long Dream in 1958. Reynolds was opposed to the publishing of Lawd Today! when Ellen Wright sent it to him several months after Wright’s death in 1960, seeing the novel as failing in its character portrayals and not measuring up to the work he thought Wright would want to be remembered and judged by. Mrs. Wright strongly disagreed with Reynolds’s assessment and arranged to have the novel published in 1963 by Walker and Company. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Works. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

RHYTHM CLUB FIRE OF 1940 The Rhythm Club in Natchez, Mississippi was a large, antiquated wooden structure built to house dances, concerts and other forms of entertainment for black people. It was an altogether segregated facility, as were all other forms of public accommodations in the Deep South. On April 23, 1940 it drew a packed house of over two-hundred people gathered to hear Chicago jazz clarinetist Walter Barnes and his swing band. A fire broke out and quickly spread to all parts of the building, taking the lives of twohundred and nine people. Only seventeen people somehow survived. The heavy casualties were due to the fact that fire laws forbidding such a large crowd were ignored and the management ordered the club’s doors locked to prevent gate 322

crashers. When a lit match was accidentally dropped on the wooden floor, a flash fire erupted which was made worse by the extensive use of Spanish moss as a decoration. The crowd immediately panicked and stampeded, trapping people in the hall as bodies piled up in front of the locked doors. The fire drew national headlines and was regarded as one of the worst club disasters in United States history. Wright made elaborate literary use of the Rhythm Club fire in his 1958 novel, The Long Dream. The novel’s central character, Fishbelly Tucker, attends a dance at the Grove, a rundown night spot for blacks that is modeled after the Rhythm Club. As a packed audience listens to ‘‘thunderous jazz’’ (Wright 212), a ‘‘sheet of red flame’’ (Wright 213) erupts in the hall, producing ‘‘an immense column of leaping fire’’ which roars ‘‘whirlwind-like, casting up surging floods of fire’’ (Wright 213). When Fishbelly tries to escape, he is terrified to see piles of bodies blocking the club’s exits. Pandemonium ensues as people panic, producing a stampede which turns the entire hall into a surging mass of trapped bodies. Fishbelly somehow escapes through a small opening in the back wall used for ventilation but his girlfriend, Gladys, along with forty-one other people, perish in the fire. Those who were not incinerated were smothered. As Keneth Kinnamon has stressed, fire is ‘‘a central metaphor’’ of Wright’s ‘‘creative imagination’’ (Kinnamon 10) and he made brilliant literary use of it throughout his career. One of his earliest published poems, ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ describes its traumatized narrator imagining a black man burned alive in a graphically depicted lynching. Several of the stories from Uncle Tom’s Children, especially ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ describe terrible fires and use fire in a nearly biblical manner as a way of dramatizing a world literally being consumed with hatred, fear, and racism. Black Boy begins with the young Wright setting fire to the curtains of his house and then hiding under the porch to escape detection and the fire’s ravages. It is significant that Bigger Thomas tries to destroy the evidence of his

‘‘Rise and Live’’ killing Mary Dalton by burning her body in a furnace which then becomes a hot symbol of his fear and guilt. In all of these works, fire is a revelation of deep-seated psychological forces or a hellish social environment which can flash out in any moment in destructive hatred and violence. In The Long Dream, Wright used the Rhythm Club fire in Natchez as a powerful metaphor of black life in the Deep South. Packed together in a segregated club which violates building codes and is poorly serviced by the city’s fire department, the black people who go to the hall seeking temporary relief from their hard lives are in fact destroyed by an environment which smothers and incinerates them. As was the case in Black Boy, Wright deepens and broadens the significance of his narrative by alluding artfully to Dante’s Inferno. The fire in the Grove is presented as ‘‘mountainous, circling’’ (Wright 215) and Fishbelly is depicted as ‘‘madly circling the blazing, smoking inferno’’ (Wright 214) as he feels ‘‘snared in a net of shadows’’ (Wright 214). Like those populating several circles of the Inferno, the victims of the fire are ‘‘blinded’’ and paralyzed, ‘‘froze in their tracks’’ (Wright 216). The Rhythm Club fire, therefore, was perceived by Wright as a terrible actual disaster killing several people he knew of from his days of living near Natchez and also as a vivid symbol of the social and psychological hell which African Americans were forced to experience in the Deep South. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Wright, Richard, The Long Dream. Chatham, New Jersey: The Chatham Bookseller, 1969.

‘‘RISE AND LIVE’’ This poem, along with ‘‘Obsession,’’ was published in the January–February 1935 issue of Midland Left, a journal devoted to proletarian literature edited by Rebecca Pitts. Wright’s involvement in leftist organizations such as the John Reed Club and the Communist Party helped to transform him both as a person

and a writer. As he revealed in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ Marxist ideology helped him to overcome his isolation by providing him with a ‘‘common vision that bound us all together’’ (Wright 117), and communist activism gave him a practical means of translating this vision into reality. He could feel himself a part of a worldwide organization that would bring about a revolution of the proletariat which would renew society and thus empower him with a hopeful vision of the future. Hazel Rowley has observed that the early poems which Wright published in a variety of leftist journals such as Midland Left, Anvil, New Masses, and Left Front were energized by his new-found faith in communism by providing these poems with ‘‘an optimism about the future which was quite new’’ (Rowley 77) for Wright. Marxist philosophy and communist practice helped Wright to balance his anger and alienation with new affirmations about a classless society brought about by a global revolution. ‘‘Rise and Live’’ is a vivid example of this new balance. The first part of the poem gives vent to Wright’s anger for a capitalist society ‘‘overflowing with good and wealth’’ which has dispossessed most of its citizens of a future by making them ‘‘aliens’’ in their own lands. The second part of the poem exhorts these people to ‘‘take back’’ their ‘‘stolen lives’’ and ‘‘fight’’ for a more just society which will treat them as ‘‘human.’’ The poem concludes by urging workers to ‘‘RISE AND LIVE,’’ echoing the anthem of the Communist Party, ‘‘The Internationale,’’ which declares ‘‘Arise, ye wretched of the earth.’’ Apprentice poems such as ‘‘Rise and Live’’ are rarely examined today but they are important for two reasons. First, they are a lucid index to Wright’s thinking and feeling when he emerged as a writer. Secondly, they contain in embryonic form many themes and techniques which Wright would refine and develop in his mature work. At the center of ‘‘Rise and Live’’ is the ‘‘monstrous irony’’ of American workers treated as ‘‘aliens’’ in a country they helped to build. Although they contributed to the construction of modern 323

Rite of Passage America by laying the tracks for the railroads which crossed the prairies and by building the granaries which helped to feed Americans, they are condemned by the ‘‘hard faces of authority’’ to meaningless lives of ‘‘lost living.’’ At best, they are given ‘‘a handout of crumbs’’ but they are denied the ‘‘good and wealth’’ which their labor has created. Wright would continue to explore the monstrous ironies of American life throughout his career in masterworks such as Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, Black Boy/American Hunger, and The Outsider. Each of these ironically titled works explores in increasingly detailed and powerful ways the ironic gap between the humanistic ideals of American society and the actual facts of American history. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1952.

RITE OF PASSAGE This novella was published in 1994 with an afterward by Arnold Rampersad, the editor of the restored editions of Wright’s major works which appeared in 1991. As such, it is part of a project of completing Wright’s oeuvre by bringing out important works which he was not able to place in his lifetime and to restore works like Native Son, Black Boy/American Hunger, and Lawd Today! to their original forms before editors altered them to make them more palatable to the general reading public. Rite of Passage has a long and interesting compositional history. Wright began writing a preliminary version of it in the spring of 1945 (Rampersad 131) not long after the publication of Black Boy, a book which explored his own childhood. Entitled ‘‘The Jackal,’’ it dealt with a group of black youths who had kidnapped a woman and were afraid to release her for fear that

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she would report them to the police. He was unable to find a publisher for the book and put it in his files where it languished until the summer of 1959 when he retitled it Leader Man and converted it into a seventy-page story centering on a fourteen-year-old African-American boy who suddenly discovers that he is an orphan when he is told that the people he regarded as his parents are actually his foster parents and his biological mother and father are dead. When the New York City Welfare Department decides to move him to another foster family, he runs away from home and joins a street gang. Wright tried to place this story in Esquire, but it was rejected because of its length. He also tried to include it in the collection of stories which became Eight Men but his agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., advised him to leave it out because he considered the story unfinished. All of the versions of this story are rooted in Wright’s long-time study of crime and the growing problem of juvenile delinquency. His research goes back to the 1930s when he worked with gangs at the South Side Boys Club in Chicago. In 1946, he helped the distinguished psychiatrist, Dr. Frederic Wertham, to found the Lafargue Clinic, a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem. At this time, he was also seriously involved with the Wiltwyck School which was located in the Catskills and offered residential programs for young men convicted of crimes in New York. While he was writing ‘‘The Jackal,’’ Wright made extensive visits in New York and Brooklyn to juvenile courts, detention centers, and schools. He read widely in the fields of sociology and psychology while publishing two articles in 1946 and 1947, ‘‘Psychiatry Comes to Harlem’’ and ‘‘Urban Misery in an American City: Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem.’’ Rite of Passage is based upon an actual case study of a boy who was treated at Wiltwyck. Johnny Gibbs, like this boy, was placed in a foster home which provided him with a stable, loving family life but 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

Robeson, Paul 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 which 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 which 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’’ (Wright 115). 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 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!’’ (Wright 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!’’ (Wright 102). 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 which, like his foster mother and his teacher, directs him away from selfdestructive 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. The novella ends with Johnny poised between two opposite existences, the redemptive world of women and the destructive life of the streets. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert. ‘‘The Invisible Woman in Wright’s Rite of Passage.’’ In The Critical Response to Richard Wright, edited by Robert Butler. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994.

ROBESON, PAUL (9 April 1898– 23 January 1976) An internationally acclaimed actor, singer, and political activist, Paul Robeson was born in Princeton, New Jersey one generation removed from slavery. His father was a protestant minister who as a young man had escaped from slavery and his mother, who died when he was six years old, was a teacher. He excelled as a student and scored the highest grade on a statewide scholarship test, earning a full scholarship to Rutgers University. He also was an extraordinarily gifted athlete, garnering twelve varsity letters and twice being named to the All-American football team. His academic 325

Robeson, Paul achievements in college resulted in his being named to Phi Beta Kappa and becoming a member of the Cap and Skull honorary society. He played three years of professional football to help finance his education at Columbia Law School, from which he graduated with an LLB degree in 1923. Bored by the practice of law and angered by the racial discrimination common at that time in the legal profession, he turned to acting and began his career in theatre with leading roles in Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones and All God’s Children Got Wings, plays which pioneered new roles for blacks in American drama. In 1930, he achieved international acclaim in London performing as Othello, a role which he helped to redefine for modern audiences. While achieving such distinction as an actor, he was also able to gain fame as a singer. In 1924, he performed in Carnegie Hall, devoting an entire concert to Negro spirituals. He was able to combine his acting and singing skills by performing in important American musicals, most notably Show Boat (1928) in which he made ‘‘Ol’ Man River’’ an American classic. He also starred in many films, including Show Boat (1936), King Soloman’s Mines (1937), Song of Freedom (1936), and The Proud Valley (1940). Despite a public career in entertainment which encouraged and, in some ways, required him to avoid making his views known about controversial political and social issues, Robeson was throughout his career deeply committed to social justice and did not shrink from taking courageous public stands on volatile social issues. In the late 1920s he became interested in socialism and reading his plays and treatises. He toured the Soviet Union in 1934, admiring its freedom from racial and class discrimination. He spent considerable time in Moscow studying Soviet culture and proclaiming its virtues. He went to Spain in 1938 to support republican troops in their struggle against fascism. Although he never became an actual member of the Communist Party, he was deeply sympathetic to Marxist values and socialist practices.

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With the outbreak of World War II, he was forced to return to the United States and continued to perform as an entertainer while acting as a vocal critic of American racism and capitalism. He was a staunch supporter of the union movement and often gave benefit concerts for a variety of workers’ causes. He sharply criticized American segregation, both in the North and in the South, speaking out with particular clarity and conviction against the banning of Negro players in major league baseball. He was able to combine effectively his dual roles as an activist and entertainer so long as the Soviet Union and the United States were allies. But Robeson drew increasingly sharp criticism for his political views after World War II when the Cold War developed. He eventually became a tragic victim of the persecution of the American left during the McCarthy era. Although he won the Spingarn Medal in 1945, the NAACP withdrew his name from its list of past winners in 1951. As he continued to praise the Soviet Union, especially after he received the Stalin Peace Prize in 1952, Robeson was attacked by mainstream politicians and came under the close scrutiny of the FBI and CIA. He was listed by the U.S. House of Representative’s Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) as a communist, and in 1950, the State Department voided his passport to prevent him from delivering what it regarded as ‘‘subversive’’ speeches in foreign countries. He was blacklisted as an actor and a singer and had severe difficulties earning a living. (By 1952 his income had dwindled to $6,000 per year, a far cry from the six figured incomes he had earned in the late 1940s.) Although Robeson’s reputation was to some extent rehabilitated in the late 1950s with the mounting prominence of the civil rights movement, the attacks on him during the McCarthy period weakened his health and destroyed his appeal as an entertainer. After a disappointing return to England and the Soviet Union in the early 1960s which was marked by a suicide attempt and botched electroshock therapy, he

Robinson, Ray returned to the United States a broken man who would live the remainder of his life in relative seclusion. Although they came from vastly different social and economic backgrounds, Wright and Robeson were similar in several important ways. Both men became painfully aware at an early age that American society had carved out an inferior ‘‘place’’ for them and they rebelled strongly against this, transcending their environments and creating lives of extraordinary achievement and significance. Wright and Robeson were also strongly committed to radical left-wing politics, believing that socialism was the best way to free America from racial injustice and economic exploitation. And each was, in his own distinctive way, an internationalist who connected the plight of African Americans to the suffering of marginalized people all over the world. Because these two men eventually reached a point where they no longer could tolerate the ongoing oppression of black people in America, they were forced to spend important parts of their lives in exile. Despite these similarities, Wright and Robeson had relatively little contact with each other, perhaps because of the differences in their ages. But they clearly were aware of and admired each other’s work. After witnessing the first performance of the stage version of Native Son, Robeson telegrammed Wright, warmly congratulating him and praising him for having ‘‘advanced the cause of your people immeasurably and doubly strengthened your place in American letters’’ (Rowley 246). In that same year, Robeson, backed by Count Basie’s band, recorded for Okeh Records Wright’s blues tribute to Joe Louis, ‘‘King Joe,’’ a record which sold 40,000 copies. And the two men collaborated in a September 1940 benefit concert to raise money for a black theatre which Theodore Ward hoped to establish in Harlem. Performing before a packed audience at the Golden Gate Ballroom, Wright read passages from ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ and Robeson sang a medley of songs, including ‘‘Ol’ Man River’’ and ‘‘Fatherland.’’

During the Cold War, Wright was keenly aware of the persecution which Robeson received in the United States, especially the black listing and revocation of his passport. This undoubtedly strengthened Wright’s resolve not to return to his native country. Selected Bibliography: Robeson, Paul. Here I Stand. New York: Random House, 1958. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

ROBINSON, RAY (?–1925) Ray Robinson was the older brother of Carl T. Robinson, one of Wright’s classmates at Smith Robertson School. In 1925, Ray was castrated and murdered by whites in Jackson after he was discovered having a sexual affair with a white prostitute whom he had come to know in his job as a bellhop at the Edwards Hotel. As Hazel Rowley has noted, Wright ‘‘would never forget Ray Robinson’s fate’’ (Rowley 39). This violent episode, along with similar explosions of racist violence such as the murder of his Uncle Hoskins when he was eight, deeply troubled Wright and left psychological scars which he would feel for the rest of his life. Such incidents were painful reminders of how southern whites controlled black behavior and would impose terrible punishments if black people would step out of the ‘‘place’’ which whites defined. References to Ray Robinson appear in several of Wright’s works. In ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,’’ which was published at the outset of Wright’s career in 1937 and would become the germ of Black Boy, Wright described this incident as a traumatic part of his ‘‘Jim Crow education’’ (Wright 14). While he was working as a bell boy in the same Jackson hotel which employed Robinson, he and his fellow black workers were reduced to terrified silence when they discovered that a bellhop had been castrated by whites for being caught in bed with a white prostitute. This terrible punishment was given as

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Roosevelt, Eleanor a warning to ‘‘trouble makin’ niggers’’ (Wright 15) who transgressed the laws of the segregated South. Wright then described his terror when he was promoted to the job of bell boy and would often witness naked white prostitutes in bed with their clients who would sternly warn him of what would happen to him if he even looked at a naked white woman. Late in his career, Wright made fictional use of the Ray Robinson lynching. In The Long Dream, published in 1958, a young black man named Chris is lynched when he is caught in a Jackson hotel with a white girl. Like Ray Robinson, Chris works at the hotel and his death is used as a way of reminding black men of their ‘‘place’’ in the Deep South. Throughout his career, Wright presented scenes of terrible violence in the form of lynchings and other kinds of violence resulting from interracial sexual activity. One of his earliest published works is an extraordinary poem entitled ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ which describes a black narrator’s traumatized response to a lynching. ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ published in 1936 in New Caravan and later included in Uncle Tom’s Children, centers on a graphic description of a lynching of a young black man who has been seen naked by a white woman as he swims in a creek with his friends. And Bigger Thomas’s frenzied killing of Mary Dalton must be understood in the context of such racial violence as the lynching of Ray Robinson. Bigger, who has been raised in Mississippi and who has lost his father in a race riot, panics when he realizes that he has been spotted in a white girl’s bedroom by her mother whom he perceives as a symbol of white authority. The racial codes of the segregated South have been deeply imbedded in him and his fear of lynching drives his terrified behavior. As a young man working as a handyman for a white family in Jackson, Wright inadvertently entered the young daughter’s bedroom without knocking and discovered her undressing. He was severely reprimanded by the girl’s mother. The episode was so painful with Wright that he

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repressed it until the mid-1940s when it rose to the surface of his consciousness as he was being interviewed by his psychiatrist and friend, Dr. Frederic Wertham who saw it as the germ of the scene in Native Son where Bigger accidentally kills Mary Dalton in a fit of panic. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: His Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wertham, Frederic, M.D. ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son.’’ Journal of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychotherapy, 6 (Winter 1944): 111–15. Wright, Richard. ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,’’ in Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: New American Library, 1963.

ROOSEVELT, ELEANOR (11 October 1884–7 November 1962) The wife of Franklin D. Roosevelt, she was an important educator, diplomat, and human rights activist. She was an especially active first lady of the United States from 1933–1945, promoting the ‘‘New Deal’’ during the Great Depression, visiting troops during World War II, and traveling throughout the world to support a broad spectrum of social causes. She was a strong supporter of women’s rights and civil rights for African Americans at a time when these issues were not popular. In 1934, she coordinated a meeting between her husband and NAACP leader Walter White to discuss anti-lynching legislation. She defied segregation laws in 1939 when she attended the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham, Alabama and refused to accept segregated seating patterns. When opera singer Marian Anderson was refused permission to sing at Constitutional Hall in Washington, DC because she was black, Mrs. Roosevelt arranged for her to sing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 70,000 people and a national radio audience. A friend of black educator Mary McLeod Bethune, she worked hard to improve education for black southerners and was instrumental in getting

Rosskam, Edwin Mrs. Bethune appointed by President Roosevelt in 1935 as one of his special advisors on race relations. Called the ’’First Lady of the World’’ by Harry Truman, she was active in the formation of the United Nations and was a key figure in formulating the UN Declaration on Human Rights, calling it ‘‘the international Magna Carta of all mankind.’’ Late in her life she was appointed by President John F. Kennedy to chair the ‘‘President’s Commission on the Status of Women’’ as well as to serve on the National Advisory Committee of the Peace Corps. Wright met Mrs. Roosevelt when he covered her 1937 visit to Harlem for the Daily Worker. In April 1938, she wrote a very favorable review of Uncle Tom’s Children in her ‘‘My Day’’ column for the New York World-Telegram, observing that the book was ‘‘beautifully written and so vivid that I had a most unhappy time reading it’’ (Rowley 142). In October 1938, she wrote a letter of recommendation for Wright’s successful application for the Guggenheim Fellowship which helped fund his writing of Native Son. In 1945, he and Mrs. Roosevelt helped organize a benefit tea to raise money for Wiltwyck School, a treatment center in the Catskills for delinquent young men from Harlem. And in that same year they both spoke at the Howard University Forum. She spoke on plans for developing post-WWII America and he delivered a paper on racial stereotypes in African-American literature. Despite their coming from such radically different social and economic backgrounds, the two had much in common. Both were deeply committed to securing civil rights for women and black Americans. And both saw American cultural problems in the broader context of global issues. Selected Bibliography: Burke, Fran. ‘‘Eleanor Roosevelt, October 11, 1884–November 7, 1962: She Made a Difference.’’ Currents and Soundings (September/ October 1984), 365–72. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Time. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

ROSSKAM, EDWIN (1903–1985) Painter, writer, and photojournalist, Rosskam was born in Germany to American parents in 1902. During World War I he and his parents were imprisoned as ‘‘enemy aliens’’ and his father died in the ordeal. After the war he came to the United States, graduating from high school in Philadelphia and attending Haverford College for a brief period. He studied painting at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts for four years and went to Paris in the mid-1920s where he became part of a group of expatriated American artists. It was in Paris that his interest in photography was piqued. In the late 1920s, he went to Polynesia and Tahiti, spending three years there as a writer, painter, and photographer. With the onset of the Great Depression, he returned to the United States and worked as a photojournalist (a term he claimed to have coined) with the Philadelphia Record, doing ‘‘picture stories’’ with his wife Louise on a variety of urban subjects. In 1937, he went to Puerto Rico as a photographer for Life magazine and later worked in the same capacity for Look. His most important work during the Great Depression was as a photographer and researcher for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This Works Progress Administration Project attempted to document American life through photographs and Rosskam’s work for that agency resulted in a five-book series entitled Faces of America. The first book was Home Town, a study of small town America consisting of Rosskam’s photographs and an accompanying written text by novelist Sherwood Anderson. The second volume, As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, was a collaboration between Rosskam and Oliver Lafarge which examined native American life in the twentieth century. Two books in the series focused on American cities, San Francisco: West Coast Metropolis and Washington: Nerve Center which featured an introduction by Eleanor Roosevelt. The fifth part of Faces of America was 12 Million

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Rosskam, Edwin Black Voices which Rosskam did in collaboration with Richard Wright. It consisted of black and white photographs of black people in both the North and the South with a written text explaining the photographs by putting them into cultural and historical context. The book was loosely modeled after Home Town and As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, both of which used the prose of famous novelists. Wright began work with Rosskam in the summer of 1941 after he had completed his collaboration with Paul Green, John Houseman, and Orson Welles, adapting Native Son for the stage. Whereas this earlier project was a long and often frustrating experience for Wright, working on 12 Million Voices was what Hazel Rowley has described as ‘‘a labor of love’’ (Rowley 237). As Wright examined the photographs of black sharecroppers which he and Rosskam unearthed from FSA files, memories of his southern past flooded his consciousness and produced writing which is unusual for its compassion and empathy. 12 Million Black Voices is the only book Wright produced which is written from the first person plural point of view and it stands out as a remarkably positive vision of black folk experience. The FSA files had no pictures of black urban life so Wright and Rosskam had to travel to Chicago to photograph life in the South Side ghetto which Wright inhabited from 1927 to 1937. They stayed with Wright’s friend Horace Cayton who put them up at the Good Shepherd Residential Center which was part of the Parkway Community House which Cayton was now directing. Rosskam took 420 photographs of South Side bars, factories, kitchenettes, and storefront churches. Wright immersed himself in the extensive sociological research which Cayton was compiling for his pioneering study of African-

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American life in Chicago, Black Metropolis. It was from this research that Wright got the idea for 12 Million Black Voices’s two part structure consisting of ‘‘Lords of the Land,’’ which examines rural black life in the South, and ‘‘Bosses of the Buildings’’ which explores the experience of the ghetto in northern cities. Wright and Rosskam worked together effectively. The book’s photographs, which were selected both from FSA files and new pictures which Wright and Rosskam took in Chicago, were smoothly integrated with Wright’s eloquent written text. Reviews of 12 Million Black Voices were extremely positive, with several reviewers comparing the book favorably with James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Wright was so inspired by his work with Rosskam on 12 Million Black Voices that he considered using the book as a point of departure for ‘‘a long series of novels’’ which would chronicle ‘‘the saga of the black nation in the United States’’ (Fabre 234). This series would contrast the feudal experiences of black southerners with the modern industrial life which African Americans would be plunged into when they migrated to northern cities. Although Wright never followed through on this idea, his work on 12 Million Black Voices did lead him to Black Boy/American Hunger which also divides into a southern section where Wright experiences feudal servitude and a northern section where he must cope with a whole new set of problems created by a modern industrial world. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

S SABLONIE`RE, MARGRIT DE Wright first met Margrit de Sablonie`re, the Dutch translator of The Outsider, in 1954 when he gave a talk in Holland about the history of the freedom movement in Ghana. She was a leftist who was deeply opposed to colonialism and a great admirer of Wright’s fiction and political writing. So the two took an immediate liking to each other, initiating what Arnold Rampersad has characterized as ‘‘an important friendship’’ (Rampersad 903) centered in Michael Fabre has called ‘‘a deep and mutual affection’’ (Fabre 406). Their six-year correspondence is one of the best revelations of Wright’s attitudes and mental condition in the final part of his life. Sablonie` re became one of Wright’s most trusted confidantes, a person he eventually came to see as a kind of ‘‘sister’’ (Walker 185). Their letters, many of which are kept in the Schomburg Collection, touch upon almost every important aspect of Wright’s life in his later years as his health failed, his marriage weakened, and his literary powers and reputation declined. He discussed with her in the frankest possible way his anxieties about his numerous illnesses and his growing suspicions that he was the object of a series of plots designed to discredit, or perhaps even kill, him. He vented to her all of his anger about the problems which the superpowers were creating during the Cold

War. He even shared with her his worries about his troubled marriage and his own increasing doubts about his powers as a writer. The letters are especially fascinating when he described the times when he seemed to regain his excitement about writing. In August 1960, he wrote that as he composed his haiku poems he felt ‘‘all the poisons being drained out’’ (Fabre 512) of him and that the experienced the same sense of freedom and exhilaration that he had known as a younger writer. He sought her advice on literary projects such as a novel entitled ‘‘A Father’s Law’’ and described to her his plans for The Long Dream. In the final year of Wright’s life, de Sablonie`re was probably the only person who realized the serious nature of Wright’s illnesses, and she sent him letters on a nearly daily basis which would try to raise his spirits. She also regularly sent him packages of food and suggested medicines which might improve his condition. She continued to translate his later works into Dutch and on two occasions prevented editors from shortening his books to save printing costs. Like He´ le` ne and Michel Bokanowski, de Sablonie`re became what Wright in his last days described as his ‘‘protectors’’ (Rowley 511) against a world he perceived as increasingly foreign and hostile. They relieved the growing isolation he felt when people close to him, such as his mother, 331

‘‘Sacrifice’’ Edward Aswell, and George Padmore, died and when old friendships with Jean-Paul Sartre and Ralph Ellison soured. He had, as he revealed in a June 19, 1960 letter to de Sablonie`re, come to see himself as ‘‘a strange man’’ who needed someone ‘‘to tell me exactly who I am’’ (Rowley 523). His deep friendship with her was one of the very few bright spots in his final years which enabled him to recover a sense of self and continue to function as a writer. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Chronology’’ in Richard Wright: Early Works. New York: The Library of America, 1991. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘SACRIFICE’’ In early 1945, Wright attempted to write a play about racial intermarriage entitled ‘‘Sacrifice.’’ The play was loosely based upon what Hazel Rowley has called ‘‘the most famous interracial marriage in Harlem’’ (Rowley 307) between African-American journalist George S. Schuyler and his wife Josephine, a white woman from Texas who believed that the American genetic pool was depleted and needed to be renewed by what she termed ‘‘hybrid vigor’’ (Rowley 308). Although Wright’s research on racial intermarriage centered mainly on the Schuylers, he also examined his own marriage to two white women, Dhimah Meadman, whom he married in 1940 and Ellen Poplar, whom he married in 1941. To some extent he also examined Horace Cayton’s marriage to a white woman as well as Cayton’s research on the subject. Wright had planned to explore the unique problems and tensions of black/white marriages in America. He modeled his central character on the Schuyler’s young daughter, Phillipa, who was a musical prodigy but who also suffered from ‘‘bad nerves and depression’’ (Rowley 308). Wright was deeply critical of Mrs. Schuyler whom 332

he felt put excessive pressure on her daughter to achieve high levels of musical achievement as a way of proving her racial theories. He felt that Phillipa was thus being ‘‘sacrificed,’’ and he planned to conclude his play with the central character committing suicide. Wright never completed the project and eventually abandoned it. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

SANDBURG, CARL (6 January 1878– 22 July 1967) American poet, folklorist, biographer, and musician who was born in Galesburg, Illinois and became a major figure in the first Chicago Renaissance at the turn of the twentieth century which infused American literature with new energy and vision. As a young man, Sandburg dropped out of school to travel widely throughout the United States, doing odd jobs as a delivery boy, fireman, truck driver, salesman, and newspaper reporter. He became active in leftist politics while living in Milwaukee from 1910 to 1912, serving as secretary to the city’s first socialist mayor. He worked as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News from 1917 to 1930, a job which enabled him to explore realistically modern American urban life from a variety of fresh perspectives. Sandburg’s wide travels and his work as a journalist endowed him with a broad, Whitmanian vision of America which he celebrated throughout his career in books of poetry such as Smoke and Steel (1920) and The People, Yes (1936), his massive six-volume biography of Lincoln (1927– 1939), and his anthology of American music, The American Songbag (1950). He is best known for his Chicago Poems (1916), a lusty evocation of that city as the ‘‘hog butcher of the world,’’ a ‘‘stacker of wheat’’ and ‘‘the City of the Big Shoulders.’’ Like Theodore Dreiser, Sandburg viewed Chicago as a boiling cauldron of change, a powerful engine of American modernism.

Sandburg, Carl After Wright came to Chicago in 1927, he immersed himself in the new literature being produced in that city such as Dreiser’s novels and Sandburg’s poetry. It is no surprise that he was drawn to Sandburg since both writers had much in common. Each produced literature which boldly broke away from accepted cultural standards, establishing rough new voices which examined aspects of modern America which previous writers were either unaware of or hesitant to discuss. They were also strongly influenced by Walt Whitman’s poetics and philosophical vision, using radically free verse to examine the experience of ordinary Americans. And Wright and Sandburg had a deep respect for American folklore and popular music, using them artfully in their work. It is important also to realize that they were essentially urban writers who sensed that a new kind of America was emerging in midwestern cities and that these cities contained enormously difficult social problems as well as exciting new possibilities. Wright saw depression Chicago more pessimistically than Sandburg regarded that city at the turn of the twentieth century, but he nevertheless rejected pastoral alternatives to the city and believed that modern American urban life contained the only real hope for African Americans. In ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ for example, he declared that Chicago offered blacks ‘‘a more stimulating life’’ than was ever possible in the South and that Chicago’s vast energy could ‘‘dazzle the mind with a taunting sense of possible achievement’’ (Wright 516). Later in that essay, he pictured Chicago using language that Sandburg might have employed, as a ‘‘fabulous city, huge, roaring, dirty, noisy, stark, brutal, a city of extremes’’ (Wright 529). In Black Boy/American Hunger, he left the hellish South for Chicago which certainly confronted him with new problems but also contained the opportunity to achieve a new life as a man and artist. But it is in Wright’s poetry that the influence of Sandburg is most apparent. As Addison Gayle has

noted in his discussion of ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands,’’ ‘‘The influence of Sandburg and Eliot is discernible in the style’’ (Gayle 69) of the poem. Wright uses long lines of free verse held together by the repetition of key words and parallel phrases which one sees in most of Sandburg’s longer poems. Like Sandburg, Wright enthusiastically celebrates the vitality of working class Americans, praising ‘‘millions and millions’’ of black people for doing the backbreaking work that helped to establish modern America. Like most of Sandburg’s city poems, ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ paradoxically mixes grotesque images of human suffering with lyrical images of human tenderness. He describes children at play during holidays, enjoying ‘‘chocolate drops and peppermint sticks’’ and he also dramatizes ‘‘tiny black fingers’’ reaching out for ‘‘the black nipples at the black breast.’’ But Wright also presents black people being destroyed by the capitalistic system as they are ‘‘caught in fast-moving belts of machines’’ and ‘‘crushed.’’ In The World of Richard Wright, Michel Fabre points out that Wright admired ‘‘the robust simplicity of Carl Sandburg’’ (Fabre 43) and that he especially ‘‘liked Sandburg’s The People, Yes which was highly praised in leftist circles’’ (Fabre 18). Many of the poems which Wright produced as an apprentice writer between 1933 and 1939 which were published in leftist journals such as Anvil and New Masses bear the stamp of Sandburg’s rugged free verse, his love of American speech, his deep suspicion of the ‘‘bosses’’ of the world, and his faith in ‘‘the people.’’ Poems such as ‘‘A Red Love Note,’’ ‘‘Ah Feel It in Mah Bones,’’ and ‘‘Transcontinental’’ echo Sandburg in their celebration of American ideals of freedom, independence, and mobility, all the while bitterly deploring how they are denied to ordinary people, especially African Americans. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul

SARTRE, JEAN-PAUL (21 June 1905– 15 April 1980) An important twentieth-century French intellectual and writer whose work encompassed an unusually broad range of areas, including fiction, drama, philosophy, and politics. Like Wright, Sartre was a proponent of la litte´rature engage´e, a ‘‘committed’’ literature devoted to diagnosing the ills of modern society and searching for cures to them. As a philosopher, Sartre is strongly linked to existentialism, a loosely defined, non-systematic philosophy which is nevertheless grounded in two fundamental beliefs: 1) the world is ‘‘absurd’’; that is, lacking in either rational order or transcendent purpose, and 2) man is ‘‘free’’ and can therefore create meanings in an otherwise empty universe through lucid consciousness and deliberate action. Among Sartre’s important philosophical works are Being and Nothingness (1943), Existentialism and Humanism (1946), and Critique of Dialectical Humanism (1976). As a literary figure, Sartre wrote a number of influential novels, plays, and short stories. His early work, such as Nausea (1938) and The Wall and Other Stories (1939), focus on the social and metaphysical anxieties of lonely central characters who feel deeply alienated from a meaningless universe. Sartre’s involvements in World War II as a soldier, a prisoner of war, and a member of the French resistance, however, changed his vision of life radically. His work from 1939 onward stresses the importance of human solidarity and the responsibility to resist tyranny while working to create a more just society. His two great novels of this period, The Age of Reason (1945) and The Reprieve (1947), envision central characters who attempt to harmonize their desire for personal freedom with their longing to sustain ‘‘good faith’’ with others by opposing political tyranny and social injustice. His play The Respectful Prostitute, which is loosely based upon the Scottsboro case, makes an incisive protest against a society which fails to protect the rights of all of its citizens.

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From World War II onward, Sartre developed a political vision which was consistent with his characters’ attempts to rejuvenate the self by connecting it to a renewed social world. Works such as Existentialism and Humanism (1946) and A Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) try to revive Marxism and communism, which Sartre felt had hardened themselves into inflexible ideologies, by harmonizing them with existentialism. The intensely personal focus of existentialism, which is centered in man’s quest to construct an authentic self, is linked to a less doctrinaire brand of Marxism and communism which emphasizes the need to build a collectivist society in which all people are responsible to each other. Sartre’s faith in leftist ideology and practice wavered and was redefined throughout his career. During the early stages of the Cold War, he supported Stalin’s Soviet Union, seeing it as preferable to American capitalism and imperialism, but he later grew sharply critical of Stalinism after the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian revolt in 1956. He abandoned faith in the Soviet Union in 1968 after its brutal repression of the uprising in Czechoslovakia. Throughout his career, however, Sartre never lost his faith in ‘‘committed literature.’’ His books of literary criticism, most notably Literary and Philosophical Essays (1955) and Politics and Literature (1973) stress the writer’s responsibility to use literature as an instrument of creating a society which is both free and just. Sartre, who grew up in comfortable uppermiddle circumstances and who benefited from a privileged French education, would, at first glance, seem to have little in common with Wright who was raised in extreme poverty and was self-educated. But, despite these outward differences, the two shared many ideals and principles and were temperamentally similar in a number of significant ways. So it is understandable that the two men were easily drawn to each other as writers and developed a close friendship which was sustained over a substantial period of time.

Savage Holiday Both men lost their fathers at a young age, as Sartre’s father died when he was one and Wright’s father left his family when he was six. They were raised by grandparents who tried to instill in them a very severe brand of Christianity which led both men to a life-long suspicion of organized religion. Each had lonely childhoods and became voracious readers as adolescents, partly to compensate for the lack of a sustained social life. Politically, Sartre and Wright were strikingly similar, as each was drawn strongly to radical leftist ideals which promised to put an end to their alienation by imprinting in their imaginations a potent image of the Marxist ‘‘classless society.’’ But since both were fiercely independent individuals, they had difficulty committing themselves over long periods of time to organized political groups centered in rigid ideologies. Wright was ambivalent about communism from the beginning and left the party when he felt that it violated his integrity as a writer and an African American man. Although Sartre was deeply attracted to the promises of communism for much of his adult life, he never joined the Communist Party and kept his distance from most other political organizations. Wright and Sartre finally became maverick socialists on the non-aligned left. Wright first met Sartre in March 1946 at Dorothy Norman’s house in New York when Sartre was doing research on post-WWII America. When Wright visited France later that year and moved to Paris permanently in 1947, he became close friends with Sartre and his partner, Simone de Beauvoir, both of whom admired Wright’s work, particularly Black Boy, and regarded him as an important American writer. Wright eagerly read Sartre’s novels and plays, as well as his philosophical writings. Wright’s ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ appeared in Sartre’s journal, Les Temps Moderne, and he wrote the introduction to The Respectful Prostitute when it appeared in Twice a Year in 1948. The two men also collaborated in the late 1940s to form two organizations devoted to discussing Cold War issues, Rassemblement De´ mocratique Re´ volutionnaire and the

Franco-American Fellowship. These organizations brought together intellectuals, artists, and activists to define an alternative to Soviet totalitarianism and American capitalism, two forces which Wright and Sartre saw as threats to European peace and stability. They participated actively in RDR’s first conference, ‘‘The Internationalism of the Human Mind.’’ Like Sartre, Wright was keenly interested in morally renewing Marxism and communism after both had become calcified during the Cold War. What drew Sartre and Wright together most meaningfully, however, was their fascination with existentialism. In a world where moral systems, religious beliefs, and social institutions had collapsed because of the traumas of modern history, existentialism promised hope by affirming the dignity of the individual and the power of committed action. Such a loosely defined philosophy provided both of them with the faith that a human world could be reconstituted out of the ruins of post-WWI and WWII experience. Selected Bibliography: Brosman, Catherine. Malraux, Sartre, and Aragon as Political Novelists. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1964. Flynn, Thomas. Sartre and Marxist Existentialism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

SAVAGE HOLIDAY With increased access to his letters and journals, literary critics have recently resorted to using a psychological or biographical approach to explicate the novels of Richard Wright, claiming that he used his own personal dilemmas, projected into his writings, in terms of a self-conscious and increasingly deliberate Freudian perspective. In fact, one of Wright’s last works, Savage Holiday (1954), is virtually a textbook narrative of Freudian cliche´s, in contrast to the less theoretical and more powerful early works. With the publication of studies by Edward Margolies and Russell Brignano, we have derived a fuller understanding of the Freudian dimensions in Wright’s fiction. Neither of these studies, however, extends its perspective to the important mother-son relationship 335

Savage Holiday in the novel. Fabre’s biography is more helpful for the personal dimensions behind the fiction. For instance, Fabre recounts Wright’s intense interest in Freudian interpretations of violence as exemplified in Wright’s involvement with Clinton Brewer, a young black man imprisoned for killing a woman. Wright introduced Brewer to Dr. Frederic Wertham, a Freudian psychoanalyst, who helped plead for Brewer’s release. Wright and Wertham were successful; however, Brewer murdered another woman shortly after his release, and this time Wright and Wertham had to marshal their energies to save Brewer from execution (236–37). Savage Holiday was written during Wright’s Parisian exile and reflects the influence of Wertham’s study of matricide, Dark Legend (1949). By this time in his career, Wright had read extensively in Freud so that, while the oedipal struggle and matricide had been previously displaced in his fiction, Savage Holiday, dedicated to Clinton Brewer, presents a blatant portrait of a destructive, promiscuous mother killed by a frustrated and betrayed son-figure. An examination of Dark Legend reveals themes that Wright was to repeat in his Savage Holiday. Wertham explains that the subject of his study, Gino, murdered his mother because of her affair with a man after the death of Gino’s father. In Savage Holiday, Wright’s hero Erskine kills Mabel Blake because of her promiscuity after her husband’s death. The significant aspect of both men’s attitudes toward their mothers or surrogatemothers is the frustrated worship that both feel rightly belongs to a proper mother. Gino remarked after his crime, ‘‘ ‘if she was honest, I would not kill her’ ’’ (121). As Wertham notes, Gino killed his mother ‘‘not in spite of his love for her, but because of it’’ (190). In an identical fashion, Savage Holiday concerns the son’s hatred of the promiscuous mother. From Erskine’s first action, his compulsive handling of the four colored pens in his pocket, the reader is presented with a man who is emotionally damaged. By constantly touching the pens,

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Erskine keeps in contact ‘‘with some emotional resolution whose meaning and content he did not know’’ (21). Erskine also admits that he is so potentially dangerous that he admits ‘‘he had to encircle himself, his heart, and his actions with bars, to hold himself in leash’’ (34). Erskine’s rage, like Gino’s, stems from his memory of his mother’s betrayal. As a child sick with a fever, Erskine was left alone when his mother went out with a man. He broods over this incident and remembers ‘‘hating her, trying to think of the many things he wanted to do to her to make her feel it’’ (39). Mrs. Fowler’s desertion of Erskine is reminiscent of Ella Wright’s severe beating of Richard, as well as the time she turned Richard and his brother over temporarily to an orphanage (Black Boy 6). In order to understand how heavy-handed Wright’s fictional treatment of the oedipal dilemma is in Savage Holiday, we must refer to Freud’s essay ‘‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men.’’ In describing men afflicted with the oedipal fixation, Freud observes that these men feel passion only when jealous instincts intervene. This type of man also thrives on a desire to ‘‘rescue’’ the beloved because he sets a high value on her promiscuity. Finally, the man suffering from an oedipal complex wishes to show his gratitude toward his mother ‘‘by wishing to have a son by his mother that shall be like himself.’’ In effect, the only way the son can identify with the father is to literally desire ‘‘to be the father of himself ’’ (51– 52, 57). Wright presents a similar fictional version of this desire to be the father of oneself in the extremely heavy-handed depiction of Erskine’s relationship with Tony. On the literal level, Tony is Mabel’s son, but he is also an earlier version of Erskine with whom Erskine identifies. Mabel makes this explicit by saying, ‘‘ ‘You remind me so much of Tony. . . . You need a mother.’ ’’ (183). The irony of this statement is lost because the relationships are simplistically cliche´d. Another Freudian theme, the child’s witnessing of the primal scene, is utilized in Savage Holiday as it was in almost all of Wright’s earlier work. In

Savage Holiday ‘‘Infantile Sexuality,’’ Freud observes that children who witness sexual intercourse between their parents imagine that they are participating in an act of subjugation of sadism. In a textbook-like manner, Tony tells Erskine that he has seen his mother ‘‘fighting’’ with men and declares that he does not want to grow up because ‘‘ ‘I don’t wanna fight ladies like my mother’ ’’ (99). Finally, in his ‘‘The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life,’’ Freud explores the necessity of unifying the tender, affectionate feelings with the sensual in order to ensure a fully normal attitude in love. But for men who have not passed beyond the oedipal stage, there is no tenderness for the sexual object. Instead, ‘‘as soon as the sexual object fulfills the condition of being degraded, sensual feeling can have free play.’’ Typical in this type of man is the fantasy of imagining the mother as a prostitute so that ‘‘by degrading her, he can win the mother as an object for sensual desire’’ (59, 63). Again, in a wooden fashion, Erskine needs to picture Mabel as so degraded that he can ‘‘save her, rescue her’’ (127). He imagines their marriage in hopelessly naı¨ve terms: ‘‘She’d obey him! she was simple; and above all, he’d be the boss; he’d dominate her completely’’ (134). Only after ‘‘conquering’’ and ‘‘humbling’’ Mabel can Erskine ‘‘be compassionate loving toward her’’ (160). Although he tells her that she is ‘‘haunting him,’’ it is clear that it is the memory of his mother that is haunting him. After proposing to Mabel, Erskine feels ‘‘wrapped in the fulfillment of long-sought dream,’’ that is, the dream of an incestuous relation with the mother (165). But very quickly Erskine’s extreme jealousy makes him realize that marriage to Mabel would be impossible for he would be always plagued by anxiety over her fidelity. In his letter to her he ironically states his own recognition of her resemblance to his mother: ‘‘This entire thing is a foolish case of mistaken identity and, if we let it continue, it will only mean misery for both of us’’ (185). The final confrontation occurs and Erskine is allowed the vicarious pleasure of condemning his own mother’s misbehavior through Mabel. He attacks her as ‘‘so careless, so stupid,

so inhuman, so brutal that you thought that a child could look right at such as that without its influencing him. It was just a picture of violence. . . . You rushed that child; you killed him’’ (200). Although a moment of reconciliation occurs, Mabel qualifies her pledge of fidelity with the fatal ‘‘If.’’ That is, she cannot pledge absolute faithfulness, and that qualification makes Erskine feel ‘‘abandoned, naked lost.’’ Erskine’s murder of Mabel is strikingly similar to Gino’s murder of his mother in Wertham’s Dark Legend. Both heroes explode in classic oedipal frustration, while Erskine, when he learns from Tony of Mabel’s affairs, rages: ‘‘Women oughtn’t to do things like that’’ (105). Both books and traditional Freudian theory claim that mothers should be pure objects worthy of the worship of their sons. When mothers are instead promiscuous, they force their sons out of the role of worshipper at the shrine to competitor for the mother’s sexual favors. The end result of that attempt can only be frustration, castration, and anger. Significantly, the real-life Gino used a kitchen butcher knife to kill his mother, and that device is echoed in Wright’s fictional version when Erskine attacks Mabel’s ‘‘nude stomach with machinelike motion’’ (175). The phallic associations are again and unfortunately rather too manifest. Savage Holiday is not a work that Wright critics have been particularly fond of discussing and it is obviously a much weaker work than either Lawd Today! or Native Son. But Savage Holiday is not a fluke in Wright’s career for it utilizes themes that are dominant throughout his work. Unfortunately, the Freudian themes have become simplistic cliche´s employed with little or no art. In fact, one senses that the characters are developed to further the pat and pre-conceived plot. The question remains, however, why did Wright compose and insist on the publication of Savage Holiday? One can claim that he lost his artistic power when removed from his American and Black roots or one can, like Robert Bone, claim that Wright’s decline was caused by ‘‘his inner life.’’ That is, Wright’s personal rebellions were rooted in ‘‘his 337

Schopenhauer, Arthur relations with his mother. . . . To rebel against maternal authority is to establish a sense of self, but also to risk abandonment, the loss of mother love.’’ According to Bone, Wright ‘‘embraces demonism and, in consequence, abandonment. As a result, his art dries up’’ (45–46). Wright makes the connection between mother love and his work as an artist explicit when after the murder Erskine is reminded of ‘‘killing’’ a drawing of a playmate’s doll, an act that he now understands as a substitute for killing of his mother. He realizes that the surrogate murder was a daydream that he had experienced while drawing with colored pencils, making clear his lifelong need to keep in touch with the pens in his pocket. In a symbolic extension, the reader of Wright’s fiction can see a parallel between Erskine’s need to fondle those pens and Wright’s work as an artist. He, too, has kept in touch with the emotional trauma made acute by his attitude (justified or not) toward his mother. But ultimately his personal source is artistically barren. The son’s rebellion is meaningless and sterile and this is what Wright demonstrates in Savage Holiday, albeit inadvertently. In his autobiography, Chester Himes humorously recalls that ‘‘Dick told us that the plot for Savage Holiday had come to him suddenly several months previously when he had been in bed with a high fever. Later, when he had let me read the finished manuscript, I believed him’’ (190–91). The reader of Wright’s earlier fiction is tempted to laugh at or dismiss Savage Holiday, but in its graphic depiction of a man caught in the tangle of his ambivalent emotional responses to a maternal figure, Wright concludes his treatment of a theme that had preoccupied his imagination for over twenty years. Diane Long Hoeveler Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. Richard Wright. Minneapolis: U. of Minnesota Press, 1969. Brignano, Russell C. Richard Wright. Pittsburgh: U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Trans. Isabel Barzun. New York: Morrow, 1973. Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘Infantile Sexuality.’’ In The Complete Psychological Works. London: Hogarth, 1964, Vol. 7. Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘The Most Prevalent 338

Form of Degradation in Erotic Life.’’ In Freud: Sexuality and the Psychology of Love. Ed. Philip Rieff. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1970. Freud, Sigmund. ‘‘A Special Type of Object Choice Made by Men.’’ In Freud: Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, edited by Philip Rieff. New York: Crowell-Collier, 1970. Himes, Chester. The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Margolies, Edward. The Art of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Wertham, Frederic. Dark Legend. New York: Doubleday, 1949. Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1945. Wright, Richard. Savage Holiday. 1954, rpt. New York: Award, 1965.

SCHOPENHAUER, ARTHUR (22 February 1788–21 September 1860) German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer is known for his pessimistic view of the world which grew, to a large extent, out of his abrasive and disagreeable personality. Having been unsuccessful as a university lecturer (he arrogantly scheduled his lectures at the University of Berlin at the same time as those of the popular Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and therefore failed to attract an audience), Schopenhauer spent the rest of his life as a misanthropic recluse. In his best-known work, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819) (The World as Will and Representation 1958), Schopenhauer expounded on the tyranny of the will which can only be overcome through a life of ascetic self-denial or through art, above all music. Schopenhauer’s ideas were taken up by a multitude of writers, among them Leo Tolstoy, Ivan Turgenev, Thomas Mann, Wilhelm Raabe, Gerhardt Hauptmann, E´mile Zola, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, August Strindberg, and Jorge Luis Borges. Richard Wagner was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer’s theory of music and his later operas clearly show this influence. According to Michael Fox, the extent of Schopenhauer’s impact is difficult to overestimate: ‘‘His assertion of the primacy of the will over the intellect in human life, his depth psychology, and his anti-rationalism make him an important precursor of existentialism and

Schwartzman, Victor psychoanalysis; his pessimism is a forerunner of the philosophy and theatre of the absurd; his attention to the aesthetics of music gave an impetus to serious reflection on this art medium; and his awareness and frequent invoking of Eastern (Hindu and Buddhist) thought was one of the first manifestations of Oriental fertilization of Western outlooks’’ (xvi). Despite Wright’s attraction to a pessimistic view of the world, his relationship with the ‘‘philosopher of pessimism’’ has not yet been explored. Only a few references to Schopenhauer can be found in the critical literature about Richard Wright’s works. Margaret Walker writes: ‘‘It is very important to remember when reading the later Richard Wright in a book like The Outsider, written after his association with Sartre, that way back there in the thirties, Wright was intensely interested in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and, above all, the novelist Dostoevski’’ (75). She also asserts: ‘‘As far back as the thirties, Wright had read Hegel . . . Schopenhauer on literature, and Nietzsche, and he had always chosen the nonreligious aims of materialist philosophy’’ (236). However, she does not discuss the extent of Schopenhauer’s influence. Describing Richard Wright’s library and readings through 1940, Michel Fabre states that the author’s holdings included Arthur Schopenhauer’s The Art of Literature, but he does not believe that the budding writer learned anything from the book (23). A thorough study of the impact of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on Wright’s writings would therefore be a valuable addition to Richard Wright research. Karl L. Stenger Selected Bibliography: Donougho Martin. ‘‘Arthur Schopenhauer.’’ In Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 90: German Writers in the Age of Goethe 17891832, edited by James Hardin and Christoph E. Schweitzer. Detroit: Thomson Gale, 1989, 291–298. Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Fox, Michael, ed., Schopenhauer: His Philosophical Achievement. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1988.

SCHWARTZMAN, VICTOR A specialist in gastroenterology who treated Wright from February 1960 until Wright’s death in the Eugene Gibez Clinic on November 28, 1960. Michel Fabre has argued that Schwartzman was a ‘‘fast friend’’ who supplied Wright with ‘‘some much-needed psychological support’’ (Fabre 497) during a time of great physical and emotional stress. By early 1960, Wright was suffering not only from the depression brought on by his declining literary career and failing marriage but was also afflicted by severe intestinal problems which left him close to ‘‘complete exhaustion’’ (Fabre 497). He was referred to Schwartzman who had recently completed his medical training and had published a book on disorders of the liver and intestines. During his first visit to the doctor’s office, Wright was surprised by his familiarity with his own writings and was pleased to see a copy of White Man, Listen! on his office desk. The two soon discovered that they shared many interests and became friends. Aware of Wright’s financial problems, Schwartzman charged nothing for his services. The doctor prescribed a strict diet that forbade Wright from consuming alcohol, fried foods, and heavily spiced foods. He also had Wright take heavy doses daily of bismuth salts, a strong antacid that later was taken off the market because it could lead to heavy metal poisoning. Its side effects included depression, sleeplessness, abdominal cramping, and paranoid delusions (Rowley 509), all of which Wright suffered in his final months. Hazel Rowley has argued that this treatment of Wright might have intensified his illnesses and contributed to his premature death. She claimed that ‘‘knowing what we now know of bismuth,’’ it probably induced ‘‘liver poisoning’’ (Rowley 522) and a general reduction in energy, which compromised his immune system. Margrit de Sablonie`re, the close friend whom Wright visited when he and Dr. Schwartzman visited Leiden, Holland in April 1960, was also certain that 339

The Scottsboro Trial Wright was being poisoned by the drugs that the doctor prescribed and urged him to stop taking them. Wright’s daughter, Julia, who picked up her father’s prescriptions, also believes that they were harming him. The druggist at one point told her, ‘‘No wonder your father is so ill, taking so much of this’’ (Rowley 522). It was Dr. Schwartzman who advised Wright to check into the Eugene Gibez Clinic on Saturday, November 26, 1960 for rest and further tests, assuring him that he would be out by the following Wednesday. Two days later, he was the doctor who pronounced him dead of a heart attack. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

THE SCOTTSBORO TRIAL A racial case which drew national and international attention in the 1930s. Along with the trial of Angelo Herndon, the Scottsboro affair dramatized in a powerful way the extreme injustices suffered by black people in the American South. On March 25, 1931, the deputy sheriff of Jackson County, Alabama stopped a Southern Railway train bound for Memphis at Rock Point, Alabama because of reports of a fight on the train among hobos. Nine black youths were arrested on the spot and several white hobos were removed from the train, including two white women. Shortly thereafter, the white women accused the black youths of rape, and a trial for rape was held in nearby Scottsboro, Alabama. After nearly being lynched by a white mob, the black defendants were convicted of rape and sentenced to death. After an appellate court overturned the verdict, a second trial was conducted in Alabama in 1933. The black defendants were represented by The International Labor Defense, an arm of the American Communist Party. A black attorney, William Patterson, headed up the defense. Five years of legal maneuvering ensued in both federal and state courts and a compromise 340

was reached between the defense and prosecution which resulted in the release of four defendants and the sentencing of the other five to long prison terms. They were finally released from Alabama prisons in 1937. As a black man who had grown up in the Deep South and a member of the Communist Party who was strongly committed to exposing racial injustice in the United States, Wright was deeply interested in the Scottsboro case and followed it closely. One of the factors which initially drew him to the Communist Party was its active involvement in the Scottsboro trial. As a member of the Communist Party, Wright helped to organize rallies in support of the Scottsboro boys in Harlem. He wrote an introduction in Twice a Year to Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute, a play based upon the Scottsboro case. Selected Bibliography: Carter, Dan T. Scottsboro: A Tragedy of the American South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Goodman, James E. Stories of Scottsboro. New York: Pantheon Books, 1994.

SEAVER, EDWIN (1900–1987) Born in Washington, DC in 1900, Seaver was a novelist and editor who was deeply involved with leftist causes in the 1930s and 1940s and served for many years as the literary editor of the Daily Worker. Seaver and Richard Wright were friends and colleagues when both were members of the Communist Party and worked together when Wright was Harlem correspondent for the Daily Worker in the late thirties. They attended the First American Writers’ Congress in New York in April 1935. The congress was called by Granville Hicks and the editors of New Masses to gather American writers on the left to create a group which would be an affiliate of the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. A wide assortment of American writers, including James T. Farrell, Michael Gold, Jack Conroy, and John Howard Lawson participated in this important meeting.

Second American Writers Congress Seaver delivered a paper at the First American Writers’ Congress entitled ‘‘What Is a Proletarian Novel?’’ In it, he argued that proletarian writers need not come from the working class and need not even write about the working class, but he insisted that their work must be informed by ‘‘theMarxist interpretation of the historical process’’ (Wald 33) and must also support the economic and political interests of working people. James T. Farrell vigorously objected to Seaver’s ideas, claiming that they deprived creative writers of the freedom they needed to interpret their experience truly. Wright, who even at this early point in his career, would have reservations about Seaver’s dogmatic pronouncements, would later agree with Farrell that leftist writers should not be so limited by rigidly ideological pressures. Despite their theoretical differences, Wright and Seaver became good friends. And Seaver was an enthusiastic supporter of Wright’s work, especially in his early career when Wright was a member of the Communist Party and the John Reed Club. He wrote a very positive review of ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ for the Daily Worker when it appeared in New Caravan in 1936. And he often supported Wright when he was attacked by the more dogmatic communists such as James W. Ford who saw Wright as being too independent and careless about Marxist dogma. Even after Wright left the party in 1942, Seaver continued his friendship with him and endorsed his fiction. In 1943, he tried to help Wright place his novel ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ with a New York publisher, and, when their efforts proved unsuccessful, he included the second half of the novel as a short story in his 1944 anthology, Cross Section.

SECOND AMERICAN WRITERS CONGRESS

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Landers, Robert. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Wald, Alan. James T. Farrell: The Revolutionary Socialist Years. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Selected Bibliography: Landers, Robert. An Honest Writer: The Life and Times of James T. Farrell. San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004. Naison, Mark. Communists in Harlem during the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

Organized by the Communist Party of the United States, it took place in New York in June 1937, exactly one month after Wright had moved there and would soon find work as a writer and editor for the Harlem branch of the Daily Worker. The conference was held during a time of great international crisis, when civil war was raging in Spain, Stalin’s ‘‘show trials’’ were being conducted in Moscow, and World War II was looming throughout Europe. Ernest Hemingway spoke in the opening session about his experiences in Spain, issuing a stern warning that this conflict was likely to be a preview of a broader and much more destructive war in Europe. Wright delivered a paper in which he declared himself a ‘‘Negro Communist writer’’ who was ‘‘wholeheartedly and militantly pro-loyalist and for the national freedom of the people of Spain’’ (Rowley 126). Like Hemingway, he viewed the civil war in Spain as the beginning of global warfare which would shake the foundations of western civilization. Unlike many members of the American Writers Congress who were so deeply disturbed about the revelations of Stalin’s brutality in Russia and were beginning to distance themselves from the American Communist Party, Wright at this point in his life remained a communist and a supporter of Stalin’s Russia. Envisioning fascism as a greater threat to human freedom than communism, he saw the Soviet Union as the only effective force fighting fascism. When the League of American Writers issued a statement in support of Stalin in 1938, Wright, along with Langston Hughes and Nelson Algren, signed the document.

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Segregation

SEGREGATION Racial segregation in America has taken two forms, separation of the races by law (de jure) in the South and separation of the races by custom (de facto) in the North. Both are strategies designed to preserve white supremacy by structuring society in ways that prevent black people from fully participating in the opportunities and possibilities of American life. Both forms of segregation are powerfully represented in Richard Wright’s work. De jure segregation as a formal system in the South dates back to the latter part of the nineteenth century as southern states developed systems of ‘‘Jim Crow’’ laws which separated the races in all aspects of public and many forms of private life. The legal foundation of such laws was the Plessy v. Ferguson decision by the Supreme Court in 1896. In a 7-to-1 decision, the court ruled in favor of a ‘‘separate but equal’’ principle in public transportation facilities for blacks and whites. It thus legally affirmed the role of states to racially divide its citizens and, in so doing, it encouraged the development of Jim Crow laws in all southern states. By the end of the nineteenth century, all aspects of public life, and many aspects of private life, were rigidly segregated by law in the South. All forms of public and private education were segregated with whites and blacks attending separate schools. (Although this system was certainly ‘‘separate,’’ it was anything but ‘‘equal’’ as white schools were far better funded and equipped than black schools.) Public accommodations of every kind were, likewise, rigidly segregated as blacks and whites were separated on public transit vehicles, restaurants, rest rooms, hospitals, and even cemeteries. Black people were also excluded from skilled trades and higher paying factory jobs, leaving them to work at low-paying, menial jobs in cities and sharecropping on farms. Marriage and sexual activity between the races were also forbidden by law and harshly penalized in all southern states.

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This vast and intricate system of racism was upheld and 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 had no legal mechanism they could employ to either modify or eliminate Jim Crow laws. Secondly, the South’s segregated society was enforced by a court system which excluded blacks from juries and extra-legal violence in the form of lynchings, beatings, and mob violence. Organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan and white citizens councils punished even the smallest deviations from Jim Crow laws and segregated practices with terrorist violence. Between 1882, when records on reported lynchings began to be kept, and 1950, 4,739 people, most of them black, were lynched. (The actual number of lynchings is much higher since many were not reported and took place in very remote rural areas.) In southern cities, mob violence in the form of race riots enforced segregation. Race riots took place in Phoenix, South Carolina, and Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, resulting in the deaths of many black people and the terrorizing of the black community. Serious race riots also broke out in New Orleans in 1900 and Atlanta in 1906. The Tulsa, Oklahoma riot of 1921 was the most serious postWorld War I race riot and resulted in the leveling of a substantial part of the African American business area and the deaths of substantial numbers of black citizens. In the North, segregation took a subtler but no less debilitating form. As black people left the South for a better life in northern cities during the ‘‘Great Migration,’’ they encountered a segregated system held together by custom and unspoken agreements rather than formal laws. But the result was the same, as they were kept out of the mainstream of American life and were reduced to the status of second-class citizens. Northern segregation took several forms. On a personal level, blacks were kept out of white neighborhoods by violence directed at them in the form of beatings, stonings, and the bombing

Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar of their homes. White homeowners also formed so-called neighborhood improvement associations for the purpose of excluding blacks, and real estate agencies and banks colluded to develop restrictive covenants that prevented African Americans from buying homes in all-white sections of the city. This residential segregation led to many other forms of racial separation in the North. Because blacks were forced to live in ghettos, they attended all-black schools which were vastly inferior to white schools. The inferior education which black people received in ghetto schools also limited their economic development and they were condemned to low-paying menial work. Trade unions made this problem worse by systematically excluding blacks. Richard Wright grew up in Mississippi, the most brutally segregated state in America, and he also personally experienced the bitter realities of northern segregation when he and his family lived in Chicago’s South Side ghetto during the Depression. His writings examine southern and northern forms of segregation better than any previous American writer. Essays such as ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,’’ the stories contained in Uncle Tom’s Children, and his autobiography Black Boy/American Hunger brilliantly analyze the physical limitations and psychological costs of southern segregation. For Wright, the segregated South is an immense trap, a fiery hell that virtually destroys both its black victims and white victimizers. In Native Son, Wright was the first American writer to describe the northern ghetto in a detailed, realistic manner from the point of view of one of its victims. Here, too, the segregated society of the North, like its southern counterpart, is a series of ‘‘walls’’ which ‘‘blind’’ people, forcing them into violence which threatens the future of American society. ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ and The Outsider also provide penetrating analyses of the northern ghettos. One of the strongest attractions which Marxism and communism had for Wright was the promise of a non-segregated community of all people, a ‘‘classless’’ society which would

transcend racial, social, and economic divisions. Communism, on a theoretical level at least, gave Wright an imaginatively potent vision of human unity, a ‘‘common vision that bound us all together’’ (Crossman 141). When he lost faith in the ability of leftist ideology to deliver on its promises, he sought fulfillment in another society he hoped would be humanly integrated, post-war France, where he felt he was treated as a man and an artist rather than a second-class citizen. When he became aware of the limitations of French society, he sought a ‘‘home’’ in Pan-Africanism, which would unite dispossessed people all over the world. The quest for a non-segregated society is central to Wright’s vision and spans his entire career. Selected Bibliography: Crossman, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam Books, 1952. Clark, Kenneth. Dark Ghetto. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Drake, St. Clair and Horace Cayton. Black Metropolis. New York: Harper and Row, 1945. Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in The Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998. Woodward, C. Vann. The Strange Career of Jim Crow. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966.

SENGHOR, LE´OPOLD SE´DAR (9 October 1906–20 December 2001) Senegalese poet, philosopher, and statesman. Born October 9, 1906, in Joal, Senegal, he died on December 20, 2001, in Verson, France. Senghor had a dual role as Senegal’s first president after its independence in 1960 and as a distinguished French-speaking African poet and leading figure of ‘‘Ne´gritude,’’ a term coined by Aime´ Ce´saire in a 1939 poem. This movement of African cultural consciousness and liberation emerged in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s among the Frenchspeaking African and Caribbean writers living in Paris as a protest against French colonial rule and the policy of assimilation. Initially influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, especially Claude McKay, it critiqued western values, revisited African culture, and supported black African artistic expression. 343

Senghor, Le´opold Se´dar After studying at the Sorbonne in Paris, being drafted into the military in 1939, captured by German forces, and imprisoned until 1942, Senghor joined the French resistance. Following the war, he entered French politics, represented his country in the French General Assembly, and founded the socialist Senegalese Progressive Union. He was unanimously elected president of Senegal in 1960 and voluntarily stepped down 20 years later. His poetic oeuvre includes Chants d’ombre (1945), Hosties noires (1948), Thiopiques (1956), Nocturnes, and Oeuvre poe´tique (1990). He also wrote philosophical treatises on Ne´gritude and critical essays under the pseudonyms Silmang Diamano and Patrice Maguilene Kaymor. Senghor received numerous international awards and became the first black member of the French Academy in 1984. Before his exile to France, Wright was unaware of the Ne´ gritude movement. In the summer of 1946, Senghor contacted him and from then on, Wright developed contacts with French-speaking Africans like Aime´ Ce´saire and Alioune Diop, who asked him to help found the magazine Pre´sence Africaine, which Diop edited. Wright agreed and sent his novella, ‘‘Bright and Morning Star,’’ for publication in the first issue (November 1947). Wright was on the editorial board with Ce´saire and Senghor. The group also included Paul Hazoume´ and Rene´ Maran; JeanPaul Sartre and Albert Camus were patrons. In February 1948, Camus, Wright, and Leiris suggested the formation of an association, the friends of Pre´sence Africaine. Senghor, however, withdrew from the magazine on July 8. In 1955, Wright’s Black Power came out in France as Puissance Noire and had a major influence on French black writers. Senghor ranked Wright with Claude McKay and Langston Hughes among poets exemplifying the African artistic gift and expressing the ideology of Ne´gritude. That summer, Diop, Maran, Ce´saire, Senghor, Hazoume´, and Wright started preparing for the First Congress of Negro Artists and

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Writers to be held in Paris in the fall of 1956. In November 1955, Wright was asked to prepare a talk about ‘‘tradition and industrialization.’’ (This paper is included in Wright’s White Man, Listen!.) At the Congress, in September 1956, Wright and Senghor commented on each other’s presentations in relation to the kinship between black Americans and black Africans as well as the role of ancestral traditions and beliefs both during colonization and decolonization. Wright corrected the English translation of the congress’s final resolution, which marked the end of western cultural domination, for final publication in Pre´ sence Africaine. In July 1957, Wright was nominated as an executive member of a French society open to all black men of culture residing in France, created by Ce´ saire, Senghor, Edouard Glissant, and David Diop. He was also elected to the executive council of the international Socie´te´ Africaine de Culture, even though he had increasingly distanced himself from these organizations. When Wright’s White Man, Listen! was published in mid-October, Senghor praised its insight, humanity, and courage. In 1959, Wright started planning a six-to-ninemonth trip to French Africa that would center on the role of western-educated colonial elites such as Senghor. His itinerary included Senegal, Mauritania, Sudan, Guinea, the Ivory Coast, Nigeria, and Upper Volta. Senghor’s friendly and enthusiastic letters (July 21 and 28) planned Wright’s visit to Senegal for October. Senghor would probably be in New York then, but he promised to look for funding for this project, which never materialized for financial as well as health reasons. Overall, Wright never had much ongoing personal contact with Senghor, and there is no indication that he ever read Senghor’s works besides his articles in Pre´sence Africaine. In fact, Wright increasingly diverged from Senghor’s ideology: Senghor was preoccupied with past African traditions, whereas Wright was grounded in a present interracial context; Senghor was profoundly

Settlement House (Memphis) Catholic, whereas Wright was an agnostic who opposed institutionalized religion; Senghor recommended a return to core culture and racial mysticism, whereas Wright was in favor of nationalism and assimilation; Senghor had a moral, cultural, and literary approach, whereas Wright mistrusted African literature’s lyricism and focused on the political. Although Wright identified with the Ne´ gritude group of westerneducated Africans caught between two cultures, he increasingly distrusted them as being more western than black. All these differences caused Wright to gradually distance himself from Africanist organizations. Caroline Garnier Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michael. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001. Ruquist, Rebecca. ‘‘Richard Wright in Paris.’’ Contemporary French and Francophone Studies 8, no. 3 Summer 2004: 285–303. Senghor, Le´opold. ‘‘La Poesie Afro Americaine’’ (1950 lecture) in Liberte´ I: Ne´gritude et Humanisme. Paris: Seuil, 1965, 120.

SETTLEMENT HOUSE (MEMPHIS) After Wright’s father abandoned the family in Memphis, Tennessee and his mother became too ill to work in early 1916, Wright was taken out of school at Howe Institute and sent with his brother Leon to Settlement House, a Methodist orphanage in Memphis. His time there would constitute a traumatic experience resembling what young children undergo in a Dickens novel or a Kafka story. In Hazel Rowley’s words, Wright ‘‘would never forget his terror and misery’’ (Rowley 8) at this bleak orphanage. The intense loneliness and fear which the seven-year-old Wright felt as a student at Howe Institute became much worse at Settlement House. He was afflicted with a deep anxiety about being separated from his mother and worried that she, like his father, might abandon him. The director of the place was Miss Simon, a ‘‘tall, gaunt mulatto woman’’ (Wright 33) who forbade

his mother from visiting him and who ruled with an iron hand. The children were ‘‘silent, hostile and vindictive,’’ contributing to an overall atmosphere of ‘‘nervousness and intrigue’’ (Wright 34). To make matters worse, Wright suffered from extreme hunger which disoriented him so severely that he was prone to frequent dizzy spells which gave him the sensation of living in a ‘‘dream’’ (Wright 34). Because the orphanage had no lawnmower, Wright and the other children had to maintain the lawn by pulling grass, a task which his weakened physical condition made quite difficult. As he reveals in Black Boy, the physical and mental suffering he endured at Settlement House made Wright feel as if he ‘‘was suspended over a void’’ (Wright 35). He withdrew into himself, sensing that he was ‘‘a distinct personality striving against others’’ (35) and developing a distrust of ‘‘everything and everybody’’ (Wright 34). (This initiated an alienation which would wax and wave throughout Wright’s entire life, leading him ultimately to regard himself as a stranger and an outsider.) Wright’s psychological disorientation at Settlement House was so great that he could not remember whether he spent weeks or months there, but after a while he ran away only to be caught by a white policeman who returned him to Miss Simon’s custody. He was then beaten severely and sent to bed. When his grandmother came to Memphis in the spring of 1916, she recognized the plight of her daughter and grandchildren and brought them to her home on Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi where they spent the summer. In the fall of 1916, Wright, his mother, and brother went to Elaine, Arkansas to live with his Aunt Maggie and her husband, Silas Hoskins. New sufferings would await them there when his uncle was murdered by whites who were jealous of his business successes. Their home destroyed again, the Wrights fled in the middle of the night to West Helena, Arkansas. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: the Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

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Seventh Day Adventism Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

SEVENTH DAY ADVENTISM A fundamentalist Christian sect believing in the ‘‘second coming of Christ’’ and practicing the sabbath on Saturday, it grew out of the Millerite movement of the nineteenth century. This movement was part of the ‘‘Second Great Awakening’’ which swept across the United States in the early parts of the nineteenth century. After William Miller died in 1849, his followers called themselves ‘‘Adventists,’’ and they were formally organized as the Seventh Day Adventist Church on May 31, 1863. While Seventh Day Adventists follow most of the tenets of mainline conservative Christianity such as original sin, the divinity of Christ, and salvation by the atonement of Christ, they break away from most Christian sects with a number of their unique convictions. For example, they believe that the ‘‘second coming’’ of Christ is imminent and that its members should be ready to leave the earth and either be with God in heaven or with Satan in hell. At the ‘‘second coming,’’ the righteous will be resurrected and taken to heaven while sinners will burn in hell. After a period of a thousand years, when Satan and his legions will rule the earth, another resurrection will take place and the righteous will return to earth, purifying it and establishing a ‘‘new Jerusalem.’’ Sinners who have died before this second resurrection will be consumed in hell which is imagined as a gigantic lake of fire. Seventh Day Adventists also commit themselves to a number of unique practices and observances. They observe the sabbath from sunset on Friday to sunset on Saturday, in keeping with the early Christian church. They also maintain special dietary laws which forbid them to consume alcohol, tobacco, and pork. (Many Seventh Day Adventists are vegetarians, and one of its more famous members, John Kellogg, the founder of Kellogg’s cereals, led a movement to eliminate

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meat from the American breakfast.) Members are also warned against secular entertainments such as theatre, film, dance, and worldly literature. Interfaith marriages are strongly discouraged, and divorce is permitted only under very restricted circumstances such as incest, spousal abuse, and homosexuality. When Wright lived with his grandmother Margaret Wilson in Jackson, Mississippi between the ages of twelve and seventeen, he was raised in a Seventh Day Adventist household since his grandmother, whom Margaret Walker has described as a ‘‘religious fanatic’’ (Walker 33), was a fervent member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and his Aunt Addie and Aunt Cleo were teachers in the church’s school. In five of his most formative years, Wright lived in a highly charged fundamentalist environment in which all of the rules and practices of Seventh Day Adventism were strictly enforced. No work was allowed on the sabbath, which became a hardship for Wright when he tried to find employment on Saturdays. Movies and secular reading were strictly forbidden, something which was very difficult for Wright to accept since he greatly enjoyed films and regarded reading as a life-giving activity. Listening to radio was also not allowed, and when Wright once constructed a crude radio, his grandmother destroyed it. And Bible reading and prayers were ‘‘daily occupations’’ (Walker 33) as his grandmother and aunts were fond of frequently quoting the Bible and organizing long family prayer sessions. Wright’s responses to this severe religious training were complexly mixed. He clearly resented the repressions and restrictions imposed upon him by his grandmother and aunts and, except for his mother, grew to dislike everyone in the household he was forced to inhabit until he was seventeen. He emphatically rejected the dogmas and observances of Seventh Day Adventism, and his painful experiences in his family’s church induced in him a life-long distaste for institutional religion of any kind. One of the most important formative experiences in his childhood occurred at age

Seventh Day Adventism twelve when he refused to testify that he was ‘‘saved’’ in a church ceremony, thereby drawing the wrath of his aunts and grandmother who thereafter saw him as a ‘‘heathen’’ who was ‘‘damned to hell’’ (Walker 33). Wright’s later agnosticism and rationalism, therefore, may be seen as his way of rejecting his fundamentalist background and centering his life in values which would be anathema to his grandmother and aunts. But, as Michel Fabre has observed, Wright ‘‘was not impervious to the force of religion’’ (Fabre 34), and as a writer, he made extensive literary uses of his fundamentalist Christian background. Like James Joyce and James T. Farrell, writers he admired and was strongly influenced by, he consciously rebelled against the formal, outward aspects of his religious upbringing but was in many ways imaginatively influenced by it. The apocalyptic vision of history embraced by Seventh Day Adventists, in certain respects at least, resembles the equally apocalyptic vision of Marxist revolution and the eventual establishment of a utopian society which attracted Wright so strongly to communism. As Wright would later reveal in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ he saw communism as a surrogate religion, a new ‘‘faith’’ which would purify history and transform human life. And the importance which Seventh Day Adventism placed on the experience of conversion would also strongly influence Wright’s fiction. Black Boy/American Hunger is clearly a secular conversion narrative depicting Wright turning away from a hellish old life in the South to a new life of increased possibility in the North. Native Son, on the one hand, ironically inverts classic conversion stories when Bigger falsely believes he has gained a new life through murder but it finally endorses the idea of conversion when he develops a new sense of self in Book Three. Novels like The Outsider, Savage Holiday, and Rite of Passage also make skillful use of the conversion motif, centering as they do on dramatic transformations of character leading to a new awareness of self and the social world.

But perhaps the clearest example of how Wright made literary use of his Seventh Day Adventist background is his repeated use of fire as a central motif in his best work. The fire and brimstone sermons he heard as a young man and his grandmother’s admonitions that he was headed toward damnation in the fiery lake of hell left lasting impressions on Wright’s sensibility, and he consciously employed such images throughout his writing career. As Keneth Kinnamon has stressed, fire is ‘‘a central metaphor’’ of Wright’s ‘‘creative imagination’’ (Kinnamon 10) and he made brilliant literary use of it throughout his career. One of his earliest published poems, ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ describes its traumatized narrator imagining a black man burned alive in a graphically depicted lynching. Several of the stories from Uncle Tom’s Children, especially ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ describe terrible fires and use fire in a nearly biblical manner as a way of dramatizing a world literally being consumed with hatred, fear, and racism. Black Boy begins with the young Wright setting fire to the curtains of his house and then hiding under the porch to escape detection and the fire’s ravages. It is significant that Bigger Thomas tries to destroy the evidence of his killing Mary Dalton by burning her body in a furnace which then becomes a hot symbol of his fear and guilt. In all of these works, fire is a revelation of deep-seated psychological forces or a hellish social environment which can flash out in any moment in destructive hatred and violence. While Wright surely did reject the dogmatism and emotional fanaticism of Seventh Day Adventism and came to regard institutional religion as a dangerous escape from engaging the problems of social injustice, he was, nevertheless, attracted to several aspects of his grandmother’s religion. She gave him a rigorous training in the Bible, especially the Old Testament, and his imagination was deeply stirred by biblical characters and narratives. And he sometimes listened in rapt wonder to the sermons put forth by Seventh Day Adventist preachers, compelled by their powerful evocation of ‘‘images of vast lakes of eternal fire, of

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‘‘Shame of Chicago, The’’ seas vanishing, of valleys of dry bones . . . and voices speaking out of the clouds’’ (Rowley 17). As he revealed in ‘‘Memories of My Grandmother,’’ his religious training as a boy, while scarring him emotionally, often lifted him imaginatively. It enabled him to envision life as much more than submitting to the grinding poverty and galling racism of the segregated South, enabling him to see his experiences in more dramatic and affirmative terms as containing both the reality of ‘‘horror’’ and the possibility of ‘‘glory.’’ Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘SHAME OF CHICAGO, THE’’ When Wright went to Chicago in August 1949, to shoot scenes for the filming of Native Son, he contracted with Ebony magazine to write three articles, a brief piece about the making of the film, an essay about his life in Paris, and an article about his impressions of post–World War II Chicago. He was paid $500.00 for each story. The essay on Chicago was entitled ‘‘The Shame of Chicago’’ and appeared in the December 1951 issue of Ebony. It consisted of a series of photographs depicting black life on the South Side and an accompanying written text describing Wright’s impressions of Chicago after his twelve-year absence from that city. The photographs, like those in 12 Million Black Voices, document the stark conditions of African-American urban life, depicting garbage-strewn streets, filthy back alleys, and ‘‘the bleak facades of slum hovels’’ which in Wright’s words, stretch ‘‘endlessly across the South Side’’ (Wright 24). The written text strongly reinforces this disturbing picture, stressing the ghetto’s physical decrepitude, inadequate social services, racial discrimination, and economic injustices.

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Although Wright does concede that postDepression Chicago has created material prosperity for some people, he emphasizes that the great majority of black people living on the South Side experience life in much the same way as they did when Wright left Chicago for New York in 1937. Although certain streets are sometimes ‘‘jammed with Packards, Cadillacs, Oldsmobiles,’’ he points out that the tires of such luxury automobiles often rest on ‘‘piles of garbage’’ (Wright 27). Even though some new housing projects have been constructed, they are ‘‘dwarfed by vast slums’’ (Wright 27) which trap its inhabitants in a cycle of poverty and discrimination. While the South Side has made some progress because of the post–World War II boom in America, the ‘‘tempo’’ of such progress ‘‘does not equal that of the city as a whole’’ (Wright 30). For Wright, Chicago’s ghetto has, for the most part, remained ‘‘an undissolved lump in the city’s melting pot’’ (Wright 28). It never became ‘‘the promised land, the longed-for Mecca’’ (Wright 24) which Wright so eagerly sought when he left the South and headed North in search of freedom in 1927. Wright’s physical description of Chicago in 1949 stresses its ‘‘chronic dirt and disorder,’’ and he contrasts the city’s ‘‘ugliness’’ (Wright 26), with the clean, tree-lined boulevards of his new home, Paris. More disturbing to Wright than the outward decrepitude of Chicago, however, is its system of racial segregation and political corruption. In order to film scenes on South Side streets, Wright’s producer, Pierre Chenal, has to bribe local police on a daily basis with ‘‘a roll of green bills’’ (Wright 25). When Wright tries to secure a room for the film’s director, Jaime Prados, in the Palmer House, it is assumed that Prados is black and he is denied a room, even though a Negro waiter informs Wright that the hotel is ‘‘a third empty’’ (Wright 28). A white policeman who has read Native Son and considers it ‘‘that damned book,’’ angrily threatens Wright, telling him ‘‘I could break you if I wanted to’’ (Wright 29). Despite Chicago’s veneer of prosperity and social

Sharecropping progress, Wright concludes ‘‘Chicago was still Chicago. The old racial lines and attitudes still ruled’’ (Wright 28). As disappointed as Wright was with Chicago, he became even more distressed by the reactions to his essay by Ebony’s conservative director, John H. Johnson, who was ‘‘horrified’’ (Rowley 397) by its bleak assessment of black life in Chicago and balked at publishing it. It took over a year for ‘‘The Shame of Chicago’’ to appear in Ebony which had an editorial policy of projecting a positive vision of black middle class life and whose readership consisted largely of successful black professionals eager to take advantage of postWorld War II American prosperity. Wright’s essay on moviemaking was published in Ebony’s January 1951 issue, but his article on his life in Paris was never published. Even though Wright offered to return the royalties he received from Ebony so that he could place his essay elsewhere, Johnson refused to take the money and kept the rights to each essay, thus preventing them from appearing in print. Wright grew particularly bitter about the role played in this matter by one of Ebony’s editors, Ben Burns, a white liberal with whom he had worked during the thirties in various communist projects. Burns originally encouraged Wright to compose a hard-hitting critique of black life in Chicago but then backtracked when he realized that his boss, John H. Johnson, had disapproved of the essay. Burns and Johnson collaborated on an anonymous editorial in the issue of Ebony in which Wright’s article appeared, sharply rebutting Wright’s views and asserting that the conditions of African-American life in Chicago were steadily improving and that black Chicagoans were much better off generally than French citizens in Paris. Burns and Johnson characterized Wright in their editorial as ‘‘a race leader’’ who ‘‘sacrificed truth on the altar of militancy’’ (Rowley 398). Wright would have been even more disturbed if he lived long enough to discover the fate of ‘‘I Choose Exile,’’ the essay which Johnson refused either to publish or relinquish the rights to. Burns eventually sold the piece illegally to Kent State

University in 1969 without consulting either the publisher of Ebony or Wright’s estate. It remains unpublished in the Kent State Library. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘The Shame of Chicago.’’ Ebony, no. 7 (December 1951), 24–32.

SHARECROPPING Also called ‘‘tenant farming,’’ it was an agricultural system devised by white southern landowners after the Civil War in response to the economic exigencies brought on by the war and its aftermath. It became an oppressive system of exploitation of unskilled labor in the South, especially black unskilled labor. It grew out of the social disorganization, agricultural disasters, and extreme poverty which southerners faced as a result of the Civil War. Landlords lacked financial resources to pay farm workers so a system was devised whereby workers would farm thirty to forty acres of land on a cropsharing basis. This required plantation owners to rent land and extend credit to workers to pay for housing, food, and other living expenses, and this credit was secured by a lien on the crops harvested by these farmers. Plantation commissaries were established to furnish supplies to tenants who bought these supplies on credit. This credit would be paid off at harvest time with crops raised by the sharecropper. Although this system might initially have been justified as a pragmatic response to the extreme hardships brought on by the Civil War and Reconstruction, it soon became a brutal form of economic exploitation amounting to forced labor of blacks and poor whites, condemning them to a mode of life which preserved many of the forms of slavery. Landowners paid so little for the crops raised and harvested by their tenant farmers that these people were forced into perennial debt and dependency upon plantation owners. Southern sharecroppers from the 1880s to the 1950s received some of the lowest wages and harshest working conditions of any American workers. 349

Sillen, Samuel From the Reconstruction period to the middle of the twentieth century, this system spread throughout the South as independent landowners often lost their land due to crop failures and economic hard times and had to hire out themselves and their families as tenant farmers. Sharecropping became the dominant pattern in staple crop production such as cotton and tobacco which were, before mechanization, extremely labor intensive. By 1890, nearly 60 percent of the cotton farming done in the Deep South states consisted of sharecropping. In 1937, the President’s Commission on Farm Tenancy found that 65 percent of all farming done in the ‘‘Cotton Belt’’ used the system of tenant farming. Sharecropping for black people was especially harsh since it was linked with the equally oppressive and exploitative social system of segregation. Blacks and whites throughout the South were separated by law, custom, and the threat of violence in all forms of public life and many forms of private life. Moreover, southern black people were deprived of the vote and participation in public office by poll taxes and literacy tests which white people did not have to deal with. This social system, which separated the races systematically from birth to death and served the needs of white supremacy, relegated black people to the bottom of the social pyramid and deprived them of the political rights needed to change the system. Sharecropping and segregation, therefore, became interlocking structures of social, political, and economic domination which deprived AfricanAmerican people of the rights and opportunities of American life. Wright grew up in one of the most racially oppressive parts of the Deep South when sharecropping and segregation went virtually unquestioned as parts of ‘‘The southern way of life’’ and he protests against both systems powerfully throughout his career. He was born on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, where his father was employed as a sharecropper and he experienced terrible poverty and family disorder as a result of this father’s inability to earn enough money to

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provide for his family. He came to see the kind of medieval peonage suffered by his father as a powerful symbol of how rural blacks were psychologically and socially imprisoned by southern culture. In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright describes his father as a ‘‘black peasant’’ whose life had been crushed by sharecropping, a man whose ‘‘soul was imprisoned by the slow flow of the seasons’’ and whose life was ‘‘chained’’ to the ‘‘animalistic impulses of his withering body’’ (Wright 40–41). Wright saw his own escape to the northern city as essential to his breaking the patterns of his father’s life, and he saw his writing and political commitments as ways of finally achieving the free American identity that southern injustice would not allow. When he accepted the Spingarn Medal in 1941, he did so in honor of his father and countless other black people who were victims of sharecropping and segregation: I accept this award in the name of my father, a sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation, and in the name of my mother who sacrificed her health on numerous underpaid jobs, and in the name of millions of others like them . . . . (Rowley 238–239) Selected Bibliography: Litwack, Leon. Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. New York: Random House, 1998. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

SILLEN, SAMUEL Marxist critic who wrote for a number of leftist journals during the 1930s and 1940s, including New Masses and Left Front. He later became editor of Mainstream. Wright knew Sillen in Chicago as the two were members of the John Reed Club and worked on the Illinois Writers’ Project. They later worked together in New York as writers for New Masses. Sillen wrote an extremely positive review of Native Son in the March 5, 1940 issue of New

Silone, Ignazio Masses, examining the novel from a rigorously Marxist perspective. He argued that the novel was grounded in a ‘‘Marxist conception of reality’’ and that the source of its power was ‘‘a revolutionary vision of life’’ (Butler 33). Comparing the book favorably with Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, he praised Native Son’s artistry, claiming that it avoided being reduced to didactic propaganda because ‘‘Idea and image are remarkably integrated’’ by Wright’s grounding Marxist theory in his own lived experience as an American black man. Sillen concluded his review by placing Wright’s work ‘‘incontrovertibly in the first ranks of American literature of our time.’’ After Wright left the Communist Party and publicized his reasons for doing so in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ Sillen substantially revised his view of Wright. In an August 23, 1944 New Masses article entitled ‘‘Richard Wright in Retreat,’’ Sillen accused Wright of abandoning Marxism and communism so that he could be part of a ‘‘reactionary camp.’’ Although Sillen’s criticisms of Wright were not as harsh as those offered by other communist leaders such as James W. Ford or Benjamin Davis, they nevertheless stung Wright and strengthened his resolve to keep his distance from the Communist Party. Selected Bibliography: Butler, Robert J. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1995. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

SILONE, IGNAZIO (1 May 1900– 6 June 1978) An Italian novelist, journalist, and political figure, he wrote a cycle of novels, Fontamara (1934), Bread and Wine (1936), and The Seed Beneath The Snow (1942) which describe fascist Italy during the Great Depression and the early days of World War II. He was born of middle-class parents in the Abruzzi region of northern Italy and as a young man planned to enter the priesthood. During WWI, however, he rejected Catholicism and

became politically active as the secretary of the land workers of Abruzzi. In 1921, he helped to form the Italian Communist Party and remained in Italy even after laws were passed forbidding opposition to fascism. In addition to serving as an editor of two important Italian newspapers, Avanguardia of Rome and Lavatore of Trieste, he ran an underground communist press which was deeply critical of fascist policies and practices. In 1930, he became an exile in Switzerland and did not return to Italy until 1944. He become a leading member of the Italian Socialist Party and remained a committed socialist until his death. The parallels between Silone and Wright are quite revealing. Both grew up in highly repressive rural environments and both rebelled strongly against the severe religious training they had received as young men. And both men experienced a long period of exile from their native land. Significantly, Wright and Silone were drawn to communism as a secular replacement for the religious values and institutions for which they had lost belief. Just as Wright saw communism as providing him with a new faith in brotherhood and the formation of a classless society, Silone in The God That Failed describes his ‘‘conversion’’ (Crossman 87) to communism as creating the possibility of a revolution which would culminate in a just and humane society centered in human dignity. Accordingly, communism became for Silone what it temporarily became for Wright, a ‘‘family, school, church’’ (Crossman 88) which would replace the culture which had been destroyed by capitalism, ‘‘Old Regime’’ politics, and WWI. Like Wright, Silone eventually became bitterly disenchanted with communism, coming to see it as a new tyranny, a totalitarian system which crushes the individual and brainwashes the artist. Although he left the Communist Party in 1930, he was able to maintain ‘‘a faith in socialism’’ (Crossman 101), seeing it as a means of creating a just society based on brotherhood and affirming the dignity of human beings as they struggled against ‘‘The economic and social mechanisms’’ (Crossman 101) which oppress them. 351

Smith Robertson Junior High School Interestingly, Wright and Silone wrote essays which formally articulated the reasons for their break from communism in the same book, The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. Wright saw Silone as a like-minded novelist from the non-communist left who could produce politically engaged writing of the highest artistic caliber. Both men were members of the ‘‘Congress of Cultural Freedom,’’ a group of American and European intellectuals which also included Thomas Mann, Andre´ Malraux, Albert Camus, Stephen Spender, and Bertrand Russell. This group of independent, free-thinking writers were united in their opposition to the various forms of totalitarianism emerging after WWII. Selected Bibliography: Cross, Richard. The God That Failed. New York: Bantam Books, 1950. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

SMITH ROBERTSON JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL After graduating from Jim Hill Primary School in June 1923, Wright worked during the summer as a caddie, a water boy at a brick yard, and a handyman for the Walls, a white family. In the fall of that year, he became a student at Smith Robertson Junior High School, which at that time was the most advanced public school a black child in Jackson could attend since that city had no high school for blacks until it opened Lanier High School in 1925. Smith Robertson, like Jim Hill, was a stable academic environment staffed by many dedicated teachers. Its principal, W. H. Lanier, ruled this school of nearly 1,400 students with an iron hand, imposing ‘‘an almost military discipline’’ (Fabre 48) on its students and faculty. Although Wright often chafed at the school’s strict regimen, he continued to thrive academically and graduated as class valedictorian on May 29, 1925. The two years he spent at Smith Robertson, along with the two years he studied at Jim Hill, would 352

constitute the bulk of Wright’s formal education. Although he studied briefly at Hyde Park Public School in Chicago in 1930, he soon dropped out to support his family and never completed high school. While at Jim Hill, Wright began to envision himself as a writer and composed a romantic story which was never published. But at Smith Robertson, he published his first story, ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre.’’ which appeared in the Southern Register, Jackson’s black weekly newspaper. His grandmother, a staunch Seventh Day Adventist, strongly disapproved of the story and discouraged Wright from writing, or even reading, such ‘‘worldly’’ literature. His teachers at Smith Robertson also took a dim view of the story, objecting to what they considered a curse word in the title. But Wright was unaffected by such criticism and was greatly excited about his success in placing the story. As he revealed in Black Boy, he began to see his writing as a means of liberating himself from the South: I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt or seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed, yet by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. (Wright 199)

The habit of reading which Wright developed at Jim Hill continued to flourish at Smith Robertson. He eagerly devoured the detective fiction and murder mysteries he found in magazines such as Argosy and Flynn’s Detective Weekly. He also read pulp novels containing westerns and ‘‘Horatio Alger stories’’ (Wright 199) which fired his imagination and encouraged his dreams of success. But even as his own self-education flourished, Wright grew increasingly suspicious of the formal education available to him in the South. He felt ‘‘walled in’’ (Wright 206) by all aspects of southern life and realized that the dreams of a new life which were growing within him would not be encouraged by his education at Smith Robertson. He became aware that he ‘‘was building

Smith, William Gardner up . . . a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle’’ (Wright 199). His doubts about southern education were painfully confirmed when he was chosen as class valedictorian and had to give a commencement address. While he had prepared his own speech entitled ‘‘The Attributes of Life,’’ the school principal rejected it and told Wright he had to deliver a much more conventional address which the principal had written. Although in Black Boy Wright admitted that his own speech was ‘‘cloudy,’’ it managed to ‘‘say what I wanted to say’’ while the principal’s words were a set of platitudes which ‘‘did not say anything’’ (Wright 209). Angry at Mr. Lanier’s attempts to silence him and make him stay in his ‘‘place,’’ Wright rebelled and spoke his own words. The speech was coldly received, and the net effect of the entire experience was to alienate Wright from his southern environment and strengthen his resolve to seek a new life in the North. When Jackson finally opened a high school for black students in 1925, Wright enrolled in it but dropped out after a few weeks so that he could earn the money he needed to move away from Mississippi. By November 1925 he was living in Memphis, Tennessee which Margaret Walker has aptly described as ‘‘a kind of way station’’ (Walker 40) to Chicago. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

SMITH, WILLIAM GARDNER (6 February 1927–5 November 1974) Journalist, novelist, and editor, Smith was born and raised in Philadelphia where he experienced a harsh ghetto environment while distinguishing himself as a student. He graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School at age 16 while ranking second in his class. His career as a journalist

began in high school with his editing the school newspaper and yearbook while also having a part-time job at the Pittsburgh Courier. After high school, he worked full-time at the Courier as a reporter for two years. He was drafted into the Army in 1946 and was assigned as a clerk typist in Germany, thus initiating a keen interest in European life and a desire to find an alternative to American culture. Returning to the United States after his military obligations were completed, he began work on his first novel, Last of the Conquerors, which was published in 1948. This novel, which deals with the ironic situation of black soldiers being treated better on foreign soil than in their own country, linked him immediately with the ‘‘Wright School’’ of black novelists who used rigorous naturalistic techniques to expose and protest American racism and injustice. His second novel, Anger at Innocence (1950), is a so-called ‘‘raceless novel’’ which, like Willard Motley’s Knock on Any Door, features an all-white cast of characters. But, like Smith’s first novel, it is thoroughly naturalistic, focusing on characters who are at the mercy of an environment which overwhelms their free will and reduces them to innocent victims. Partly because of the bad reviews which American critics had given his first two novels, but also because he felt Europe was a better place for black people, Smith and his wife left for Paris in 1951, beginning his long exile from America, broken only by a brief visit to the United States in the 1960s. While in Paris, Smith became acquainted with other African-American expatriates such as Wright, James Baldwin, Chester Himes, and Ollie Harrington, often congregating with them at their gathering spot, the Cafe´ Tournon. Although his marriage foundered in Paris and eventually ended in divorce, Smith was greatly invigorated by the personal freedom and release from American segregation which he experienced in Paris. He became a correspondent for Jet and Ebony and completed his third novel, South Street in 1954. This book, which some regard as a precursor to novels about black power activists of 353

Socialism the 1960s and 1970s, centers on a black militant embittered by the lynching of his father. Smith’s final novel, The Stone Face, was published in 1963 and examines the experiences of an African-American expatriate in Paris who marries a Polish woman who survives a German concentration camp. Like all of Smith’s novels, it received mixed reviews from both white and black critics who faulted it for melodramatic plotting, unconvincing characters, and pedestrian style. Although it was Smith’s attempt to escape what he felt were the limits of protest literature, many regarded it as narrowly propagandistic. Smith lived in Ghana in the mid-1960s, working as a television journalist. A political coup forced him to leave that country after two years, and he returned to France where he continued to work as a print journalist for Agence FrancePresse. He traveled briefly to the United States in 1967 to cover riots in major American cities. His final book, Return to America (1970), examines the ‘‘Black Power’’ movement and predicts a long period of serious racial strife in America. His last years were spent in France where he died from cancer in 1974. His ashes rest in Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery where Richard Wright’s ashes are also located. Smith’s relationship with Wright began on a positive note with the publication of his 1945 essay in Ebony entitled ‘‘Black Boy in Brooklyn’’ which describes Wright as a person deeply wounded by American racism who was able to heal himself by writing important protest fiction. And in his early days in Paris Smith enjoyed a cordial relationship with Wright and other black expatriates. But their relationship became badly strained, and they became ‘‘arch-enemies’’ (Rowley 499) when the two became embroiled in personal squabbles. Wright became exasperated with Smith after a 1958 Time article quoted Smith as criticizing Wright for his exile in France and suggested that Wright was a ‘‘red’’ who was dangerously anti-American. Matters only got worse when Smith became sexually involved with Celia Hornung, one of Wright’s mistresses. It

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was hardly a surprise, therefore, when Wright singled out Smith for harsh satiric treatment in ‘‘Island of Hallucinations,’’ an unpublished novel which portrays the Lilliputian infighting of black American writers in Paris. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1955. Bryant, Jerry W. ‘‘Individuality and Fraternity: The Novels of William Gardner Smith,’’ Studies in Black Literature, 3 (Summer 1972) 1–8. Hodges, Leroy. Portrait of an Expatriate-William Gardner Smith. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1985. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

SOCIALISM The term ‘‘socialism’’ refers to a wide spectrum of doctrines and movements defining a social system in which property and wealth as well as the production and distribution of goods are subject to social control rather than private enterprise. As an economic system, it is associated with state ownership of the means of production. As a social system, it emphasizes cooperation rather than competition and equal distribution of goods rather than individual ownership. Socialism has deep roots in western history and can be traced back as far as classical times in books such as Plato’s Republic and later in utopian fictions like More’s Utopia. But modern socialism is rooted in working class movements of the late nineteenth century which revolted against capitalism’s exploitation of workers and poor people. Socialism has been expressed in a great variety of forms ranging from Marxism and communism which demand the abolition of capital and private enterprise to more moderate varieties which seek to harmonize certain aspects of capitalism with socialist principles. Wright first became interested in socialism and other leftist ideologies in his early days in Chicago when he would listen to socialist and communist speakers in Washington Park. When he worked in the Chicago Post Office in the early

The South of Richard Wright thirties, he developed friendships with co-workers such as Abe Aaron who introduced him to the Chicago branch of the John Reed Club, a communist-sponsored literary organization composed mostly of young socialists and communists. He joined the John Reed Club in 1933 and a year later he became a member of the Communist Party. He read widely in socialist and communist literature and began writing proletarian poems such as ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ and ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise’’ which are centered in radically leftist themes. At this point in his life, Wright was strongly attracted to socialism and communism because they provided him with a lucid, coherent analysis of social problems and a systematic way of addressing those problems. But as a person who was temperamentally a staunch individualist, Wright was always uneasy about the strict control and ideological rigidity of communism. After nine very conflicted and sometimes stormy years as a party member, he officially withdrew from the CPUSA in 1942. While he felt that the Communist Party deprived him of the imaginative and personal freedom he needed as a writer and also believed that the party failed to understand the real needs of American black people, Wright, nevertheless, remained a maverick socialist for the remainder of his life. After leaving the party, he continued to find new ways of committing himself to the core principles of socialism. After exiling himself and his family in France, he became an active member of Rassemblement De´mocratique, writers and intellectuals on the non-communist left whom Wright felt were grounded in ‘‘revolutionary socialism’’ (Kinnamon 129). He also became deeply involved with Pan-Africanism, a group of socialists and communists devoted to freeing Third World countries from colonial domination. Very late in life, Wright became disillusioned with the French Socialist Party, pointing out in a 1959 interview that ‘‘They were responsible for much of the political stupidity that was committed in Africa’’ (Kinnamon 194–95). And in his final two years he distanced himself from several leftist organizations such as Pre´sence Africaine

and Societe Africaine de Culture. But, however much Wright became convinced of the failure of political organizations to express socialist values, he never lost faith in such values. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

THE SOUTH OF RICHARD WRIGHT The South figures prominently in the works of Richard Wright. This is especially true of the early novellas that appear in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), in the autobiographical statements ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ (1938) and Black Boy (1945), and in the posthumously published stories included in Eight Men (1961). Always the region is presented as a place of extreme racism and unabated violence, a place that does not allow a black man to be a man, and, ultimately, a place from which black men in particular must escape if they will save their own lives. In ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ from Uncle Tom’s Children the innocence of black male childhood is shattered when a group of friends go swimming in a pond belonging to white man without his permission. To keep from being discovered by the son of the owner and his lady friend, the boys attempt to run away. While retrieving their clothes, ‘‘Big Boy’’ accidentally exposes himself to the white woman, a real taboo in the South, and in the aftermath of the exposure, the owner’s son is killed. Although ‘‘Big Boy’’ is not fully guilty of a crime, he nevertheless must run for his life, ultimately being smuggled out of the South to avoid being lynched, the fate that was his friend Bobo’s. Similarly, in a much later published story from Eight Men, Dave Saunders, the young black male protagonist in ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man,’’ must leave the South as well in order to escape the conspiracy of whites and blacks, including his own family, to keep him a ‘‘boy’’ 355

Spain instead of helping him grow into manhood. Dave is not only treated as a child even though he is in his mid-teens and works for Mr. Hawkins, but he also is openly ridiculed when he concocts a lie to cover up his accidental killing of a mule because he is too inept with a gun. In Dave’s case, his mother even receives his pay from Mr. Hawkins because she does not consider him man enough to handle his own money. In the conclusion of ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man,’’ Dave takes the gun and hops a freight train away from the South, on his way to someplace where he can be a man. The South as presented in ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man’’ recalls the scenario of the region presented in ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow’’ and the fuller autobiographical statement Black Boy. In both works, the South is presented as a place where even well meaning whites have the capacity to turn vicious and where blacks have become so dehumanized that they themselves often participate in the emasculation of black men. The South is characterized as a place that elicits the worst kind of fear from blacks, especially from black men, and oftentimes the only way that blacks can feel of any worth is by striking out at other blacks. This behavior often follows blacks when they leave the South as is clearly seen in Bigger Thomas’s behavior in Wright’s most famous work, Native Son after the family migrates from Mississippi to Chicago. The South takes on yet another dimension of racism as seen in ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ where the hardworking Silas has bought his own land but still exists only at the mercy and whim of white men. Treated like a child, cheated out of a fair price for his crops, and having his home and wife violated by a white man with complicity from his own wife, Silas concludes, ‘‘Yuh die ef yuh fight! Yuh die if yuh don fight! Either way yuh die n it son mean nothin’’ (Wright 113). Wright was never able to fully reconcile himself with the South of his childhood and he seldom returned after escaping its violence and hatred. He did, however, revisit the South’s cruel legacy

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time and again in his writing. Indeed, the fear and loathing generated by his early life in the South provided a powerful backdrop for much of his fiction. Warren J. Carson Selected Bibliography: Carson, Warren. ‘‘ ‘They Don’t Look So Good, Mistah’: Realities of the South in Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Selected Short Fiction.’’ CLA Journal (March 2004), 299–309. Jackson, Blyden. ‘‘Richard Wright: Black Boy from America’s Black Belt and Urban Ghettos.’’ CLA Journal (Winter 1969), 287–309. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Signet, 1963.

SPAIN Wright was particularly interested in Spain’s rich and complex history as the junction between Europe and Africa and in the fact that its centuries of Islamic and Moorish influences set it apart from other western European countries. That marginality peaked at the time Wright became interested in Spain, during its civil war (1936– 1939) and the ensuing dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. In 1936, working from Morocco, Franco led a nationalist military revolt against the republican government of Spain. The coup’s failure gave birth to a bloody civil war, in which the violence and terror spread by both sides reflected the great passions unleashed by the war. While the nationalist side was aided by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, the republicans’ support came from the Soviet Union and international brigades of European and American volunteers. Beyond Spanish borders, many artists and intellectuals, among them Wright, saw the conflict as part of an international struggle between tyranny and democracy, fascism and freedom, communism and capitalism. Wright knew of people who had died fighting for freedom in Spain; acquaintances including Herbert Kline, Langston Hughes, Oliver Law, and Harry Haywood were actually in Spain in 1937. In 1939, Franco became the caudillo of Spain, an exhausted, still divided, impoverished state

Spain that he ruled until his death in 1975. At the end of WWII, Spain was labeled the last fascist dictatorship and largely ostracized until the Cold War, when, as an anticommunist state, it regained international trust. By 1955, it was admitted to the United Nations and Franco’s regime appeared secure, despite ongoing domestic opposition. Wright had taken interest in the Spanish Civil War as early as 1937: at the second American Writers’ Congress organized by the Communist Party in New York, he declared that he was ‘‘proLoyalist,’’ for national freedom of the Spanish people and in favor of American military intervention. That same year, as a reporter for the Harlem bureau of the New York Daily Worker, Wright published five articles on the Spanish Civil War, the Communist Party, and the efforts of the black American soldiers fighting against fascism. In 1938, the League of American Writers also published a letter of his in Writers Taking Sides: Letters about the War in Spain from 419 American Authors. Years after the dying Gertrude Stein had suggested it, in the summer of 1946, Wright decided to go to Spain in 1954, at the instigation of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, to whom he dedicated the result of his investigations, Pagan Spain, published in 1957. Over the summers of 1956 and 1955, Wright made three trips to Spain. His first trip—August 15 to September 10, 1954—started with Barcelona, in Catalonia. He then headed south to Valencia, Morata de Tajuna, Saragossa, Guadalajara, and Madrid. Further south, through La Mancha, he visited Cordoba, Granada, Malaga, and Sevilla, and went back to Madrid. Before his second trip, he went to the United Nations library in Geneva, Switzerland to study Spain’s economical development, history, and language. During his second visit—November 8 to December 17, 1954—he visited the southwest (San Sebastian, Azpeita, Galicia, Asturias, Burgos, and Avila) on his way to Madrid. His third trip— February 20 to early April 1955—took him to Madrid, Toledo, Saragossa, and Barcelona, which he found the most remarkable city in Europe.

After visiting Valencia, he headed south to Granada, Algeciras, and Tangier, in Spanish Morocco, returning to Granada and Sevilla via Gibraltar. Over the course of these three visits, he lived with locals; attended religious ceremonies; discovered resistance movements, prostitution, and the white slave trade; visited night clubs, slums, and cathedrals; and met members of diverse socioeconomical backgrounds, political parties, regional groups, professions, nationalities, and creeds. The Spain Wright describes is a totalitarian, sectarian state deprived of civil liberties and riddled with hunger, ignorance, and poverty. Pagan Spain examines the psychology and reality of everyday life under a repressive regime; it portrays Spain’s struggle between modernity and tradition, the sacred and the secular. It also exemplifies Wright’s deep sympathy and identification with oppressed people: Jews, Protestants, gypsies, immigrants, Catalonians, Basques, and, in particular, poor and powerless women. In Spain, however, Wright also discovered a poverty and oppression not connected with race; he called the discriminated, ostracized minorities of Spain ‘‘white Negroes’’ who did not seem to belong to the white race. He compared gypsy camps with Harlem, Catholic bigotry with Mississippi racism, religious intolerance in Spain with racial intolerance in the United States, and the processions’ hooded men adoring the Virgin with the hooded Klansmen idolizing Southern white women. Thus, through his time in Spain, he became newly thankful for having been ‘‘liberated’’ from archaic traditions and superstitions that then still entrapped Spaniards. Caroline Garnier Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001. Weiss, Lynn M. ‘‘Para Usted: Richard Wright’s Pagan Spain.’’ In The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture, edited by Maria Dietrich and Werner Sollars. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. 212–25.

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Spingarn Medal

SPINGARN MEDAL An annual award instituted in 1914 and given by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to black Americans who have distinguished themselves in his or her field in the previous year, or over a period of time. It is named after Joel Spingarn (1875–1939), a white literary critic who was the chairman of the board of the NAACP for many years. The medal is considered one of the highest awards given to African-American men and women. Winners include W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Carter Woodson, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Marian Anderson. Wright won the Spingarn Medal in 1941 for his ‘‘powerful depiction in his books, Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, of the proscription, segregation and denial of opportunities to the American Negro’’ (Rowley 238). His acceptance speech was originally intended as an impassioned plea for American blacks to not support America’s entry into World War II and was modeled after an essay, which Wright had earlier published in New Masses, entitled ‘‘Not My People’s War.’’ But in between the time when Wright was notified of his winning the award and its official bestowal at the annual NAACP convention in Houston in August 1941, Germany had invaded Russia, thereby nullifying its non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union and reversing the Communist Party’s official stance toward World War II. Whereas it had earlier denounced the war as fought to achieve the agendas of capitalist and imperialist nations, it now dramatically changed its mind, proclaiming the war against Germany as a ‘‘people’s war’’ against fascism. The party now put heavy pressure on Wright to scrap his anti-war speech which he had intended as his acceptance speech for the Spingarn Medal. The speech which Wright delivered in Houston is described by Margaret Walker as ‘‘brief and classic’’ (Walker 157) and comparable in eloquence to William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address. But it contained none of Wright’s original intention to oppose black involvement in World 358

War II, and he deeply resented the pressure which the Communist Party had applied to him in order to change his speech. Michel Fabre calls this episode as ‘‘one of the most mortifying events of [Wright’s] career’’ (Fabre 225) and argues that it strengthened his resolve to leave the party, which he did a year later. Fabre also stresses that this incident produced in Wright a deep suspicion of totalitarianism which emerges in his later writings. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

‘‘SPREAD YOUR SUNRISE’’ Wright published this poem in the July 1935 issue of New Masses, the most prestigious literary journal of the American Communist Party. After joining the John Reed Club of Chicago in 1933, he published 14 poems during the next two years in a wide range of leftist journals such as New Masses, Left Front, Anvil, Left Midland, and International Literature. The great majority of these poems were heavily weighted with Marxist themes and were written in a brash free verse reminiscent of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, two poets whom Wright admired. By the time he joined the Communist Party in 1934, Wright was well on his way to becoming one of the party’s most promising and respected young writers. Although its wildly comic tone is unusual in Wright’s work, ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise’’ is otherwise typical of the political poetry Wright produced at the start of his career. It is an enthusiastic celebration of Marxist revolution which is personified by a ‘‘bushy haired giant-child’’ from Russia whose birth certificate has been signed by Lenin. This symbolic persona, who in some ways resembles Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and other mythic figures from American folklore, spreads hope (‘‘sunshine’’) throughout the world by dislodging ‘‘millionaires’’ from their positions of power.

Stein, Gertrude Equipped with a ‘‘long tall broom’’ which will sweep the world clean and buckets of paint which will paint ‘‘the whole world red,’’ he destroys ‘‘the little fences between the nations’’ and creates a ‘‘Revolution’’ which will result in a society free of racial prejudice and economic exploitation. Although Wright would soon grow disenchanted with communism because he discovered that its utopian ideals fell well short of its actual practices, in 1935 he strongly believed that a Marxist revolution of the proletariat was possible and desirable. Poems such as ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise,’’ ‘‘Ah Feel It in Mah Bones,’’ ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan,’’ and ‘‘Red Leaves of Books’’—all published in 1935—vividly underscore Wright’s enthusiastic embracing of Marxist ideology and communist practice. As he stressed in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ this new faith enabled him to make ‘‘the first total emotional commitment of my life’’ (Wright 117). Such a faith empowered him with a hope that the hellish world in which he lived could be redeemed by an international movement which would bring about a classless society. In this sense, the heroic persona of ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise’’ is indeed a ‘‘God Almighty’’ and a ‘‘Hoooly Chriiist,’’ a new deity who replaces what Wright described in another poem as the ‘‘dead and forgotten gods’’ of the past. Selected Bibliography: Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam Books, 1952.

STALINISM The form of Marxism promoted by Soviet dictator, Josef Stalin. It required the repression of all dissent, brutal forms of punishment for dissenters, and absolute government control of economic life. It also emphasized the control of all communist movements throughout the world by the Soviet Union. In these ways, Stalinism is directly opposed to the principles espoused by Leon Trotsky whom Stalin had murdered in Mexico City in 1940.

When Wright joined the Communist Party in 1934, he was a strong supporter of Stalinism, as were most American communists such as Granville Hicks and Phillip Rahv. Even when Hicks, Rahv, and many other American communists left the party from 1936 to 1938 because of their disenchantment with Stalin’s show trials, Wright continued to be a Stalinist, seeing Stalin’s Soviet Union as a necessary force in the fight against fascism. However much Wright deplored Stalin’s tactical errors, he envisioned the Soviet Union as the best hope for the establishment of a humane, classless society in the future. In 1938, Wright, along with Langston Hughes and Nelson Algren, signed a petition generated by the League of American Writers which supported Stalin. And even after he had formally left the Communist Party in 1942, Wright continued to admire Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party of the United States who was a strong supporter of Stalin. It is not until the early 1950s that Wright made a clear and final break with Stalinism. Disillusioned with the brutal totalitarian state Stalin had established in the Soviet Union which was intent on world domination, Wright lost his faith in Stalin and developed a position as an existential humanist on the non-communist left, rejecting both American capitalism and Soviet totalitarianism. This remained his stance toward the Cold War until his death in 1960. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ Atlantic Monthly, 159 (August 1944): 61–70.

STEIN, GERTRUDE (13 February 1874– 27 July 1946) A leading figure in twentieth-century American modernism, she was one of the main spokespersons for ‘‘the lost generation,’’ a term she is credited with coining. Her apartment in Paris was a gathering point for American expatriates from 359

Steinbeck, John the end of World War I to her death immediately following World War II. Her radical experiments in language and literary structure strongly influenced Ezra Pound, e. e. cummings, and Ernest Hemingway. Her best known and most closely studied work includes Three Lives (1909), The Making of Americans (1925), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), and Q.E.D. (1950). Wright read Three Lives in 1935 and was much impressed with Stein’s realistic portrayal of Melanctha, a working class black woman, and regarded Stein as one of the few American authors who could treat Negro life seriously and could capture the rhythms and nuances of black speech. Stein became aware of Wright in 1945 when she read his enthusiastic review of her book, Wars I Have Seen. This led her to read Black Boy, a book she was greatly impressed with, and to initiate a correspondence with Wright. In a 1945 Chicago Defender interview, she ranked Wright as ‘‘the best American writer today’’ and in an essay she wrote for The New York Times Magazine praised him for writing ‘‘not as a Negro but a man’’ (Fabre 286). When Wright and his family left America to live in France in 1946, it was Stein who secured rooms for them at the Trianon Palace Hotel, and she met them at the Gare St-Lazare when they arrived in Paris. Because Wright spoke little French, she became for a time their guide to Paris and introduced him to a number of important writers and intellectuals. Their relationship gradually soured when Wright and Stein quarreled about political and racial matters, and Wright became irritated not only by Stein’s cold treatment of his wife and daughter but by Stein not coming to his defense when one of her friends cheated Wright out of a substantial sum of money. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1968.

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STEINBECK, JOHN (27 February 1902– 20 December 1968) An American novelist born into comfortable, upper-middle class circumstances in Salinas, California, and educated at Stanford University, Steinbeck distinguished himself as a writer who focused on the lives of Americans from working class and poverty backgrounds. His second novel, Tortilla Flat (1935), is an affectionate portrait of Mexican-American paisanos, and his third novel, In Dubious Battle (1936) examines how such people are victimized by a social and economic system controlled by wealthy landowners and corrupt politicians. Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Long Valley provide sympathetic accounts of ordinary Americans who are marginalized in modern America. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), Steinbeck’s masterpiece, won the Pulitzer Prize and is the epic story of Oklahoma farmers who undertake a long, hard journey west in search of new lives after their previous lives have been destroyed by the physical miseries brought on by the Dust Bowl and the economic difficulties created by the Great Depression. Strongly leftist in outlook, it explores the possibility of American society being transformed by a Marxist revolution of the proletariat. After the depression and World War II, Steinbeck’s literary career declined as he produced a number of disappointing novels such as The Wayward Bus (1947), The Pearl (1947), East of Eden (1952) and The Winter of Our Discontent (1961). Like so many novelists who emerged as proletarian writers during the Great Depression and had used naturalistic techniques to express their visions of American life, Steinbeck never adjusted to the vast changes in American culture after World War II. His naturalistic techniques, which were so useful in depicting the problems of thirties America, were too rigid and formulaic to express the complex protean nature of the American culture from the mid-1940s to the late 1960s. And the subjects he explored in the novels of his late career never tapped into his literary imagination as powerfully as did the subjects he explored in the Depression.

Stock Market Crash of 1929 Richard Wright was a contemporary of Steinbeck and had much in common with him. Although they came from vastly different social backgrounds and regions, both men had a profound sympathy for and understanding of the American underclass, people who were marginalized and exploited by those who controlled modern America. The two men led quintessentially American lives of constant, restless movement. They traveled widely and in their later careers wrote travel books which never attained the high literary quality of their early fiction. Steinbeck’s journeys are documented by The Log of the Sea of Cortez (1950), Once There Was a War (1958), and Travels with Charley (1961) while Wright’s wanderlust is captured in Black Power (1954), The Color Curtain (1956), and Pagan Spain (1956). Steinbeck and Wright were also greatly interested in film, used cinematic techniques elaborately in their fiction, and were actively involved at certain points in the careers in the production of actual films. The Forgotten Village, a documentary about Mexican workers developed by Steinbeck and Herbert Kline in 1940, intrigued Wright and inspired him to become actively involved in the making of films. He later tried to organize his own film company but was not able to do so for lack of adequate funding. However, he eventually combined with French director Pierre Chenal to make a film of Native Son in 1951, writing the script and acting out the role of Bigger Thomas. Wright saw himself and Steinbeck as part of a unique group of writers whose imaginations were formed by the cultural disasters of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed. When interviewed in 1940 about the ‘‘literary generation’’ he felt identified with, he answered that he, like Steinbeck, James T. Farrell, and Clifford Odets, belonged to a group of writers who were ‘‘formed in 1929, coinciding with the economic depression and differing from preceding generations in its great political preoccupation’’ (Kinnamon 32). He re-emphasized this point in another interview appearing in the August 3, 1940 edition of the Baltimore Afro-

American, asserting that he felt linked to a generation of writers including Steinbeck and Sterling Brown, who were formed by the depression and made ‘‘the influence of society on the individual’’ (Kinnamon 35) their central theme. Reviewers of Native Son certainly perceived the connection between Wright and Steinbeck when several compared his novel with The Grapes of Wrath. Clifton Fadiman’s review in the New Yorker, for example, favorably compared Wright’s book with The Grapes of Wrath. The reviewer for New Masses likewise explored parallels between the two books, predicting that Wright would soon follow Steinbeck as a Pulitzer Prize winner. Reviewers from the New York Times and the Herald Tribune made similar comparisons between Wright’s and Steinbeck’s great novel. The lives of Wright and Steinbeck actually crossed paths on two occasions. Both men submitted stories for the 1938 O. Henry Awards, with Wright winning second prize for ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ and Steinbeck being given third prize for ‘‘The Promise.’’ And when Wright was on his honeymoon with Dhimah Meadman in Mexico in 1940, he ran into Steinbeck and Herbert Kline who were filming The Forgotten Village. Wright knew Kline, an experienced documentary filmmaker, from their days as leftist organizers in Chicago and was invited to join them as they made their movie. This greatly piqued Wright’s interest in films, leading him to write the script for a documentary about the Fisk Jubilee singers, ‘‘Melody Limited.’’ He later tried to form his own film company, but the project failed for lack of adequate funding. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

STOCK MARKET CRASH OF 1929 The failure of the U.S. stock market on October 29, 1929, resulting in a world-wide Great Depression lasting for twelve years. 361

Story magazine When the stock market crashed, Wright was living in Chicago with his mother, brother, and aunt, working in the Chicago Post Office and planning to resume his formal education. He had recently achieved an exceptionally high score of 95 on the post office’s competitive exam and had high expectations of a steady job and, for the first time in his life, an economically stable existence with a bright future. The crash on Wall Street put an end to this and plunged the Wright family into severe poverty for the next seven years. Although he was hired back at the post office in 1930 on a temporary basis, the job did not provide him with sufficient hours and his weekly salary plunged from $30.00 per week to $5.00 per week. To make matters worse, his mother suffered a severe relapse of her illness, his brother Leon developed a case of ulcers, and his Aunt Cleo had a heart attack, thus making Wright the sole support of his family. Wright would come to see the disaster of 1929 as a pivotal moment not only in his own personal life but also in modern history. When asked in a 1940 interview what literary generation he belonged to, he replied, ‘‘The latest generation, the one I belong to, was formed in 1929, coinciding with the economic depression and differing from preceding generations in its great political preoccupation’’ (Kinnamon 32). Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

STORY MAGAZINE Founded in 1931 by journalist Whit Burnett and his first wife, Martha Foley, Story magazine played an important role in the development of many American fiction writers and became, in the late 1930s, one of the most prestigious venues for short fiction in America. Its origins were quite modest as its first issue consisted of 167 copies printed in Vienna, Austria

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on a mimeograph machine. It moved its operations to New York City in 1933, and by the end of the decade, its circulation reached 21,000 copies. It published the work of many young writers who would later become important literary figures, including J. D. Salinger, Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, and Truman Capote. In hopes of identifying promising talent, Story sponsored contests for college students, people serving in the armed forces, and writers working for the Works Progress Administration. After 1948, its publication history is sporadic. Its operations were suspended in 1948 because of financial difficulties, and it later appeared in book form from 1951 to 1953. It was reactivated as a magazine in 1960 by Burnett and his second wife Hallie but was discontinued after a year. Story was rejuvenated in 1989 by Richard and Lois Rosenthal who edited the magazine until it ceased operations with its winter 2000 issue. In the summer of 1937, Story created a literary competition for writers involved in the Federal Writers Project. It welcomed submissions in poetry, fiction, drama, and non-fiction prose, offering a first prize of $500 and publication in Story. The contest had a distinguished panel of judges, including novelist Sinclair Lewis, editor Edward Aswell, journalist Lewis Gannett, and the president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, Harry Scherman. Although Story had rejected Richard Wright’s ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ in November 1936, he entered the four stories in Uncle Tom’s Children in the magazine’s 1937 contest. ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ got first prize, winning out over 600 other submissions. Michel Fabre describes Wright’s winning this contest as his ‘‘brilliant literary debut’’ (Fabre 156). It was clearly a dramatic step forward in Wright’s career since it not only brought him national attention and gave him a substantial amount of money he needed to get the time necessary to begin work on Native Son, but it also put him in contact with several people who would play important roles in his development as a

Strachey, John writer. Harry Scherman’s interest in Wright’s work later helped to pave the way for Native Son and Black Boy to be published as Book-of-theMonth-Club selections. Winning the Story magazine contest also initiated an extremely valuable relationship with Edward Aswell who was instrumental in getting Uncle Tom’s Children published by Harper and Brothers, the firm which published his best work such as Native Son, Black Boy, and The Outsider. (Aswell would also become Wright’s close friend and trusted literary advisor.) The recognition Wright received from winning the contest sponsored by Story also enabled him to part company with ineffectual literary agents such as Max Lieber, John Trounstein, and Anne Watkins, who were unable to place his work advantageously, and to become associated with the Paul Reynolds Agency, one of America’s most prestigious literary agencies. In the past, the Reynolds Agency had clients such as Paul Laurence Dunbar and William Dean Howells, and in the late 1930s, it represented F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Catcher, George Bernard Shaw, and H. G. Wells. The head of the agency, Paul Reynolds, Jr., like Aswell, became Wright’s close friend and literary advisor. Winning the 1937 contest sponsored by Story magazine thus was a dramatic turning point in Wright’s young career. While Wright began 1937 as a largely unknown writer who was having difficulty placing his work with nationally prominent publishers and was still uncertain of himself as a writer, by the end of that year he was being identified by important people as a promising American author who was exploring bold new directions in his fiction. Moreover, he had secured one of the country’s most skilled editors as well as an influential literary agent with whom he would work closely for most of the remainder of his career. Winning the contest also initiated Wright’s association with Harper and Brothers and Bookof-the-Month Club, which published some of his best work and identified him as one of the leading American writers of his time.

Selected Bibliography: Foley, Martha and Jay Neugeboren. The Story of Story Magazine. New York: W. W. Norton, 1980. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

STRACHEY, JOHN (21 October 1901– 15 July 1963) A British socialist and prolific writer, he was a member of the Communist Party in the early thirties but broke with communism in 1939. He joined the Labor Party in 1922 and became editor of the Socialist Review and the Miner. He was elected to Parliament in 1929, serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Oswald Mosely. After joining the Communist Party in 1931, he resigned from the Parliamentary Labor Party, devoting himself to lecturing, writing, and organizing workers. During World War II he served in the Royal Air Force, and after the war he was elected to Parliament as Labor MP from Dundee. He was a member of Parliament from 1945 to his death in 1963. His many books include Revolution by Reason (1925), The Coming Struggle for Power (1932), The Menace of Fascism (1933), The Theory and Practice of Socialism (1936), Contemporary Capitalism (1956), The End of Empire (1959), and On the Prevention of War (1962). Wright first met Strachey in Chicago in the spring of 1934 when he invited him to speak on the rise of European fascism at the John Reed Club. Both men were young radicals deeply committed to leftist theory and a revolution of the proletariat. Wright read Strachey’s The Coming Struggle for Power shortly after it was published, greatly admiring his assessment of the growing crisis in Europe. The two later met in Paris in 1950 at the Congress for Cultural Freedom where Strachey was on the program with William Faulkner, Andre´ Malraux, Arthur Koestler, and Gunnar Myrdal. Like Wright, Strachey was an ex-communist who still believed in socialism and was trying to build a movement for political change on the non-communist left.

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‘‘Strength’’ Strachey figured prominently in Wright’s attempts in the 1950s to gain a resident visa to England so that he and his family could leave France and live in London. Wright had never become fluent in French and had grown tired of the political intrigues and personal rivalries of the expatriate colony in France. Moreover, his daughter Julia planned to study at Cambridge University, and his wife Ellen thought that she could work more effectively as a literary great in London. So in 1957, Wright sought the help of his friend John Strachey who was then a Labor Party member of Parliament and an extremely influential figure in British politics. Strachey contacted Reginald Butler, the Home Secretary, about arranging a resident visa for Wright who assured him that Wright would be given fair treatment. But Butler made no promises and did little to help Wright’s cause. Britain was tightening its policies concerning immigration of non-white people, and government officials were suspicious of Wright’s political activities. Strachey then took Wright’s case before the House of Commons on November 20, 1958, but this too had little effect. British officials repeatedly rebuffed Wright’s attempts to live permanently in England even after his wife and daughters had taken up residence in London by 1959. Wright was given only tourist visas which allowed him to visit England for brief periods of time. By the final year of his life, Wright had given up plans to live in England and rented a small apartment in Paris where he lived the remainder of his life separated from his family. Wright sent several letters to Strachey expressing his disappointment with British officials. In a letter dated October 12, 1959, he deplored the ‘‘coldness and rudeness of the British officials,’’ claiming that ‘‘there was something monstrously shameful’’ (Fabre 495) in their behavior. In a subsequent letter to Strachey, he retorted, ‘‘I’ll stay in France where I have friends. I had elected to live in England but was made to feel that I was not wanted’’ (Fabre 495). He complained to Strachey that the real reason he was denied a visa to

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England was his race and his leftist politics and concluded that Britian’s policies in the long run would only increase the tensions between developed nations and third world countries. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

‘‘STRENGTH’’ This twelve line free verse poem was published in the March–April 1934 issue of The Anvil, a leftwing magazine edited by Jack Conroy which was devoted to proletarian writing. Written at a time when Wright was a thoroughly committed communist, the poem is strongly Marxist in vision. It begins by arguing that a ‘‘lone comrade’’ can accomplish little when confronting the capitalistic system which Wright describes as ‘‘legions of tyranny.’’ For Wright, the protest of isolated individuals can amount to little more than ‘‘a gentle breeze, intermittently tearing at granite crags.’’ But the second part of the poem claims that political activism can be an effective weapon against an unjust society when carefully organized and systematized. When the lone comrade is ‘‘united with millions and millions of other lives’’ centered in a ‘‘historic mission,’’ they will achieve an ‘‘inevitable victory’’ with a people’s revolution. This kind of massive political movement is compared to ‘‘a raging hurricane vast and powerful’’ which will uproot ‘‘the rottening husks of the trees of greed.’’ As a dedicated communist, Wright envisions revolution of the proletariat as having the inevitability of nature’s most powerful forces. Like so many of Wright’s apprentice poems, ‘‘Strength’’ foreshadows themes which Wright would develop in his mature work. The deterministic metaphors which Wright uses in the poem will be amplified and complicated in Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son to suggest the explosive forces at work in the social environments depicted in those books. Wright’s faith in collective

Strong, Anna Louise political action would be shaken by his growing doubts about communism and his eventual rejection of the Communist Party in 1942, but his fascination with lone individuals struggling against hostile social environments would persist throughout his career and find especially powerful treatment in Black Boy/American Hunger, The Outsider, and The Long Dream. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ Atlantic Monthly, August 1944, 61–70.

STRONG, ANNA LOUISE (24 November 1885–29 March 1970) An American journalist who worked for many years for a wide variety of leftist organizations, including the Communist Party. She was born in Friend, Nebraska to parents who were actively engaged in church missionary work. Her father, Syndney Dix Strong, was a social gospel minister in the Congregational Church. A precocious student, she mastered several languages at a young age and received her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago when she was twenty-three. She then became strongly involved in the politics of the Progressive movement, focusing mainly on child welfare and labor issues. She was an active participant in the Seattle general strike of 1919, a landmark event in the American Labor movement. She became interested in communism in the 1930s, traveling with Lincoln Steffans to the Soviet Union in 1921 and then working as the Moscow correspondent for the International News Service. Their activity produced two books, The First Time in History (1924), which was prefaced with an essay by Leon Trotsky, and Children of Revolution (1925). In 1930, she helped to found Moscow News, the first English language newspaper in that city. She developed into a staunch believer in Soviet communism and wrote several books praising the revolutionary changes in Russia, including The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931) and The Soviet World (1936).

She returned to the United States in 1934 and worked for the Communist Party in Chicago and New York, working closely with Earl Browder, the head of the CPUSA. She also operated as an undercover agent for Soviet intelligence. She served as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II and settled in the Soviet Union after the war. Her sympathies for Maoist China, however, got her in trouble with Soviet authorities, and she was arrested in 1949 on charges of espionage and then deported. She moved to China where she lived until her death in 1970. Wright knew Strong when they worked for the Communist Party in Chicago and New York during the 1930s and their relationship, for the most part, was stormy. He probably first met her when she gave a lecture in May 1934 at the Abraham Lincoln Center in Chicago. Two years later, when she was secretary to Earl Browder, he made an appeal to her to intercede on his behalf with Browder after he had developed serious conflicts with party officials such as James Ford and Harry Haywood. She adamantly refused to take Wright’s side in this matter, coldly informing him, ‘‘That’s your affair . . . It does not concern us’’ (Gayle 151). This rebuff greatly angered Wright and contributed to his growing disenchantment with the party. He never forgot Strong’s dismissive treatment of him which he felt was motivated by her desire to curry favor with the party officials with whom he was experiencing difficulties. There is no record of subsequent contact between Wright and Strong until 1949 when she was expelled from the Soviet Union. Fearing that the United States would refuse to grant her a passport to re-enter America, she wrote a series of six articles to the European edition of the New York Herald Tribune in which she downplayed her role in the Communist Party and castigated party officials for their treatment of her. Wright was infuriated when he read these articles and sent an open letter to Strong which was published in the Herald Tribune. This letter, entitled ‘‘Comrade Strong, Don’t You Remember?,’’ blasted her for the manner in which she exploited and mistreated party 365

‘‘Superstition’’ members when she occupied powerful positions in the party: Comrade Strong, for thirty years you defended, created, rationalized, perfected, and justified the very cruelties you now lament . . . You have listened to comrades in the Communist Party voice appeals and complaints similar to yours and turned your head away. (Gayle 209)

He urged her to openly confess her sins as a party official and thus ‘‘step out of that mass of psychological slavery in which you have flourished’’ (Gayle 209). Michel Fabre regards Wright’s open letter to Strong as marking ‘‘a stage in his evolution’’ (Fabre 328) as a political thinker. Although Wright had quietly withdrawn from the party in 1942 and refused to actually name the names of party workers in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist,’’ in his letter to Strong he identifies her and Benjamin Davis as communist officials who had committed serious wrongdoings. The letter, therefore, might be seen as his most impassioned indictment of the Communist Party. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Gayle, Addison. The Ordeal of a Native Son. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1980.

‘‘SUPERSTITION’’ A short story which Wright published in the April 1931 issue of Abbott’s Magazine, a magazine developed by the Chicago Defender which catered to a black audience and which had a large circulation of nearly 100,000 readers. For the young Wright, publication in such a respected and widely circulated magazine was a considerable achievement and it encouraged him to pursue his writing in a serious way. But he learned a valuable lesson from the way he was treated by the editors of Abbott’s who never paid him for his work. In the future, Wright would insist on signed contracts before he would allow magazines to publish his work.

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The story is a gothic potboiler which draws heavily from the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, a writer whom Wright read with great interest as a young man and who would continue to exert influence on him throughout his career. It deals with a group of black businessmen who each tell a story after a long meal while they are enjoying after dinner cigars. The last person to offer a story relates a tale of his visit to a small southern town where he stays with a black family because he is told that all of the hotels in town are fully occupied. The family labors under a curse which states that when all members of the family are reunited in a single place, one of them will die. On this particular occasion all of the members of the family unexpectedly show up for a Christmas celebration, and one does indeed die, a girl named Lillian who succumbs to fits of coughing. While the family interprets this in superstitious terms and reacts in horror to Lillian’s death, the story’s narrator offers a purely rational, naturalistic explanation, pointing out that Lillian had suffered from tuberculosis long before the Christmas reunion. Michel Fabre believed that Wright wrote this tale ‘‘exclusively for money’’ (Fabre 82) and faulted the story for its melodramatic plotting, thin characterization, and cliche´d use of gothic conventions. But like Dan McCall, he considered the story important because it revealed tendencies which would become prominent in Wright’s mature writing. Although ‘‘Superstition’’ is an apprentice work which makes clumsy use of gothic effects and themes, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ make every skilled and subtle use of gothic motifs to describe African-American life as an extended nightmare. As Wright stressed at the end of ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,’’ Poe would not have to invent horror if he were alive in modern America because ‘‘horror would invent him’’ (Wright 540). While Wright at age 23 wrote an improbable gothic thriller for the purpose of making money, he would use gothic techniques seriously as a mature artist to expose the horror

‘‘Superstition’’ of living in a racist culture always on the edge of terrible violence and death. ‘‘Superstition’’ is also a valuable index of Wright’s later development in its assertion of the primacy of rational thinking over irrational, ‘‘superstitious’’ modes of perception. As a Marxist and a person who later defined himself as a western rationalist, Wright deplored all forms of injustice, particularly American segregation, because they were premised on the myth that one group of people was inherently superior to other groups of people. As both a writer and a political activist, Wright was deeply committed

throughout his life with discrediting irrational prejudices and the social structures they create by holding them up to rational scrutiny and replacing them through rationally organized action. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.’’ In Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Wright, Richard. ‘‘Superstition.’’ In The World of Richard Wright, by Michel Fabre. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985, 217–228.

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T ‘‘TARBABY’S DAWN’’ This unpublished novel was begun ‘‘as early as 1934’’ (Fabre 135) and describes the childhood and adolescence of a black boxer. The original title of the book was ‘‘Tarbaby’s Sunrise’’ and was written at the time Wright was working on another novel, ‘‘Cesspool,’’ which described the experiences of a Chicago postal work and was published posthumously in 1963 as Lawd Today! By 1935, Wright had re-titled the book ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn,’’ and in the next two years, various versions of it were rejected by a number of publishers, including Viking, Norton, Modern Age, and Vanguard. The novel was a series of loosely linked scenes which constituted a bildungsroman describing the experiences of 15-year-old Daniel Morrison, the son of a black farm worker in Mississippi. Morrison dreams of being a championship boxer like Jack Johnson but has to go to work on a plantation owned by Jim Hawkins after doing poorly in school and failing to go beyond the fourth grade. Things get worse when he impregnates a local girl and is being forced to marry her against his will. His life takes an even more disastrous turn for the worse when he purchases a gun and accidentally kills one of his boss’s mules while practicing his shooting. The first part of the novel ends with him deciding to run away from

Mississippi and take a train to Chicago where he hopes to pursue his boxing career. Wright intended to write a second part of the novel in which Morrison becomes a prize fighter but then is injured and becomes partially paralyzed. He dies ‘‘drunk, sick, and alone’’ (Rowley 538). Wright never composed this second part of the novel and turned his hand to other projects such as Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. Willard Maas, an editor for Harper’s Bazaar, read the manuscript of ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn’’ in November 1939 and suggested that Wright rework the last two chapters as a separate story. The story eventually became ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ which was published in Harper’s Bazaar in their January 1940 issue. In that same year, it also appeared in O Henry Award Prize Stories of 1940. Late in his life, Wright made small revisions in the story and included it in Eight Men as ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man.’’ ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn’’ draws heavily from Wright’s own experiences growing up in Mississippi. Like the protagonist of that story, Wright was raised in a strict religious household and was coerced to testify falsely at his baptism that he was ‘‘saved.’’ Both Wright and his central character were terrified by stories of black men being lynched when they were accused of violating sexual taboos 369

Targ, William defined by the white South. And they became so unhappy with their lives in segregated Mississippi that they fled the South, taking trains to Chicago where they hoped to find new lives. Although ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn’’ was never published, it does have genuine importance in Wright’s career since it gave him an opportunity to explore themes which would become central to his vision. The conflict between an aspiring individual and a brutally repressive society is also at the heart of Native Son, Black Boy/American Hunger, and The Outsider. And the quest for open motion toward a new and liberating space which concludes the first part of ‘‘Tarbaby’s Dawn’’ would also be echoed in the endings of works such as ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ Black Boy, and The Long Dream. The portrayal of lynching as the ultimate racial horror of the segregated South would also resonate in works throughout Wright’s career from early poems such as ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ and ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ to later fictions such as The Long Dream. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

TARG, WILLIAM (4 March 1907– 22 July 1999) Better known for his role as an editor to famous writers, William Targ, nonetheless, earned prestige as a ‘‘bibliophile’’ owing to his multifaceted discourses on bookmanship arising from his own professional publications as a scholar-critic and editor of collections and founder of Targ Editions, a publishing house. From an early age, he was inspired by books that would eventually define his career and expertise in their productions. Born in Chicago, Illinois, to Russian emigrants Max and Esther (Solomon) Targowik, he later adopted the truncated surname of ‘‘Targ’’ in response to

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typical, turn-of-the-century actions of immigrants to immerse themselves into the ‘‘melting pot’’ myth of America. To become uniform Americans required aspirants to forsake, and if not to forget, their ‘‘Old World’’ ethnic identities of difference by changing their names to sound more AngloSaxon, and thus, more homogeneous. This the Russian parents did, and their son William advanced the family a step further in their processes of assimilation by his becoming the firstgeneration member to be educated in American schools. His enrolling in the Chicago public school system and then progressing to high school signaled forward movement—at least until Targ ended his formal educational pursuits. The only courses that truly interested Targ in these preand post–World War I years were those in English printing. The latter craft introduced Targ to the manual skill of typesetting and then to gainful employment as an apprentice laborer which, at the same time, providentially enabled his love for the art of bookmanship to grow into a lifelong occupation. This love of words and meanings Targ forged into a professional occupation in the book industry. At grassroots class level and despite no high school diploma, Targ obviously had been inculcated with strong, family ethics of work and thrift. This is both why and how Targ, as an apprentice typesetter and/or periodic semi-skilled laborer, managed to buy up secondhand books and, despite lack of space or book shelves, to store his acquisitions in multiple crates. His private book collection grew to such an extent that eventually Targ no longer depended upon borrowing books from the public libraries. In essence, he very early became a book dealer. Moreover, his employment at age eighteen first as an office boy and then galley reader at MacMillan Publishers enabled Targ to learn on site the various stages of book productions as well as the entrepreneurship skills necessary to market them. In 1929 and at the young age of twenty-two, Targ, still acting on the American dream of wealth and independence, became self-employed when he opened his own bookstore

Targ, William in Chicago. He operated it for thirteen years. In the process of buying and selling books, Targ amassed thousands of rare books and first editions that inspired him as a scholar-critic and editor to write about productions of books himself. Targ’s literary career and bookmanship expertise at this point should be understood as taking two different but yet interlocking directions. On the one hand, he became a first-rate editor to important writers such as Studs Terkel, Richard Wright, Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and Carl Sandburg. In 1942 at age thirty-five, Targ left Chicago for Cleveland, Ohio, where he became editor at World Publishing in charge of the Tower and Forum unit, the section of the company that bought reprints, rebound them in hard copy, and sold them cheaply. In 1945, he moved to New York to head World’s trade division in that area. And, with Wright’s domicile having been in New York from 1937–1946, and the headquarters of the author’s main publishing house of Harper and Row being located there as well, it was not surprising that the paths of Targ and Wright would eventually cross because of the importance of the publishing industry in New York City. In fact, the Targ-Wright ties were rekindled in the 1950s after Wright had taken exile in Paris, France. It was in 1956, that Targ assisted Richard Wright at a time of despair in the author’s life. Wright had already left America in 1946 and began to produce texts with French contemporary philosophical ideas of existentialism not yet understood by American critics. Thus, when he published his existentialist novel The Outsider in 1953, American critics were befuddled. Savage Holiday, published in 1954 and fundamentally based upon Freudian psychology, did not bode well with the critics, either. And then critics were also displeased when Wright published his travel narrative of Black Power in 1954 using an egocentric, existentialist author-persona as the central intelligence of the text. Wright’s long-time publisher of Harper and Row refused the Bandung, Indonesia, travel manuscript, but World Publishers under William Targ accepted and released The Color Curtain: A Report of the Bandung

Conference in 1956. The mid-1950s was a time of financial crisis in the life of Richard Wright, the American expatriate, that once again brought together the Targ-Wright relationship which had begun years earlier in Chicago. Again, Targ played a significant role toward the end of the author’s life. In March 1960, Wright contacted Targ about a collection of ten short stories that he finally narrowed to eight and called Eight Men. World Publishers accepted the collection and posthumously published it in 1961; however, Targ also indicated that World Publishers legally held the rights to publish Wright’s next book. This project turned out to be Wright’s haiku poetry, a collection of four thousand poems which the author selectively reduced to 811 by the time he submitted them to Targ publication, in June 1960. Targ indicated that World would not be interested, and unfortunately, Wright’s health declined so drastically that he died on November 28, 1960 in Paris. The Wright estate finally released Wright’s haiku for publication in 1998. In the meantime, Targ made two other professional moves. In 1964, he left World Publishers to join G. P. Putnam’s and Sons. During his term as editor, he published other prestigious writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Ashley Montagu, and Lin Yutang. His most famous coup was becoming editor for Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather. While two other publishers had turned down the work, Targ listened to Puzo’s oral presentation and then provided him with a $5,000 advance. The work put Putnam’s on the map and became their highest-paying single work. Targ stayed with Putnam’s until his retirement in 1974 at age sixty-five, after which, self-employed again in a one-man operation, he founded Targ Editions, this time devoted to beautifully-bound, limited editions of poetry, criticism, and short fiction. Targ lived a long life of ninety-two years. He outlived his first wife Anne Jesselson whom he married on May 1, 1933; she died in February 1965. From his second marriage to Roslyn Siegal on July 30, 1965, he sired one son Russell Targ of Palo Alto, California. Three grandchildren 371

Third American Writers Congress and three great-grandchildren survived Targ, who died in his Manhattan home on July 22, 1999. Virginia Whatley Smith

1973. Naison, Mark. Communists in New York During the Depression. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. ‘‘William Targ, ‘Godfather’ Editor, Dies at 92.’’ New York Times. July 25, 1999. 31. ‘‘Targ, William.’’ Who’s Who in America. 44th ed. Vol. 2. Wilmette, Illinois: MacMillan Directory Division, 1986–87. 2748.

TILL, EMMETT (25 July 1941– 28 August 1955)

THIRD AMERICAN WRITERS CONGRESS The conference opened on June 2, 1939 in New York’s Carnegie Hall and concluded three days later. Over three thousand writers, intellectuals, and Communist Party officials were in attendance. Because a number of leftist writers such as James T. Farrell, Claude McKay, John Dos Passos, and Max Eastman were greatly disturbed about Stalin’s brutality during the Moscow show trials and had become increasingly disillusioned with and hostile towards communism, the Third American Writers Congress was held mainly to ‘‘rally those who were still faithful to the Communists’’ (Fabre 192). Thomas Mann, who had fled from Nazi Germany, was named honorary president of the opening session and spoke about the growing dangers of nazism in Europe. Michael Gold presented a paper which reviewed the literature of the 1930s, and Herbert Aptheker delivered a talk about the important cultural contributions which black people had made to American culture. The conference concluded with Langston Hughes reading a list of the names of 45 writers who had died fighting fascism in Spain. Wright, who attended the conference with Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Margaret Walker, delivered a short paper on the craft of fiction. It was at the conference that he quarreled with Walker, breaking off a friendship that had lasted for three years. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 372

A 14-year-old boy who was brutally beaten and murdered in August 1955 by southern white men because he allegedly insulted a white woman after purchasing candy from her in a store in Money, Mississippi. Money, a tiny backwater town in the Mississippi delta, was an especially violent place known for its entrenched patterns of segregation and racism. Three months before the murder of Emmett Till, Rev. George Lee, who was the first black man to register to vote in the county since Reconstruction, was shot in the face by an enraged white man who was never brought to trial. Shortly before Till had arrived in Money, another black man was murdered after he registered to vote. Emmett Till had grown up in Chicago where he had attended integrated schools and had little or no understanding of the segregated ways of the Deep South. He came to Money with his seventeen-year-old cousin to visit his granduncle, Mose Wright, who was a sharecropper and a minister. On August 21, Till went to town with a group of friends to purchase candy and cold drinks at the local store. After showing his cohorts a photograph of some white schoolmates and implying that he had a white girl friend, he was dared to enter the store and talk to the white woman behind the counter. When he allegedly said ‘‘Bye, baby’’ to her as he left the store, a clear violation of Money’s racial codes, his friends were shocked and predicted that serious trouble would occur because of the incident. Two nights later, Till was roused out of bed in the middle of the night by the woman’s husband and his brother-in-law. He was taken to a barn on the outskirts of town, savagely beaten, and shot in the head. His body was thrown into the Tallahatchie River where it was found several days later

Town Meeting of the Air in a condition of severe decomposition. Although local officials wanted the body buried immediately to cover up the evidence of the crime, Emmett’s mother insisted on bringing it back to Chicago for an open casket funeral ‘‘so all the world can see what they did to my boy’’ (Rowley 471). Mrs. Till’s courageous act achieved exactly this result as national and international media publicized the funeral and a grisly picture of Till’s bloated and disfigured face appeared in Jet magazine. The trial of the two men who murdered Till also drew attention throughout the United States and Europe. Predictably, the all-white jury, some of whom openly consumed beer in court, found the defendants innocent. (Several months later, the killers, in a well-paid interview with William Bradford Huie in Look magazine, admitted that they had indeed murdered Till and bragged about their crime. Because of the legal technicality of double indemnity, they could not be re-tried and were never legally punished.) Wright followed the Till case closely from his exile in Paris. It epitomized for him the terrible racism of the Deep South and the savage violence with which it was often enforced. It brought back painful memories of his own Mississippi boyhood when many black men were lynched for alleged misconduct with white women, and it certainly must have revived the traumatic experience early in his childhood when his uncle Silas Hoskins was murdered by Arkansas whites who were jealous of his business successes. Shortly after receiving news of Emmett Till’s murder, Wright confided to a friend, Margrit de Sablonie`re, ‘‘Such wanton killings fill me with disgust, uneasiness, and a sense of dread’’ (Rowley 471). He later made a statement to the French press that the trial of Till’s killers was a ‘‘parody of justice’’ (Fabre 422) which would cast a pall on race relations in the United States and throughout the world. But he was confident that, while white supremacists had won a ‘‘battle’’ in Mississippi, they were losing the ‘‘war’’ in the larger court of world opinion, stating in a 1957 essay in France-Soir that ‘‘The world will judge the judges of Mississippi’’ (Rowley 471).

Wright was certainly correct in his assessment in the long-term impact of the Emmett Till case. Television coverage of the funeral and trial opened eyes all over the United States and throughout the world to the brutality and injustice of southern segregation. Along with the Supreme Court decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in American schools and the Montgomery bus boycott, the Emmett Till case catalyzed the Civil Rights Movement which eventually led to the dismantling of southern segregation and the Jim Crow laws which provided its legal foundation. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Hold, 2001. Till-Mobley, Mamie. Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America. New York: Random House, 2003. Whitfield, Stephen. A Death in the Delta. New York: Free Press, 1988.

TOWN MEETING OF THE AIR An ABC radio show that began in May 1935 and continued for twenty-one years. Its slogan was ‘‘Which Way, America? Fascism? Communism? Socialism? Or Democracy?’’ The show was moderated by George Vernon Denney and employed a format of having prominent experts debating controversial political or cultural issues. The program featured questions from the live audience as well as the listening audience from all over the country. It was broadcast on Thursday nights and at its peak had an estimated audience of approximately three million people. Wright appeared on this show on May 24, 1945, along with George Denny, Jr., Irving Ives, Elmer Carter, and Jerry Voorhis. The subject of their debate was ‘‘Are We Solving America’s Racial Problem?’’ The show began with Carter providing a very optimistic reading of the racial situation in America, claiming that ‘‘the walls of fascism and racial bigotry and intolerance are cracking and tumbling down’’ (Kinnamon 73) all across 373

‘‘Tradition and Industrialization’’ America. He argued that lynching has ‘‘almost been eradicated,’’ blacks were voting in larger numbers, and ‘‘racial inequalities sanctioned by law and custom which impede the full realization of democracy are beginning to disappear’’ (Kinnamon 72). Wright emphatically disagreed with Denny’s rosy assessment of the America’s racial situation, stressing that ‘‘The race problem is not being solved. Indeed, it is becoming more acute’’ (Kinnamon 74). He pointed out that there were recent outbreaks of racial violence in Detroit, Los Angeles, and Beaumont, Texas, and argued that the racial dilemmas faced by America will never be resolved until all forms of segregation are eliminated. But because segregation is ‘‘our national policy,’’ America is a radically ‘‘split country’’ (Kinnamon 74) which denies blacks their basic rights, depriving them of the economic and educational opportunities which they need to attain full citizenship. Wright also warned that unless real solutions to racial problems are seriously pursued and achieve significant results, ‘‘violence may be upon us’’ (Kinnamon 75). Toward the end of the broadcast Wright fielded a question from the audience when a man asked him what he thought were the responsibilities which black people had to solve America’s racial problems. Wright’s answer came in two parts. He stressed that African Americans needed to organize to improve black education, family life, and economic opportunity. He urged Negroes to protest against all forms of racism and predicted that ‘‘Negro agitation’’ would increase and perhaps become violent if progress were not made. But he added that the ‘‘fundamental responsibility’’ to change American society ‘‘rests upon whites’’ (Kinnamon 77) since they control the political and economic systems which have discriminated against blacks. In hindsight, Wright’s remarks on Town Meeting of the Air seem prophetic. The ‘‘Negro agitation’’ he called for took the form of the Civil Rights Movement and ‘‘Black Power’’ movement. And the violence he predicted did indeed occur in

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the urban revolts of the 1960s and 1970s. A full solution to the problems Wright described in this radio show has yet to be achieved. Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (ed). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993.

‘‘TRADITION AND INDUSTRIALIZATION’’ This essay is an expanded form of a speech which Wright gave in Paris in 1956 at the First Congress of Negro Artists and Writers sponsored by Pre´sence Africaine. It was subtitled ‘‘The Historic Meaning and Plight of the Tragic Elite in Asia and Africa’’ and was included as one of the four essays in White Man, Listen! published by Doubleday in October 1957. Wright stresses in the first part of the essay his complicated status as a ‘‘western man of color’’ (Wright 44). His vision of the world is ‘‘split’’ (Wright 47) since he is both a black man who has been victimized by the West and is therefore highly critical of its attitudes and practices, and he is also a product of the West and endorses many of its core values. While he emphatically rejects western colonialism which has resulted in a racism which has produced ‘‘blood-sucking murder, butchery, slavery’’ (Wright 58) in Africa and Asia, he strongly endorses western rationalism and secularism because they hold the keys to solving the problems of the Third World. Wright’s ‘‘double vision’’ (Wright 47) also applies to emerging nations in Africa and Asia. Although he emphatically supports their struggle to free themselves from colonial rule, he is deeply suspicious of their tribal traditions which he fears will result in their re-enslavement. Early in the essay he observes that he is ‘‘numbed and appalled when I know that millions of men in Asia and Africa assign more reality to their dead fathers than to the crying claims of their daily lives: poverty, political degradation, illness, ignorance’’ (Wright 48). Rejecting the ‘‘irrationalism of Asia and Africa’’ (Wright 58), Wright argues that the

‘‘Transcontinental’’ Third World must be modernized along western lines if it is to overcome ‘‘a dead past’’ and ‘‘build a rational future’’ (Wright 68). While clearly rejecting the West’s perversion of its humanitarian ideals in its treatment of colonialized people, Wright nevertheless embraces those western ideals in their pure form and believes they can rebuild Asia and Africa in the twentieth century. He endorses western secularism, seeing it as a hopeful alternative to the superstitions and religious divisions which he regards as impeding the development of emerging nations. He likewise sees western rationalism as a needed replacement for the irrational customs and traditions of tribal societies because it will make possible the science, technology, and industrialism which will bring Third World nations into the modern world. Wright, however, places the highest premium on western freedom, which makes ‘‘man . . . his own ruler’’ (Wright 51) and makes possible constant development of new ideas. Regarding ‘‘human freedom as a supreme right’’ (Wright 51), he deplores how that principle is destroyed both by the tribalism of Asia and Africa and the totalitarian governments of Europe. As he stated in the inscription to White Man, Listen!, Wright puts forth a vision of social change which embraces ‘‘the best of two worlds’’ (Wright v) while rejecting the destructive tendencies of both western and Third World cultures. His way of achieving this balance is to have the West put massive economic and technical ‘‘aid’’ (Wright 65) to Africa and Asia while supporting the regimes of a ‘‘tragic elite’’ (Wright 44) of leaders such as Nehru, Akrumah, and Sukarno who are citizens of emerging nations but who have been educated in the West and can use western values and techniques to transform their countries into modern nations. Wright concludes the essay by making dire predictions if the West fails in its responsibility to undo the evils of colonialism by rebuilding Asia and Africa as it helped to regenerate Germany and Japan after World War II. If the West continues to ‘‘hamstring’’ (Wright 57) Third World

nations, it will encourage forms of nationalism and fascism which could eventually lead to its own destruction. For Wright, therefore, the West’s response to the continents it colonized is a test of its own cultural integrity and if it fails to bring ‘‘the spirit of the Enlightenment and Reformation’’ (Wright 63) to the Third World, it discredits its core values and risks its own demise. Selected Bibliography: Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Wright, Richard. The Color Curtain. Cleveland, Ohio: World Publishing Co., 1954. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1957.

‘‘TRANSCONTINENTAL’’ This poem, which Michel Fabre characterizes as ‘‘the longest and perhaps most ambitious poem [Wright] ever wrote,’’ (Fabre 131) was published in the January 1936 issue of International Literature, a communist magazine published in Moscow which received worldwide circulation. It was inspired, in part, by Louis Aragon’s Red Front, a long Marxist poem celebrating proletarian revolution, which Wright explicitly praises in a brief inscription to his poem. While Aragon imagines revolution as a powerful locomotive moving inevitably forward, demolishing capitalistic society and leading to a utopian future, Wright pictures revolution as an automobile ‘‘commandeered’’ by unemployed hitchhikers. They ride the car across America on ‘‘the highway of Self-Determination,’’ taking control of their lives by placing their hands on the steering wheel and pressing their feet on the gas pedal. Their journey becomes a symbolic fantasy in which they actualize ‘‘Lenin’s dream’’ of a worker’s society which eliminates racial prejudice, economic injustice, and social inequality. ‘‘Leaving the past’’ behind them, they distribute millions of ‘‘leaflets of freedom,’’ liberating oppressed people all across America. They pass through New England, New York, and Washington, DC freeing everyone from the ‘‘bourgeois’’ past and

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Trotsky, Leon ‘‘Letting the light of history’’ shine through to a brighter future. When they go into the Deep South, they run over a lynch-mob and encourage sharecroppers to strike in a ‘‘UNITED FRONT.’’ With their ‘‘tires leaving hammer and sickle prints on the pavement,’’ they speed toward the midwest, observing masses of workers striking in Chicago. As they listen to the ‘‘howls of dispossessed’’ people, they see ‘‘bureaucratic insects splattering against their windshield.’’ The journey ends as they move westward, ‘‘speeding on the wheels of revolution’’ as they observe thousands of ‘‘collective farms’’ sprouting all over the West. The poem assumes the form of a large modernist collage as Wright uses a radically free verse and fills it with a wide variety of genres. He opens the poem with cinematic images which counterpoint rich people in their ‘‘cool green . . . golf courses’’ with unemployed hitch-hikers whose ‘‘glazed faces’’ and empty stomachs reveal the suffering of working class America during the Great Depression. Wright, likewise, mixes levels of diction, at times characterizing the ruling class as ‘‘bastards’’ and ‘‘Sons of bitches’’ and at other points lyrically celebrating the ‘‘eastern sky’’ with its ‘‘clouds of hope.’’ Like Dos Passos who used snippets of newspaper headlines in his USA Trilogy, Wright inserts prose radio reporting to connect his poem with actual events. And he builds music into the poem by using jazz rhythms and concluding with lines from the communist anthem, ‘‘The Internationale’’ which proclaims ‘‘Arise, ye prisoners . . . Arise ye wretched . . . Fabre perceives a ‘‘symphonic unity’’ (Fabre 131) in this wildly impressionistic poem. Indeed, all of its diverse parts are held together by a unifying theme which one finds in most of Wright’s early poetry: A decadent bourgeois society is falling apart and will be replaced and redeemed by a more just world. See also Marxism. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

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TROTSKY, LEON (7 November 1879– 20 August 1940) Born Lev Bronstein to Russian-Jewish parents in the Ukraine, he became a devoted Marxist by age eighteen and was exiled to Siberia in 1896 for his political views. He escaped two years later using a forged passport of a man named Trotsky who was the head jailer of the prison in Odessa where he had earlier been imprisoned. For the remainder of his life, he would go by the name of Leon Trotsky, keeping the first name (Lev) from his prior life and using his new last name to signify his identity as a revolutionary. He lived in London after his escape from Siberia, forming a revolutionary journal Iskria with Vladimir Lenin. Returning to Moscow in 1905, he was imprisoned again and, while in Siberia, developed the concept of world revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. He escaped from prison again in 1907 and went to Vienna where he became a journalist and later to New York where he collaborated with Nickolai Bucharin in forming the newspaper, New World. After World War I, he returned to Russia, becoming a major force in the ‘‘October Revolution’’ which installed the Bolsheviks in power. Under Lenin’s rule, he became the chief organizer of the Red Army which won the civil war following the revolution. He was at this point second in command to Lenin in the new revolutionary government. It was during this time that serious conflict developed between Trotsky and Josef Stalin, and, when Lenin died in 1924, Stalin maneuvered him out of party power. Eventually Trotsky was expelled from the Politburo and in 1927 was cast out of the Communist Party. He spent the last thirteen years of his life in exile in a variety of places and was assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, probably by an agent of the Soviet government. Although Wright admitted in ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ that he had never read Trotsky’s books but had read and been impressed by Stalin’s Marxism and The Colonial Question (Crossman 129), he favored Trotsky’s concept of world

12 Million Black Voices revolution and was deeply suspicious of Stalin’s nationalistic program of ‘‘revolution in one country.’’ When the Communist Party imposed its Stalinist policy of the ‘‘Popular Front’’ in the late 1930s, which de-emphasized world revolution in an attempt to gain allies in the Soviet Union’s war against Hitler’s Germany, Wright became bitterly disillusioned with this change, seeing it as a betrayal of the party’s commitments to black Americans. Wright’s unhappiness with ‘‘Popular Front’’ strategies was one of the main reasons why he left the party in 1942. Wright also strongly disapproved of the Communist Party’s treatment of its members who were perceived to be loyal to Trotsky. When his friend David Poindexter was expelled from the party in 1935 on trumped-up charges of being a ‘‘Trotskyite traitor’’ (Fabre 137), Wright was disgusted by the miniature show trial which Poindexter was given and never forgave its organizers, Oliver Law and Harry Haywood, for their abuse of Poindexter. Wright himself was accused by Chicago communists of being a Trotskyite, and this led to his dropping out of the May Day parade of 1937 and moving to New York where he felt that he would be given more artistic freedom and fair treatment by the party. After World War II, Wright developed close, long lasting friendships with Trotskyites C. L. R. James and George Padmore, both of whom had been expelled from the Communist Party for their veering from party orthodoxy and pressing for world revolution of oppressed people. It was through these men and other Trotskyites that Wright became interested in Pan Africanism, a global movement committed to eliminating colonialism and establishing the independence of Third World nations. See also Marxism; Socialism. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on The Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist.’’ In The God That Failed, edited by Richard Crossman. New York: Bantam, 1952.

12 MILLION BLACK VOICES A collaboration between Wright and WPA photographer Edwin Rosskam, it was a photodocumentary study of the Great Migration, that movement of African Americans in the twentieth century from the rural South to the urban North. Rosskam approached Wright in January 1941 to produce the written text of the book which would be accompanied by photographs of black southern life compiled during the depression by the Farm Security Administration and pictures Rosskam would take of black life on Chicago’s South Side. Wright, who had lived in Chicago’s ‘‘Black Belt’’ for ten years and who had done extensive research into black migration into Chicago as part of his work for the Illinois Writers Project, responded enthusiastically to Rosskam’s invitation. The two men worked well together since both were veterans of WPA projects and shared similar political outlooks. Rosskam, a German Jew, was deeply committed to using his work in the struggle against racism and Wright, fresh from completing Native Son, was intent on broadening his critique of American capitalism and segregation. Several of Wright’s books, particularly Lawd Today!, Native Son, and Black Boy, drew criticism over the years that they presented excessively harsh and unsympathetic portraits of black life, but 12 Million Voices clearly provides a vision of African-American experience which is noteworthy for its empathy and warmth. As Hazel Rowley has observed, Wright describes the everyday life of black people with ‘‘unusual tenderness’’ (237) even while he strongly condemns American capitalism for exploiting Negroes and frustrating their development. In 12 Million Black Voices, Wright filters his narrative through a first-person plural perspective (‘‘we’’) instead of his usual practice of using third person and omniscient points of view which objectively portray black experience. Instead of presenting his materials with the critical detachment of a social scientist, Wright uses an extremely emotional, poetic tone to stress his solidarity with and compassion for his people. As 377

12 Million Black Voices he stresses in the conclusion of the book, ‘‘The ties that bind us are deeper than those which separate us’’ (146). In April 1941, Wright, his new wife Ellen, and Rosskam went to Chicago where they took many photographs of ghetto life. Wright’s intimate knowledge of the South Side made it possible for Rosskam to gain access to black homes, store front churches, kitchenettes, and bars, places that white people rarely visited. Wright and his wife stayed in the Good Shepherd Community Center which was supervised by Horace Cayton and his wife Irma. Wright drew heavily upon Cayton’s extensive research into black life in Chicago, research that would eventually be incorporated into Black Metropolis, the massive sociological study which he co-authored with St. Clair Drake. 12 Million Black Voices divided modern African-American experience into two forms, southern rural life which was presided over by white ‘‘bosses of the land’’ and northern urban life which was controlled by ‘‘the bosses of the buildings.’’ Wright envisioned the epic journey from South to North as a movement from medieval circumstances to a modern world and concluded that ‘‘perhaps never in history has a more utterly unprepared folk wanted to go to the city’’ (93). Black people, whose lives were ‘‘blasted’’ (93) by centuries of slavery and impoverished by over half a century of segregation and segregation, were thrust into the complex, fast-moving world of twentieth-century American cities and were expected to shift for themselves. Wright stresses that the results were predictably disastrous and made worse by the harsh conditions of the Great Depression. But Wright does not present this vision of black history in an essentially pessimistic, deterministic manner. He points out that African Americans have developed a rich culture of their own which has sustained them in hard times and that they have been strengthened in the crucible of their experience in America. He finally sees his people as at a ‘‘crossroads’’ in their development which may bring them to higher levels in the ‘‘upward

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march of American life’’ (146). 12 Million Black Voices, like Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, concludes with a potentially hopeful vision of forward movement as its final words tell us ‘‘Men are moving! And we shall be with them . . . ’’ (147). The critical reception of 12 Million Black Voices was a fascinating mixture of attitudes and, in some ways, signals a turning point in Wright’s career. Benjamin Davis, Jr., the head of the American Communist Party’s Harlem bureau who had serious reservations about Native Son, had unqualified praise for the book in his Sunday Worker review. W. E. B. Du Bois, who would take Wright to task later for what he believed was a false view of black culture in Black Boy, was greatly pleased with 12 Million Black Voices. In a personal letter written to Wright, Ralph Ellison admitted that he was so moved by the book that he was reduced to tears. However, Beatrice Murphy, in her Baltimore Afro-American review, objected to what she felt was Wright’s failure to present a more affirmative vision of Negro experience. As Hazel Rowley points out, the publication of 12 Million Black Voices was significant in Wright’s career in two other ways. Coming out as it did in mid-November 1941, just a few weeks before the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, it appeared at a critical juncture when literary tastes changed dramatically. Now that the Great Depression had ended and World War II began, Americans had lost their interest in protest literature and looked for more patriotic and uplifting writing. This not only greatly reduced the sales of 12 Million Black Voices and made it difficult for Wright to find a publisher for ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ but signaled a shift in American literary culture from naturalistic, socially centered literature to writing which was existential in outlook. The literary stock of novelists such as Wright, James T. Farrell and John Dos Passos went down just as the literary stock of novelists such as Saul Bellow and Ralph Ellison went up. 12 Million Black Voices also signaled a problematic turn for Wright’s personal life as well. In the

Twice a Year highly patriotic times brought on by World War II, some readers of the book found it subversive. In October 1942 a white reader from Washington, DC sent a letter to the secretary of war complaining about Wright’s criticism of capitalism and what he considered to be pro-Japanese sentiments in the book. This letter eventually found its way to J. Edgar Hoover who assigned an agent to look into Wright’s work and political behavior. From this point to the end of Wright’s life, he would be kept under surveillance by the FBI and other intelligence organizations, causing him considerable personal distress over the years. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1988.

TWICE A YEAR A journal which was developed and edited by Dorothy Norman in 1937 and was published until 1948. Its full title was Twice a Year: A Semi-

Annual Journal of Literature, The Arts, and Civil Liberties. It featured social commentary, literary criticism, and reprinted photographs from leading American photographers. The journal focused often on issues of discrimination faced by black people and Jews. During World War II, it published many articles on Nazi atrocities. Prominent leftist writers such as Ignazio Silone and Jean-Paul Sartre published their work in Twice a Year. Wright, who developed a close friendship with Norman after the two met in 1944, published several pieces in the journal, including an introduction to Sartre’s The Respectful Prostitute, ‘‘A World View of the American Negro,’’ and ‘‘Urban Misery in an American City: Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem.’’ Selected Bibliography: ‘‘Interview with Dorothy Norman’’ conducted by William McNaughton at the Artist’s Home in East Hampton , New York, May 31, 1979 http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/ transcripts/norman79.htm. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973.

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U UNCLE TOM’S CHILDREN Wright’s first published book, it was originally printed by Harper and Brothers on March 24, 1938 as Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas. This version of the book included ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ ‘‘Down by the Riverside,’’ ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ and ‘‘Fire and Cloud.’’ It was reissued by Harper in 1940 as Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories, adding an autobiographical preface, ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,’’ and another story, ‘‘Bright and Morning Star.’’ Wright wrote all six pieces while living in Chicago and working for the Communist Party. Several of these individual works were published separately. ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,’’ for example, appeared in 1937 in American Stuff, an anthology of writings from authors involved with the Federal Writers’ Project. ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ won first prize in Story magazine’s 1937 contest, and ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ was featured in the May 10, 1938 issue of New Masses. This story also was placed in two important anthologies, The Best Stories of 1939 and Fifty Best American Stories (1914–1939). As Margaret Walker has stressed, both versions of Uncle Tom’s Children were deeply rooted in Wright’s traumatic experiences growing up in the Deep South:

I am convinced that the best of Richard Wright’s fiction grew out of his first nineteen years of his life . . . Out of this racial nightmare marked with racial suffering, poverty, religious fanaticism, and sexual confusion emerge the five long stories in Uncle Tom’s Children . . . . (Walker 43)

The works in both versions are coherently held together by their rural southern settings and by recurrent images of darkness and fire as well as persistent scenes of racial violence. Wright also organized them in a careful sequence starting with narratives in which black people are victimized and moving to stories of characters who oppose southern injustice with revolutionary action. 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’’ (Farrell 5), Uncle Tom’s Children boldly departs from the traditional ways in which black life had been depicted by previous American and AfricanAmerican writers. As its title suggests, it aggressively challenges the long-standing stereotype of the ‘‘Uncle Tom,’’ the Negro who is spiritually ennobled by passively enduring with Christian

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Uncle Tom’s Children 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 friend, 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 which are 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 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 1940 collection,

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is suffused with brutal violence which whites administer to blacks. In the preface, Wright laments the fate of a bellhop with whom he worked in a Jackson hotel who was ‘‘castrated and run out of town’’ (Wright 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!’’ (Wright 89) as they try to satisfy their need for avenging Mann’s justified killing of a white man. Reverend Taylor in ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ immediately is 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’’ (Wright 115). In addition to reducing to absurdity the myth of ‘‘Uncle Tom,’’ Wright’s book also broke away aggressively 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

Uncle Tom’s Children 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, who was a thorough-going modernist who detested the medieval 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 which 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, in many ways is 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’’ (Wright 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’’ (Wright 61) sweeps over him as he realizes that his new faith in leftist politics can provide ‘‘the way’’ (Wright 101) to a better life for himself and his people. ‘‘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’’ (Wright 183). 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’’ (Wright 170) makes her a political martyr who, in the story’s final words, becomes part of ‘‘the dead that never dies’’ (Wright 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 naivete´ of its political vision. Her review in Saturday Review of Literature accused Wright of writing ‘‘a book about hatreds’’ which failed to fairly represent ‘‘the broader and more fundamental aspects of Negro life’’ (Hurston 32). Moreover, Hurston felt that ‘‘the solution of the party’’ which 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 32). Hurston’s criticisms, while not given much notice in the late 1930s, would assume much more prominence by 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 feminine experience. Selected Bibliography: Farrell, James T. ‘‘Lynch Patterns,’’ Partisan Review, 4 (May 1938), 57–58. Hurston, Zora Neale, ‘‘Stories of Conflict,’’ Saturday Review of Literature, 17 (April 2, 1938), 32. Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. New York: Signet Books, 1963. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

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Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)

UNIVERSAL NEGRO IMPROVEMENT ASSOCIATION (UNIA) This organization was founded by Marcus Garvey and Amy Ashcroft in 1914 in Jamaica. Its goals were to organize black people on a worldwide basis, liberate Africa from colonial rule, and establish independent black societies in Africa based upon capitalism. Garvey moved to the United States in March 1916 and spent a full year touring the country while promoting the UNIA. He then established his headquarters in Harlem and published Negro World, a journal which eventually achieved a circulation of 50,000. Garvey’s organization was extremely popular among working-class and poor blacks, and by 1919 it had thirty branches with over two million members. Garvey’s organization was premised upon a belief in black nationalism. He was convinced that black people would never be justly treated by or integrated into white society so he advocated a ‘‘Back to Africa’’ policy whereby blacks would return to their homeland, drive out white colonialists, and establish independent black nations. In 1919, Garvey established the Black Cross Navigation and Trading Company which was supported by stock investments of ten million dollars. The company was equipped with two steamships which were to take African Americans back to Africa as well as establish commerce between America, the Caribbean, and Africa. Because of mismanagement and the corruption of some of Garvey’s officials, the company ran out of money after two trips to Africa and went into bankruptcy. Garvey was arrested, charged with fraudulent use of the mails, and sentenced to five years in prison. His sentence was later commuted by President Coolidge, and Garvey was deported to Jamaica. UNIA never recovered from its financial problems and scandals, ceasing to exist by 1930. Richard Wright first became acquainted with the UNIA and Garvey’s philosophical and political ideas in 1928 when he had come to Chicago 384

and would listen to political speakers in Washington Park. He was particularly drawn to a group known as the Negro Forum which was composed of evangelical preachers, communists, and Garveyites. He formed friendships with some of these followers of Garvey and had a brief romantic relationship with a young woman whose father was a fervent believer in Garvey’s ideas and programs. He sometimes visited their apartments, what he describes in American Hunger as their ‘‘dingy flats’’ whose walls were covered with ‘‘maps of Africa and India and Japan’’ as well as ‘‘portraits of Marcus Garvey in gaudy regalia.’’ Wright’s response to the UNIA in particular and Garvey in general is an interesting mixture. Fresh from the Deep South where blacks were either silenced or severely punished for speaking out against the white world, Wright was ‘‘enthralled’’ by the boldness of their criticisms and their ‘‘passionate rejection of America’’ (Wright 28). He felt that their outspoken pride in being black, what he called their ‘‘racialistic outlook’’ gave them ‘‘a dignity that I had never seen before in Negroes’’ (Wright 28). He deeply respected Garvey’s ability to organize the masses of black Americans and he admired the ability of Garveyites to devote themselves to a unifying creed: Their lives were not cluttered with ideas in which they could only half believe. They could not create illusions which made them think they were living when they were not; their daily lives were too nakedly harsh to permit of camouflage. I understood their emotions for I partly shared them. (Wright 28)

Wright’s ambivalence here is quite revealing. For although he could identify with the singleminded devotion to a cause displayed by the Garveyites and envied their racial pride and attacks on the white system of racial oppression, he could not accept their faith in establishing a separate black nation. However much he was attracted to the ‘‘emotional dynamics’’ of Garveyism, he could not embrace the ‘‘ideology’’ (Wright 28) of the UNIA.

University of Chicago As Michel Fabre has observed, the young Wright could sympathize with the emotional appeals of Garvey’s movement but ‘‘he never stopped thinking of himself as an American and a western man’’ (Fabre xix). Even in his early days in Chicago when he was thrilled by the spectacle of black people boldly speaking out against white oppression and envisioning a black homeland, Wright the rationalist thought that the Garveyites could ‘‘never achieve their goal’’ since ‘‘Africa was owned by Europe’’ and American blacks were ‘‘people of the West’’ (Wright 29). Late in his life, Wright declared in a 1957 interview that, however much he admired Garvey’s organizing of ‘‘some two million American Negroes,’’ he felt that Garvey’s ideas were ‘‘romantic and impractical’’ (Kinnamon 177). It was communism, with its rationalism and western orientation that captured Wright’s political imagination as a young man. But Garvey’s powerful image of Africa as a recovered black homeland would continue to fascinate Wright long after he rejected communism and became involved with the Pan-African movement. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre (eds.). Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1993. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO The university was originally founded as a Baptist institution of higher learning in 1856, but it went bankrupt thirty years later. It was revived as a uniquely modern, urban university in 1891 when millionaires such as John D. Rockefeller, Marshall Field, and Charles Hutchinson endowed what historian Donald Miller has described as ‘‘The University of the future, an experiment in both democracy and higher education’’ (393). From its very beginning, the University of Chicago was a bold pioneer in many important aspects of American education. Its first president,

William Rainey Harper, envisioned it as an engine of modern inquiry and social change, an institution which would promote ‘‘the cultural redemption of America’’ (Miller 401). It created the first department of sociology in 1892, and in 1895 it established The American Journal of Sociology. It recruited a distinguished faculty which included Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, Robert Park, and George Herbert Mead, a group which revolutionized the social sciences. Moreover, the university’s sociology department regarded the city of Chicago as a massive social laboratory and initiated a wide range of programs which would study Chicago as a modern city in a scrupulously scientific way. It also did pioneer work in co-education and developed important outreach programs to the community in its unique ‘‘University Extension’’ division. These programs included mail order courses, evening courses, public lecture series, and strong support for budding social service initiatives such as Jane Addams’s Hull House. And it was at the University of Chicago that two important black sociologists, Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier, received their training under the direction of Robert Park. By the time Wright moved to Chicago in 1927, the University of Chicago had become one of America’s premier educational institutions which was on a par with Ivy League colleges and universities. But its continued interest in its mission to reach out to all parts of the community and to transform America’s urban culture made it a particularly attractive place for Wright. It clearly played an important role in his development as an artist and thinker. The social worker for the Wright family was Mary Wirth, the wife of Louis Wirth, an important member of the university’s sociology department. She introduced Wright to her husband who not only provided him with reading lists of seminal studies in the social sciences but also made himself available to discuss these books and, on one occasion, delivered a talk at Wright’s John Reed Club. Through Wirth, Wright became acquainted with University of

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University of Chicago Chicago faculty such as Robert Park and Robert Morss Lovett as well as Horace Cayton who was Wirth’s graduate assistant. As Wright observes in his introduction to Black Metropolis, a monumental study of black life in Chicago which Cayton co-authored with St. Clair Drake, the University of Chicago played a crucial role in his maturation as a writer and thinker. Captivated by the ‘‘raw beauty’’ of Chicago when he first came there as a young man, Wright was frustrated in his attempts to tell his ‘‘story’’ about his urban experiences because Chicago’s ‘‘extremes of possibility, death and hope’’ had overwhelmed his imagination and reduced him to ‘‘dumb yearning to write’’ which rendered him inarticulate and confused. But the sociological research generated at the University of Chicago gave him a new way of understanding his environment which enabled him to translate his inchoate impulses into formed art: But I did not know what my story was, and it was not until I stumbled upon science that I discovered some of the meanings of the environment that battered and taunted me. I encountered the work of men who were studying the Negro community, amassing facts about Negro life, and I found that sincere art and honest science were not far apart, that each could enrich the other. The huge mountains of fact piled up by the Department of Sociology at the University of

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Chicago gave me my first concrete vision of the forces that molded the Negro’s body and soul. (I was never a student at the university; it is doubtful whether I could pass the entrance examination). (xvii–xviii)

Although his family’s dire financial problems prevented Wright from pursuing his formal education in Chicago, the profound process of self-education which he experienced there was strongly connected with the University of Chicago. Like James T. Farrell, he was deeply influenced by the ‘‘Chicago School’’ of sociology and anthropology. Books like Wirth’s The Ghetto, Frederick Thrasher’s The Gang, Robert Park’s The City, and Harvey Zorbaugh’s The Gold Coast and the Slums fired Wright’s imagination and helped him to see the modern urban environment in a clearer, more productive way. The University of Chicago, like the John Reed Club, the South Side Writers Group, and the Communist Party not only put Wright in contact with like-minded people but also catalyzed his thinking and nurtured his artistic and human growth. It is doubtful whether any other university in America at that time could have performed these functions so well for Wright. Selected Bibliography: Miller, Donald. City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago in the Making of America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996.

V VAN VECHTEN, CARL (17 June 1880– 21 December 1964) Carl Van Vechten, journalist, novelist, and photographer, was dubbed Harlem’s first ‘‘Negrotarian’’ and honorary ‘‘Niggeratus’’ by Zora Neale Hurston because of his intense interest in and enthusiastic support of black writers and artists. Born into a liberal and affluent Midwestern family, Van Vechten began his career as a journalist, contributing articles on a wide range of topics to the Chicago American. When he was fired because of a controversial gossip column which he wrote under the pseudonym ‘‘The Chaperone,’’ Van Vechten moved to New York City in 1906, where he was employed by the New York Times as a music critic. Having married Anna Snyder in 1907, Van Vechten spent time in Paris with his wife, where he served as the correspondent of the New York Times. The marriage lasted only until 1912 and after the couple divorced, Van Vechten married Russian-born Fania Marinoff, an actress, in 1914. Despite Van Vechten’s homosexual orientation and his frequent forays into Harlem’s gay subculture, his marriage to Fania endured. In 1915, a collection of his essays on music, theater, and ballet appeared as Music after the Great War. Additional essay collections followed in rapid succession: Music and Bad Manners (1916), Interpreters and Interpretations (1917),

The Merry-Go-Round (1918), In the Garret (1920), and Red (1925). Van Vechten championed above all experimental artists and writers. He promoted Gertrude Stein’s works and praised such innovative composers as Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Erik Satie. In the 1920s, Van Vechten turned from criticism to writing novels, and he published seven satirical comedies of manners between 1922 and 1930, among them Peter Whiffle (1922), Blind Bow-Boy (1923), The Tattooed Countess (1924), Firecrackers (1925), and Spider Boy (1928). According to Edward Lueders, ‘‘Van Vechten’s novels could be taken, with their wit and lightness, as ironic masques, as philosophical diversions capable of yielding riches in esoteric lore and wisdom to the ‘‘sophisticated’’ reader’’ (58). Van Vechten’s most serious and controversial novel, Nigger Heaven, whose ironic title refers to both Harlem and the top seats in a segregated theater, was published in 1926 and is, according to Lueders, ‘‘a logical development in the sequence of his lifelong interest in and respect for the Negro’’ (95). Whereas some reviewers criticized Van Vechten for concentrating on the sordid aspects of Harlem, others praised the novel as a sympathetic and realistic depiction of life in Harlem. James Weldon Johnson, for example, stated in his review for Opportunity that Van Vechten ‘‘pays colored people the rare tribute of 387

Vardaman, James K. writing about them as people rather than puppets’’ (October 1926). When Ralph Van Vechten, Carl’s brother, died in 1928, Carl inherited a sizeable fortune which made him financially independent and enabled him to concentrate on his longstanding interest in photography. From 1932 onward, Van Vechten took thousands of photos of white and African-American writers, dancers, painters, composers, and singers, providing posterity with an impressive cultural document. In 1966, the Library of Congress acquired over 1,400 of these photographs from the Van Vechten estate. Some of the best known and most frequently reproduced images of Richard Wright were taken by Carl Van Vechten on 23 June 1939, shortly after their first meeting. Whereas the photo held by the Library of Congress shows Wright looking into the camera while seated in front of a striped backdrop (Lot 12735, no. 1216), the photo reproduced in Generations in Black and White (1993) shows him averting his gaze (89). In a third photo, taken at the same time and reproduced in Margaret Walker’s book, Wright holds and contemplates an African sculpture. Walker’s book also includes a dual portrait of Wright and Van Vechten, possibly taken by Saul Mauriber, Van Vechten’s assistant. An additional photo of Wright taken in 1939 can be found in Portraits (1978), and a photo of Wright and his wife Ellen featuring the same backdrop is included in Michel Fabre’s biography (295). In addition to taking some of the most striking images of Richard Wright, Carl Van Vechten was instrumental in paving the way for Wright’s first trip to France by acting as an intermediary between the writer and Gertrude Stein. As the correspondence between Van Vechten and Stein shows, Carl sent Wright’s complimentary review of Stein’s Wars I Have Seen, entitled ‘‘Gertrude Stein’s Story Is Drenched in Hitler’s Horrors,’’ to the author in March 1945, and Stein in turn asked Van Vechten to provide her with all of Wright’s novels. After reading Black Boy, Stein asked Van Vechten on 2 May 1945 to forward a

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letter to Wright in which she expressed her admiration for the book. Wright then asked Stein to send her some of her books and she complied. On May 27, 1945, Wright expressed his desire to visit France in a letter to Stein: ‘‘Maybe next year we will come to France and I hope that Paris will be like so many have said it used to be. Will it? For a reason I don’t know, I’ve always felt that France would mean something to me, and that I’d live there. So I’m honor bound to see France’’ (Fabre 297). Stein secured an official invitation for Wright from the French government and met the writer and his family when he arrived at Gare Saint-Lazare on May 10, 1946. She arranged a hotel for the Wrights, introduced them to various writers and intellectuals, and showed them the beauties of the city while already suffering from the terminal illness that was to claim her life on 27 July 1946. Without Van Vechten’s crucial role as go-between the friendship between Wright and Stein would probably not have developed. Karl L. Stenger Selected Bibliography: Burns, Edward, ed., The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Carl Van Vechten 1913– 1946, 2 vols. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Byrd, Rudolph P., ed., Generations in Black and White: Photographs by Carl Van Vechten from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Lueders, Edward. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Twayne, 1965. Mauriber, Saul, ed., Portraits: The Photographs of Carl Van Vechten. Indianapolis, Indiana: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1988.

VARDAMAN, JAMES K. (26 July 1861– 25 June 1930) A prominent early twentieth-century southern politician who was a staunch segregationist and an unabashed racist, Vardaman served as Governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908, the year of Richard Wright’s birth. Labeling himself ‘‘The Great White Chief,’’ he came to power on the

‘‘Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre, The’’ strength of white populism and crude racial politics. Vardaman’s constituency consisted largely of poor and working class whites who had deeply rooted resentments for black people and the rich planter class controlling Mississippi’s cotton economy. A flamboyant demagogue who dressed in expensive white suits and who sported shoulder-length black hair, Vardaman was often successful in gaining political power by manipulating the racial hatreds and class resentments of his supporters. Keneth Kinnamon has argued that the Mississippi Wright grew up in was a world of ‘‘total discrimination’’ (Kinnamon 6) and was the most intensely racist state in America. Vardaman and other politicians like his prote´ge´ Theodore Bilbo epitomized the systematically racist culture of Mississippi in Wright’s childhood and adolescence. Some of Vardaman’s public statements provide vivid illustrations of the discrimination and violence which black Mississippians faced at that time. He once asserted that ‘‘The only way to control the nigger is to whip him when he does not obey without it and another is never to pay him more wages than is necessary to buy food and clothing’’ (Cash 253). He felt that African Americans were ‘‘lazy, lying, lustful animals’’ who could not become ‘‘tolerable citizens’’ (Cash 254) and once retorted ‘‘If it necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy’’ (Cash 251). It is not surprising that during Wright’s lifetime Mississippi had more lynchings and other racial violence than any other state in America. Wright, therefore, had good reasons for describing his home state in Black Boy as a kind of ‘‘Dantean hell’’ and left that state as a young man, returning only on one occasion to visit his father and other relatives in 1940 on his return from Mexico. Memphis, Chicago, New York, and Paris were anything but ideal places for Wright, but they proved to be far more fruitful environments for him as an artist and a person than the Mississippi controlled by racist demagogues like Vardaman.

Selected Bibliography: Cash, W. J. The Mind of the South. New York: Vintage Books, 1960. Key, V. O. Southern Politics. New York: Vintage Books, 1949. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

‘‘VOODOO OF HELL’S HALF ACRE, THE’’ Although no copy of the story exists, it is regarded as Wright’s first published writing and appeared around 1924 in the Southern Register, a blackowned weekly newspaper in Jackson, Mississippi. Wright was a student at Smith Robertson Junior High School when he wrote the story and delivered papers for the Southern Register. In Black Boy, Wright described the story’s plot as centering around a ‘‘villain’’ intent on robbing a widow’s home. He characterized the tone of the story as ‘‘crudely atmospheric, emotional, intuitively psychological and stemmed from pure feeling’’ (Wright 194). While doing research for his biography of Wright in the early 1960s, Michel Fabre interviewed Mrs. Tillie Perkins Scott who claimed to be the typesetter at the newspaper who worked with the story, and she attempted to compose from memory the story’s first two paragraphs. According to her, a character was named ‘‘Bigger Thomas,’’ and most of the plot was drawn from Wright’s school days at Smith Robertson. Wright mentions in Black Boy that reactions to the story were quite negative. His grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson, chided him for wasting his time writing fiction and considered such activity to be ‘‘devil’s work.’’ His Aunt Addie, who like his grandmother was a fervent Seventh Day Adventist, was displeased by the word ‘‘hell’’ in the title and perhaps did not read much further than that. Wright’s classmates saw Wright’s story as alien to their own interests and began to distance themselves from him. As a result, he felt that his writing isolated him, ‘‘cutting [him] off . . . more completely than ever from other people’’ (Wright 197). The feelings of estrangement from others, which Wright sensed as a child and would feel in varying degrees throughout his life, was deepened by his artistic activity. 389

‘‘Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre, The’’ From what we can gather from the piecemeal recreations of the story, ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’ does contain in embryonic form elements which would later assume prominence in Wright’s mature work. The story’s gothic tone certainly prefigures the horror generated in novels such as Native Son and Savage Holiday as well as stories such as ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground.’’ As Dan McCall and others have argued, there is a pronounced strain of gothic horror in most of Wright’s fiction. Wright, who greatly admired the work of Edgar Allan Poe, saw the experience of blacks in America as a kind of extended nightmare and concluded ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ by observing that ‘‘And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent

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him’’ (Wright 462). But the most revealing prediction of Wright’s future work in ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre’’ is the appearance of a character named Bigger Thomas, who was modeled after one of Wright’s boyhood friends, James ‘‘Biggy’’ Thomas. As Fabre has observed, Wright ‘‘never forgot’’ (Fabre 49) his rebellious neighbor and spent many years constructing the character who eventually found his way to Native Son. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969. Wright, Richard. ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.’’ In Native Son: The Restored Text. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

W WALKER, MARGARET (1915–1998) Poet, novelist, biographer, and teacher, Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and moved with her family to New Orleans at age ten. Her father was a Methodist minister, and her mother was a music teacher. She became an avid reader of literature at an early age and excelled at her studies at Gilbert Academy in New Orleans. She studied at Dillard University for two years and, at the advice of Langston Hughes, transferred to Northwestern University where she earned her B.A. in English in 1935 at the age of nineteen. Two years after graduating from college, she published her first poem, ‘‘For My People’’ in Poetry magazine which was later anthologized in The Negro Caravan. While in college, Walker began work in the Illinois Writers’ Project, a WPA-sponsored organization which did extensive research on Illinois history and black life in Chicago. Such work gave her first-hand knowledge of the serious problems of working-class and poor people in urban environments during the Great Depression. It inspired her to write an unpublished novel set in the South Side of Chicago, ‘‘Goose Island,’’ as well as bringing her in contact with a number of writers such as Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Frank Yerby, Nelson Algren, and Willard Motley.

She enrolled in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa in 1939, receiving her M.A. in 1940. While at Iowa, she worked on her first volume of poetry, For My People, which was published in 1942 and was given the Yale Younger Poets Award. She then began a long teaching career, first at Livingston College and West Virginia State College, and in 1949, she began work at Jackson State College where she was a mainstay in the English Department until her death in 1998. Busy raising a family of four children and teaching heavy course loads at Jackson State, Walker published relatively little in the 1950s and early 1960s, but in 1966, she gained national attention with Jubilee, a novel set in slave times which was based upon the memories and experiences of her maternal great-grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier. This novel challenged the sentimental and stereotyped visions of slavery put forth by popular fiction such as Gone With the Wind and helped to create a new direction in AfricanAmerican literature, the neo-slave novel. Three volumes of poetry followed: Prophets for a New Day (1970), October Journey (1973), and For Farish Green Street (1986). Her collected poems, This Is My Century, were published in 1989, and her collected essays On Being Black, Female, and Free, edited by Maryemma Graham, appeared a year 391

Ward, Essie Lee before her death. How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature was also edited by Maryemma Graham and was published in 1990. Wright probably first met Walker in 1935 when they worked together on the Illinois Writers’ Project. Shortly afterwards, Wright joined the Southside Writers’ Group which included Walker, Arna Bontemps, Frank Marshall Davis, Theodore Ward, and Horace Cayton. They met on a regular basis, sometimes in their homes and apartments, and also at the Abraham Lincoln Center, to discuss their own work and also examine the problems faced by African-American writers. Wright and Walker became good friends and literary confidants. They also attended the National Negro Congress in 1936. During this important period in Wright’s development, he was composing some of the stories which would later appear in Uncle Tom’s Children and was also working on a novel, ‘‘Cesspool,’’ which would be published posthumously as Lawd Today!. Walker was deeply impressed by Wright’s work and was one of his strongest supporters as he groped his way to a career in writing. When Wright was faced with the dilemmas of either accepting a permanent job at the Chicago Post Office which would at last give him and his family a modicum of financial security or going to New York to pursue the possibility of becoming a writer, she urged him to choose the latter option, asking him ‘‘would you want to be a postman all your life?’’ (Rowley 123). During the first two years of Wright’s stay in New York, he and Walker regularly corresponded with each other. While he was writing Native Son, she sent him news clippings of the Robert Nixon murder case which Wright used as a documentary basis for Bigger’s murder of Bessie. Wright also used slightly modified versions of these news stories in the press coverage of Bigger’s trial. When Wright visited Chicago in November 1938 to probe further into the Nixon case and do library research on the Loeb-Leopold trial, Walker accompanied him and loaned him her library card to withdraw books on both cases.

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The friendship between Wright and Walker became strained when it became clear that he did not reciprocate her romantic feelings, and it ended abruptly when she visited New York in 1939 to attend the Third American Writers’ Congress. By this time, Wright had proposed marriage to two other women and had also begun a relationship with Dhimah Rose Meadman, whom he would marry later that year. Moreover, Wright had become offended by Walker’s revealing details of his personal life to mutual friends and, according to Hazel Rowley, had become furious with her when she had suggested that he was having homosexual relationships with Langston Hughes and Ted Ward. Walker tried to patch up their relationship by sending him a long letter of apology but he never responded to the letter and their friendship was never renewed. In 1988, Walker published her biography of Wright, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. In the dedication she presents the book as ‘‘both a memorial for the man and testimonial to the wonderful friendship we shared more than fifty years ago’’ (Walker v). She stressed how Wright’s work grows out of the various psychic wounds he received while growing up in the segregated South. She depicts Wright as a lonely outsider who was never able in his personal life to overcome these wounds but was able to transform the pain of his life into important works of enduring art. Selected Bibliography: Graham, Maryemma. ‘‘The Fusion of Ideas: An Interview with Margaret Walker Alexander.’’ African American Review, 27 (Summer 1993), 33–46. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Ward, Jerry W. ‘‘An Open Letter to Michael Fabre.’’ The Mississippi Quarterly, 43 (Spring 1990), 25–36.

WARD, ESSIE LEE She was one of Wright’s classmates at Jim Hill Public School and Smith Robertson Junior

Ward, Theodore High School. She lived on Poindexter Street near Wright’s house on Lynch Street, and the two would often walk to school together with other friends when they were in junior high. Because there was no public transportation to the northeast corner of Jackson where Smith Robertson was located, they had to walk several miles each day. Unlike many of Wright’s school friends who came from black middle-class backgrounds, she had to endure serious economic hardships as a child. Her father died from tuberculosis when she was nine, and her mother struggled to make ends meet with her job as a cook in the homes of white people. Both she and Wright were extremely self conscious about the shabby clothes they wore to school and were determined to use their educations as a way of improving their lives. At both Jim Hill and Smith Robertson, Wright and Ward were part of a lively group of friends that included Dick Jordan, Joe Brown, D. C. Blackburn, Lewis Anderson, and Sarah McNeamer. Many of them later migrated to Chicago in the late 1920s and early 1930s to escape the racial prejudice in the Deep South and pursue expanded opportunities for better lives in the North. Ward and her mother went to Chicago and she remained friends with Wright during the 1930s. When he won first prize in Story magazine’s fiction contest in 1937 with ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ he wrote her a letter informing her of the award. He also told her about the upcoming publication of Uncle Tom’s Children, adding ‘‘I hope you get a copy and see what your old pal has done’’ (Fabre 157). The friendships which Wright established with Ward and others when he was a student in Jackson for four years were extremely important in his development. Classmates like Ward, Brown, and Jordan broke the personal isolation he experienced in his early years when his family’s constant movements made it difficult for him to form sustained relationships with peers. And those lively, intelligent young people also inspired Wright to pursue education as a means of personal development and social advancement. As he reveals in

Black Boy/American Hunger, his days at Jim Hill and Smith Robertson put him in contact with ‘‘boys and girls who were studying, fighting, talking’’ and this ‘‘revitalized [my] being,’’ thus enabling him to envision a hopeful ‘‘future’’ (Wright 147) for himself. In a 1994 television documentary entitled Richard Wright: Black Boy, Ward remembered Wright as a serious student who read voraciously, sometimes remaining in the classroom while others enjoyed recess: ‘‘He kept his eyes in those books all the time . . . I wondered how he had eyes.’’ Essie Lee Ward was also an excellent student who graduated toward the top of her class, giving a speech at the same commencement exercises in which Wright provided the valedictory address, ‘‘Attributes of Life.’’ Her speech centered on the need to work hard in order to attain success in American life. By associating with gifted, dedicated students like Ward, Wright was able to see his life in fresh, affirmative terms, envisioning his work as a writer as the means by which he could free himself from the prison of southern life. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

WARD, THEODORE (15 September 1902–8 May 1983) An African-American playwright and promoter of black theater who was born in Thibodaux, Louisiana, the eighth of eleven children. He received the rudiments of a grammar school education but from an early age onward was a voracious reader, becoming, like Wright, a self-educated person. He ran away from home at age thirteen after the death of his mother and spent ten years traveling widely throughout the United States while supporting himself with a broad range of odd jobs. His career in drama began in 1929 when he studied literature in an extension course at the University of Utah. In 1931, he won a scholarship 393

‘‘We of the Streets’’ to study creative writing at the University of Wisconsin and remained there for two years. He moved to Chicago in 1935, joining the John Reed Club and immersing himself in left-wing ideology and organizing. He also worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as a recreational director. In 1937, he wrote Sick and Tiahd, a protest play which won an award given by a local labor union in Chicago, and in 1940, he completed Big White Fog, which was produced by the Federal Theatre Project. This play, which most regard as his best work, deals with a working class black family trying to eke out a living during the Great Depression while surrounded by the ‘‘white fog’’ of American racism and capitalism. Ward argues in the play that only a coalition of black and white people committed to socialist ideals can solve the problems of a disintegrating American society. He moved to New York in 1940 where he lived for the next twenty-five years, writing three more plays and working on a wide variety of theater projects. Together with Langston Hughes, Owen Dodson, and a number of other black writers, directors, and actors, he founded the Negro Playwrights Company. He completed Deliver the Goods in 1942, a play about the problems which longshoremen in New York faced during WWII. Our Lan’, an epic drama about freed slaves after the Civil War, was produced in 1947. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1947 which enabled him to work on John Brown, a play he researched and revised over a twenty-year period. Ward returned to Chicago in 1964 and founded the South Side Center for the Performing Arts in 1967, a group devoted to the development of African-American theater and the training of black playwrights, actors, and directors. Our Lan’ was revived in Chicago in 1967, running for nearly a year in one of Chicago’s poorest communities and staged in a former neighborhood movie theater. A 1978 Rockefeller Foundation Grant enabled Ward to produce Our Lan’ in a Free Southern Theatre production in New Orleans.

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The parallels between Wright and Ward, both as writers and men, are quite significant. Both were born in the Deep South during a period of rigid segregation, economic suffering, and racial violence, and both fled the South as young men seeking better lives in other parts of the United States. Due to the harsh limits imposed upon them by the Jim Crow South, neither received much formal education, but each became extraordinary self-taught men who brought powerful new visions of African-American life to American consciousness. Wright and Ward found their ways to Chicago and New York during the late 1920s and the Great Depression, becoming deeply involved in leftist ideology and organizing. They were active members of the John Reed Club and the Southside Writers Group. Their most important works, Native Son and Big White Fog, appeared in the same year, making strong protests about American capitalism and racism. Ward was strongly influenced by Wright as an artist and a person and once revealed to Constance Ward that he regarded the reading of Native Son as ‘‘the most amazing experience of my life’’ (Webb 178). Selected Bibliography: Mitchell, Loften. Black Drama. New York: Hawthorne Books, 1967. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Hold, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Demonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright. New York: Putnam’s, 1968.

‘‘WE OF THE STREETS’’ This poem, published in the April 13, 1937 issue of New Masses, celebrates the spiritual resiliency and political potential of America’s urban masses during the worst years of the Great Depression. Employing long, free flowing lines of Whitmanian verse and a rough but robust imagery suggestive of Carl Sandburg’s Chicago Poems, Wright recreates the ‘‘nervous landscapes’’ of working class Chicago, with its thundering ‘‘L,’’ streets ‘‘lush with the ferment of our living,’’ ‘‘odors of onions drifting from doorways,’’ and ‘‘effluvium of baby new-born downstairs.’’

Webb, Constance The first part of this proletarian poem describes this harshly vibrant city of workers whose ‘‘bodies are hard like worn pavement.’’ While this section concludes with an image of darkness, ‘‘the sun dying between tenements,’’ the second part opens with ‘‘sunshine,’’ the ‘‘common hope’’ that these people will organize and do as a group ‘‘what none of us would do alone.’’ ‘‘We of the Streets’’ concludes with a powerful image of workers marching ‘‘ten thousand strong’’ as they are held together by bonds of ‘‘fraternity’’ and are vigorously chanting their demands for a more just society. Michel Fabre has argued that Wright’s early poetry is important because it reveals some of ‘‘the major tendencies of Wright’s imagination’’ (Fabre 34). Not only do such poems clearly illuminate the political and social thinking of the young Wright, but they also employ a wide range of poetic techniques which Wright would refine in his mature work to convey his deepest personal feelings. In this sense, his ‘‘poetry never stopped appearing in his prose works’’ (Fabre 54). The prose poems of Black Boy/American Hunger and the richly layered prose of 12 Million Black Voices are therefore rooted in Wright’s apprentice verse. The affinities between ‘‘We of the Streets’’ and Native Son are especially strong. Wright’s poem was published in the same year when he began writing Native Son, and some of the poem’s imagery and themes appear at key points in his novel. The striking image of the ‘‘sun dying between tenements’’ which concludes the first part of the poem is quite similar to the ominous picture of the ‘‘sun dying over the roof tops’’ (Wright 42) which appears in Book One when Bigger gazes out the window of his ghetto apartment as he contemplates working for the Daltons. The lightly disguised Marxist hope suggested in the poem with ‘‘sunshine’’ symbolizing a ‘‘common hope’’ of workers rising in solidarity is employed more explicitly in Native Son when Bigger looks out his jail window and feels a ‘‘supporting oneness’’ with ‘‘everything that is common and good’’ as he contemplates ‘‘an image of a

strong, blinding sun’’ (Wright 362). Like the narrator of ‘‘We of the Streets,’’ he experiences hope when he can feel ‘‘union’’ with ‘‘a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men’’ as the sun’s rays melt away the differences between people. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 1985. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972.

WEBB, CONSTANCE (1918– ) A native of California who was educated at Fresno State College and the University of California at Berkeley, Webb became a devoted Trotskyist as a college student and organized for the Socialist Worker’s Party. Living in New York and Los Angeles after graduating from college, she supported herself by becoming an actress and a fashion model. She married prominent black intellectual and activist C. L. R. James and met Wright in August 1942 when she and James were invited for dinner at Wright’s Brooklyn apartment. She and Wright established a strong friendship which lasted for the remainder of his life. After Wright and his family took up residence in France, she visited them on several occasions and maintained a correspondence with Wright for many years. Webb wrote the first biography of Wright, Richard Wright: The Biography of a Major Figure in American Literature which was published by C. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1968. She began her research in 1945, using ‘‘notes, letters, telegrams, and manuscripts’’ (Webb 7) which Wright gave to her. After his death in 1960, she worked with Wright’s widow, Ellen, examining his files and diaries. She also interviewed Wright’s friends such as Joe Brown, his agent Paul Reynolds, Jr., his editor Edward Aswell, and fellow novelists Ralph Ellison and Chester Himes. She received ‘‘critical information’’ (Webb 7) about Wright from Arna Bontemps, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Norman, Herbert Hill, Jan Wittenber, and Jack Conroy. 395

Welles, Orson Despite her long friendship with Wright and her access to much important inside information, Webb’s biography has not been received well by Wright scholars. Saul Maloff ’s Newsweek review complained that the book was ‘‘chaotically organized and absurdly inconclusive’’ (Maloff 42) as well as being factually incorrect. Michel Fabre, who met Webb in 1962 and supplied her with significant data, also found many factual errors in Webb’s book, even though he pointed them out to her when he read the manuscript. He considered her knowledge of Wright’s life to be ‘‘sketchy’’ (Fabre viii). Margaret Walker offered the most severe criticism of Webb’s biography, characterizing it as ‘‘sentimental, phony, and if not tawdry, downright mawkish’’ (Walker 2). Like Fabre, she questioned the factual accuracy of Webb’s knowledge of Wright’s life. Webb’s biography perhaps is best read as a personal remembrance rather than a disciplined scholarly work. Her memoir, Not Without Love, was published in 1993 and contains interesting anecdotal information about Wright. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Maloff, Saul. ’’Review of Constance Webb’s Richard Wright,’’ (April 1, 1969), 92. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

WELLES, ORSON (6 May 1915– 9 October 1985) Director, producer, writer, and actor, Welles was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. His father was an inventor and manufacturer, and his mother was a gifted pianist. Welles’s family life was troubled by his father’s alcoholism and his mother’s chronic illness. The two separated when Welles was four, and his mother died when he was nine. Welles was a prodigy at a very early age and enrolled when he was eleven at the Todd School, a progressive school which nurtured his creative imagination and independent spirit. While at the Todd School, he began writing, directing and

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acting in plays. Roger Hill, the school’s headmaster, became a kind of surrogate father to Welles. Welles made his Broadway debut when he was nineteen as Tybalt in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Two years later, he combined with director/producer John Houseman in a groundbreaking production of Macbeth for the Federal Negro Theatre in Harlem. Welles and Houseman then formed the Mercury Players which did weekly radio dramas that were broadcast nationally. (They attained worldwide notoriety when their version of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was presented so realistically that it caused a panic throughout the United States.) They also formed their own repertory company, the Mercury Theatre, in 1937 which produced highly acclaimed and often controversial productions of Shaw’s Heartbreak House, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. Welles is also known for his distinguished work in film. At age twenty-five he produced, directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane which many regard as the greatest of all American films. Welles followed this remarkable success with another film classic, The Magnificent Ambersons which he produced, directed, and acted in. Welles’s abrasive personality and fierce artistic independence got him into trouble with Hollywood moguls who limited his career as a producer, writer, and director, but he, nevertheless, continued to be an important figure in American films as an actor performing in important works such as The Third Man, Jane Eyre, The Stranger, Moby Dick, and Catch-22. Welles first drew Richard Wright’s attention when Wright visited New York in the spring of 1936 and attended the all-black performance of Macbeth which Welles and Houseman directed for the Federal Negro Theatre in Harlem. (Wright was so deeply impressed by the play that he tried to develop a Federal Negro Theatre in Chicago which attempted to stage Paul Green’s In the Bosom of Abraham which featured a predominately black cast.) When Houseman, who read

Welles, Orson Native Son while collaborating with Welles on Citizen Kane, contacted Wright in 1940 about securing stage rights to the novel, Wright chose to work with Mercury Theatre even though Ted Ward and Paul Robeson also contacted him about adapting Native Son for the stage. A substantial part of Wright’s desire to have his book dramatized by the Mercury Theatre was his admiration for Welles and his desire to have him direct the play. Regarding Welles as a ‘‘human locomotive’’ (Fabre 211), he greatly admired his artistic courage and creative energy. The story of Native Son being transformed for the stage is a fascinating and tangled tale. Welles and Houseman were extremely dissatisfied with the script developed by Wright’s collaborator, Paul Green, and had to make drastic changes in it before it could be performed by their repertory company. Green, whose contract with Wright enabled him to veer widely from the novel by altering the plot, changing its themes, and reimagining its characters, produced a script which Houseman regarded as ‘‘a deliberate betrayal’’ of Wright’s work (Houseman 94). Welles also strongly objected to the script, especially its tendency to soften Wright’s political protest by making Bigger’s story into a kind of religious conversion narrative. As Green envisioned Bigger, he became an improbable black Christ who triumphed over his harsh environment through Christian suffering. Green’s play concluded with Bigger proclaiming himself as ‘‘the man who walked with God’’ while a priest in a white surplice intones ‘‘I am the Resurrection and the Life’’ (Houseman 93). Welles completely rejected this distorted picture of Bigger and was particularly critical of Green’s elaborate use of Negro spirituals to give the play a falsely religious tone. What Welles desired instead of Green’s sentimental allegory was what he called ‘‘dynamic theatre’’ (Rowley 240) which would be much truer to Wright’s novel. He wanted to shock the audience with dramatic lighting and sound effects, rapid scene changes, and a set which would dramatize the harshness of Bigger’s environment. To suggest the entrapping nature of Chicago’s South Side

ghetto, he framed the stage with drab yellow bricks. He reduced the novel to ten dramatic scenes presented with no curtain drops or intermissions to give the impression of Bigger’s rapid deterioration under powerful environmental pressures. Recorded police sirens and the sound of a raging furnace were played during set changes. In order to draw the audience more powerfully into Bigger’s world, Welles used a number of other clever theatrical devices. For example, when Bigger is captured by the police, he fires his revolver directly at the audience and in the trial scene Bigger is seated in the auditorium as the judge pronounces his sentence while directly facing the audience. The play ends exactly as the novel concludes, with Bigger clutching prison bars while he glowers ironically at the audience. Native Son ultimately became two distinctly different plays, Green’s version which was published as a book by Harper and Brothers and the performed version worked out by Wright, Houseman, and Welles. Green was furious about the staged play which he regarded as a ‘‘bastard’’ which had been ‘‘mutilated’’ (Rowley 46) by people who did not consult with him and he refused to attend the play’s opening. Welles and Houseman were equally unhappy with the published book and demanded that their names as well as the name of the Mercury Theatre be removed from its dust jacket. Wright, however, was pleased with the play which ran for 115 performances and drew mostly favorable reviews. While he remained publicly silent about Green’s printed text, he privately revealed that he was relieved that it never was performed. He was very grateful to both Welles and Houseman for bringing Native Son so powerfully to the stage. In a note to Houseman, he thanked him for his work and doubted that ‘‘Native Son would ever have seen the boards of Broadway’’ (Houseman 100) without his help. And on the play’s opening night he sent a telegram to Houseman and Welles, congratulating them for their ‘‘energy, talent and courage’’ in directing and producing Native Son, adding that they were ‘‘two of the most gallant men in the theatrical world’’ (Rowley 245). 397

Wertham, Frederic Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1973. Houseman, John. ‘‘Native Son on Stage,’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

WERTHAM, FREDERIC (20 March 1895– 18 November 1981) Born Frederic Wertheimer, he was an eminent psychiatrist who left Germany in 1922 for the United States to teach psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University. He came to New York in 1932 to work at the Bellevue Mental Hospital. Committed to liberal causes throughout his life, he was loosely associated with the Communist Party and was especially active in protesting racial discrimination. He became a friend of Clarence Darrow and was one of the few psychiatrists Darrow could find to testify in court cases involving black people. Wright met Wertham in 1941 after reading Dark Legend: A Study in Murder, Wertham’s case study of an Italian immigrant who had stabbed his mother to death as a result of the rage he felt from his mother’s promiscuous behavior following the death of his father. Wright, who at that time was involved with the trial of Clinton Brewer, a black man who had murdered two women by stabbing them, contacted Wertham immediately after reading Dark Legend and requested that he visit Brewer in prison and serve as an expert witness in his trial. Wertham saved Brewer from a death sentence by arguing in court that he was insane and therefore legally incapable of murder. Thus began a close friendship between Wright and Wertham. As Michel Fabre has observed, ‘‘These two men were bound together by their interest in literature and their fight for racial equality’’ (292). Wertham, a Jew who was deeply troubled by anti-Semitism in Europe and victimized at times by it in America, was strongly

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committed to promoting racial justice and improving the conditions of African Americans and other minorities. As the director of the Mental Health Clinic at the General Hospital in Queens, he ministered to the needs of black teenagers who had become involved in gangs. Wright shared Wertham’s interest in juvenile delinquency and, at the time of meeting Wertham, was working on a novel, ‘‘The Jackal,’’ which focused on Harlem gangs. Wertham later involved Wright in his project to establish a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem for troubled black teenagers. It became known as the Lafargue Clinic and opened on April 5, 1946 in the basement of the parish house of St. Phillips Episcopal Church. Wright, along with his friend, Dorothy Norman, helped to raise money for the clinic and he also wrote two articles in Twice a Year, ‘‘Psychiatry Comes to Harlem’’ and ‘‘Juvenile Delinquency in Harlem,’’ which promoted the clinic. Wertham, who was keenly interested in the relationship between psychiatry and literature, and Wright, who had an equally keen interest in psychiatry, collaborated on a fascinating ‘‘experiment’’ which sheds important light on Wright’s work, especially Native Son. Wright agreed to undergo analysis by Wertham and, while being analyzed, uncovered a traumatic incident which he experienced as a 16-year-old boy doing odd jobs for a white family in Jackson, Mississippi. His chores included chopping wood and tending to the furnace, and one day he accidentally entered the bedroom of the family’s teenage daughter while she was undressing. He was severely reprimanded, and, because the episode was so painful to a black youth living in segregated Mississippi, he repressed the memory of it until it surfaced in his psychotherapy with Wertham. Wright agreed with Wertham that this episode was the germ of the scene in Native Son in which Bigger is surprised in Mary Dalton’s bedroom by Mrs. Dalton. As Keneth Kinnamon has revealed, ‘‘The diffident and fearful young black handyman, the amiable white girl, the sexually significant situation—

West, Dorothy these elements, transmuted, found their way into Native Son in the relationship between Bigger Thomas and Mary Dalton’’ (120). Wertham reported his analysis of Wright in an article entitled ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son’’ and later in his introduction to The World Within: Fiction Illuminating the Neuroses of Our Time. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Works. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wertham, Frederic. ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son,’’ Journal of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychotherapy, V1 (July 1944): 111–15.

WEST, DOROTHY (2 June 1907– 4 May 1998) Novelist, short-story writer and editor, Dorothy West wrote over a period spanning nearly seventy years and was an important figure in both the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and the period of proletarian writing of the 1930s. In her lifetime, she published over sixty stories, founded an important literary journal, and published two novels, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995). A collection of her essays and stories entitled The Richer, The Poorer was published in 1995. A precocious child who started first grade through special permission from the Boston School Board at age four, she excelled in school, graduating from Girls Latin School in Boston in 1923 and then beginning work at Columbia University where she majored in journalism and philosophy. She published her first story ‘‘The Typewriter’’ in 1926, becoming a co-winner with Zora Neale Hurston in Opportunity’s contest for fiction. (This story was included in The Best Stories of 1926.) During the Harlem Renaissance, she became close friends with Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston as well as important white literary figures such as H. L.

Mencken, Fanny Hurst, and Carl Van Vechten. A trip to Russia in 1936 to make a film about race relations in America deepened her interest in using literature as a way of diagnosing social problems and protesting racial injustice. Upon returning to the United States from Russia in 1933, she founded and edited Challenge, a journal dedicated to connecting the work of Harlem Renaissance writers such as Countee Cullen, Alain Locke, and Claude McKay with a new generation of socially involved and politically engaged writers gathering around Richard Wright. The journal published six issues and, after experiencing serious financial problems, was replaced by New Challenge which she co-edited with Marian Minus and Richard Wright. Although New Challenge published only one issue and folded because of economic problems and editorial conflicts between West and Wright, it played an important role in defining a new direction for African-American literature in the Great Depression. It included Wright’s seminal essay, ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ as well as bold new poems by Margaret Walker, Owen Dodson, Sterling Brown, and Frank Marshall Davis. After New Challenge collapsed, West worked as a welfare investigator in Harlem and was involved in the Federal Writers Project. She continued to write stories, publishing ‘‘Mammy’’ in Opportunity in 1940 and initiating a career as short-story writer for The New York Daily News, publishing twenty-five stories in that newspaper between 1940 and 1960. She left New York in 1945 and took up permanent residence in an African-American enclave on Martha’s Vineyard where she spent the rest of her life. While living there, she published two striking novels about the psychological pressures and social difficulties of middle class black life, The Living Is Easy (1948) and The Wedding (1995). Wright’s relationship with Dorothy West was stormy from beginning to end. To begin with, they came from radically different social backgrounds, Wright growing up in severe poverty in a brutally segregated Mississippi and West being raised in a prosperous upper-middle class world in Boston. 399

West Helena, Arkansas While Wright was self-educated, West had the benefit of elite schooling and easy access to important people. Marian Minus, who was a member of Wright’s South Side Writers Club in Chicago and also a close friend of West’s, brought Wright and West together in an attempt to follow the collapse of Challenge magazine with New Challenge, but from the outset, West was suspicious of Wright’s influence. To begin with, she resented Wright connecting the journal with the Communist Party which supplied an important part of its funding. And her more conservative vision of literature made her extremely uncomfortable with Wright’s insistence that the journal maintain a well-defined political stance. Matters only got worse when Wright’s harsh review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God appeared in New Challenge strongly attacking that novel for its absence of political content and its overemphasis on personal and aesthetic values. West, who was a personal friend of Hurston, resented Wright’s review, objecting to what she felt was his inability to judge the novel on literary grounds. New Challenge, therefore, was doomed from the start. Wright, who did most of the editorial work, was presented in the first issue as only a ‘‘co-editor,’’ a demotion he was not happy about. When the Community Party withdrew its financial support and the personal and ideological rifts widened between Wright, Minus, and West, the journal became defunct. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert.The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1965. Daniel, Walter C. ‘‘Challenge Magazine: The Experiment That Failed,’’ CLA Journal, 19 (June 1976) 494–503. Johnson, Abby and Ronald Johnson. Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the Twentieth Century. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001.

WEST HELENA, ARKANSAS A small town along the Mississippi River in Phillips County, Arkansas, it is 25 miles north of

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Elaine, Arkansas. As a child, Wright lived in these two river towns and underwent traumatic experiences in each place. After Wright’s father abandoned his family in Memphis and his mother was unable to work because of illness, he went with his mother and brother Leon in the fall of 1916 to live with his Aunt Maggie and her husband, Silas Hoskins, in Elaine. Wright, who saw his uncle as a kind of father surrogate and regarded his aunt as ‘‘another mother’’ (Wright 77), was initially happy in Elaine, but this quickly changed when Silas was murdered by whites and the Wrights had to flee in terror during the middle of the night to West Helena where they stayed in hiding in a rented room for nearly a month. They then returned to Jackson, Mississippi where they lived with Wright’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Bolden Wilson. Unable to adjust to Grandmother Wilson’s strict Seventh Day Adventist lifestyle, they returned to West Helena where his mother and aunt found jobs as domestics. Maggie soon took up with a lover, ‘‘Professor’’ Matthews, who was in West Helena escaping the law. When Maggie and Matthews left for Detroit, Wright, his mother, and brother were again stranded and faced severe hunger and economic hardship. Wright’s mother eventually found a job working in a doctor’s office, and Wright and his brother started school in the fall of 1918. Wright was living in West Helena when World War I ended on November 11, 1918, a day when he witnessed for the first time in his life the flight of an airplane. Not long after this, Wright’s mother suffered a paralyzing stroke, and he was forced to leave school and work a series of menial jobs to help support the family. The family was then split up with Wright’s brother being sent to Detroit to live with Aunt Maggie and Wright being sent to Greenwood, Mississippi to live with his aunt and uncle, Clark and Jody Wilson. Wright’s traumatic experiences in Elaine and West Helena left him with deeply embedded emotional and psychological scars. As Margaret

‘‘What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You’’ Walker has stressed, his painful experiences as a child in the Deep South gave him a ‘‘psychic wound’’ (Walker 43) which shaped his personality, a wound he tried to heal with his writing. The murder of his uncle and the hunger and poverty his family was forced to endure in Arkansas engraved in Wright’s psyche fear and anxiety which made him ‘‘limp’’ through his days in West Helena ‘‘under the threat of violence’’ (Wright 87). This in turn caused him to see himself as ‘‘the victim of a thousand lynchings’’ (Wright 87). He developed two strategies for coping with this hostile environment. First of all, he developed an inward life which could make things ‘‘happen within’’ (Wright 85) as a way of compensating for his feelings of impotence when dealing with his outer environment. His fantasies thus became a ‘‘moral bulwark’’ which enabled him to keep his ‘‘emotional integrity whole’’ (Wright 87). This eventually would lead him to become a writer who could use words to fight back at a world which crippled his mother and murdered his uncle. Secondly, Wright began from his days in West Helena to develop a longing to leave the South altogether and seek a new life elsewhere. This would result in his going to Chicago in December 1927. Interestingly, one of the rumors he heard as a young boy in West Helena became raw material for a story which would compose in the North. He was told that a black woman avenged the murder of her husband by a white mob when she attended her husband’s burial with a shotgun wrapped in a sheet. Just as she had finished praying for her husband, she unwrapped the gun and used it to kill four white men. Although Wright never could ascertain whether the story he heard in West Helena was ‘‘factually true,’’ his harsh experiences there convinced him that it was ‘‘emotionally true’’ (Wright 86) and he used it as the basis for one of the concluding events in ‘‘Bright and Morning Star,’’ the final story in the 1940 version of Uncle Tom’s Children. In that story, a black mother named Sue avenges the death of her son by whites by using a shotgun concealed in a sheet to kill the man responsible for her son’s death.

Selected Bibliography: Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

‘‘WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW WON’T HURT YOU’’ This story was originally published in the December 1942 issue of Harper’s Magazine and later appeared in the June 1943 edition of Negro Digest. Wright also included it in American Hunger. It is based upon an incident Wright observed while working as an orderly in the Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago during the winter of 1933. Two black men with whom he worked named Brand and Cooke developed an intense personal antagonism while working menial jobs in the basement of the hospital where guinea pigs used in experiments were kept in wire cages. On February 13, 1933 a fight broke out between the two with Cooke brandishing an ice pick and Brand using a knife. In the scuffle which ensued, most of the cages were toppled and the guinea pigs escaped. Fearing the loss of their jobs, Wright, Brand, and Cooke scrambled to put the animals back in their cages but did so randomly. As a result, the experiments using these animals were compromised with false data. But since none of the scientists were aware of how the guinea pigs were put into the wrong cages, the experiments continued. Wright and his co-workers, to protect themselves, kept quiet about the whole matter. Wright regarded this grimly comic episode as an epiphany about racial relationships in America. Just as Wright, Brand, and Cooke were forced to take menial, poorly paid jobs in the basement of the hospital, so too were African-American people shunted off to marginal positions in American life, segregated in a kind of sociological ‘‘underground.’’ For Wright, blacks in America were ‘‘caged’’ in much the same way that the hospital’s lab animals were contained, trapped in ‘‘places’’ 401

White Man, Listen! which denied the possibilities of American life. Because it was impossible to challenge or reform the system which trapped them, many blacks like Brand and Cooke took their anger and resentments out on each other, further contributing to their hopeless condition. Worse, they were reduced to silence, for fear that articulating their views would only worsen their condition. Like Bigger Thomas, Fred Daniels, Cross Damon, and many other protagonists who appear in Wright’s fictions, the actual people described in ‘‘What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You’’ are condemned to trapped, marginalized lives which often erupt in meaningless, self destructive violence. A basic thrust in all of Wright’s writing is to reveal the human costs of assigning people to demeaning ‘‘underground’’ lives. Wright’s work thus is a constant reminder to his readers that what they don’t know does hurt them. If we are to avoid the fate of Brand and Cooke, we must see our trapped lives and not stay quiet about them. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

WHITE MAN, LISTEN! A book of literary and cultural essays published by Doubleday on October 15, 1957, it drew from a series of lectures which Wright had delivered in Europe from 1950 to 1956. The manuscript was enthusiastically received by Wright’s agent, Paul Reynolds, Jr., who saw it as possessing the energy and power of Wright’s earlier work. Wright’s editor Edward Aswell also was ‘‘deeply moved’’ (Fabre 454) by the book and regarded it as a work that could re-establish Wright’s reputation in America which was now experiencing the political and social upheavals brought on by the Civil Rights movement. The book consists of Wright’s introduction and four substantial essays, ‘‘The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People,’’ ‘‘Tradition

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and Industrialization,’’ ‘‘The Literature of the Negro in the United States,’’ and ‘‘The Miracle of Nationalism on the African Gold Coast.’’ These essays tried to combine progressive western ideas with the social traditions and political aspirations of emerging Third World nations. In the book’s inscription, Wright explained that he tried to combine ‘‘the best of two worlds’’ in an attempt to define a new kind of ‘‘home’’ (Wright v) for the world’s dispossessed people. But in the introduction Wright stressed that the book is more analytical than prescriptive: I’m much more the diagnostician than the scribbler of prescriptions. I’m no Moses and, as one great and shrewd American once said, if some Moses should lead you into the Promised Land, some other Moses, equally adroit and persuasive, could just as easily lead you out again. To those who insist upon detailed and concrete plans of action, I can only urgently advise them to consult their congressman, their psychoanalyst, or, better still, if they are determined believers, their local priest. (Wright xvi)

By this point in his career, Wright had rejected not only his earlier commitment to communism but also had developed substantial anxieties about the new political theories circulating in the Third World which categorically rejected western modernism. He came to see himself in existential terms as one of ‘‘the lonely outsiders’’ whom he described in the book’s inscription as part of ‘‘Westernized and Tragic Elite’’ who ‘‘exist precariously on the cliff-like margins of many cultures’’ (Wright v). As he stressed in the introduction, he regarded himself as a ‘‘rootless man’’ who cherished ‘‘the state of abandonment, of aloneness’’ (Wright xvi), and could make himself ‘‘at home almost anywhere on this earth’’ (Wright xvii). Despite Aswell’s hopes that the book would trigger revival of interest in Wright, it sold poorly, even though it drew mostly positive reviews. Alioune Diop in Pre´sence Africaine applauded Wright’s understanding of the psychology of oppressed people. The black press in America

Whitman, Walt was especially enthusiastic in its praise. Roi Ottley in the Chicago Sunday Tribune Review of Books lauded Wright for his trenchant prose and lucid assessment of the problems of Third World people. And J. Saunders Reddings’s review in The Baltimore Afro-American stressed that ‘‘Wright has never written more brilliantly or poignantly’’ (Kinnamon 407) in his attempt to make both blacks and whites more aware of the serious problems faced by emerging nations in Africa and Asia. The establishment press, however, had sharp criticism of the book. Oscar Handlin in The New York Times Book Review took Wright to task for being ‘‘argumentative, belligerent, and often wrong-headed’’ (Kinnamon 401). Sheldon Grebstein in the Lexington, Kentucky Sunday HeraldLeader accused Wright of demagoguery while the reviewer for The New Yorker complained of Wright’s ‘‘intellectual jargon’’ and ‘‘strident emotionalism’’ (Fabre 456). Even though the majority of reviews were quite positive, Wright was distressed by the criticisms he received in the establishment press and resolved to ‘‘stick to fiction’’ (Fabre 456) in his subsequent writing. In a letter of Margrit de Sablonie`re, he complained that ‘‘my books on world affairs are not really wanted’’ and cried out in exasperation: ‘‘why should I go on writing books that folks will not read?’’ (Fabre 456). Unaware of how subsequent generations of readers would re-examine books like White Man, Listen! And find them powerfully relevant, Wright in his final years began to wonder if his political and social ideas were obsolete and turned his attention increasingly to fiction and poetry. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1957. Kinnamon, Keneth. A Richard Wright Bibliography. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1988. Reilly, John. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. White Man, Listen! New York: Doubleday, 1964.

WHITMAN, WALT (31 May 1819– 26 March 1892) Whitman is considered by most scholars and critics as the foremost American poet, a seminal writer who transformed American literature with a radically new form of free verse and an elaborate use of the American vernacular. He was born of working class parents on Long Island in 1819 and spent much of his most formative childhood years in Brooklyn where he received the basic rudiments of an education and became a journeyman printer. In 1846, he became an editor of The Brooklyn Eagle and was eventually discharged for supporting the ‘‘Abolitionist’’ movement. He then traveled to New Orleans where he worked as an editor for the Crescent and began writing poetry. Returning to New York, he worked for various newspapers, including The Brooklyn Times and began writing the poems which would appear in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman made this extraordinary book of poems his life work, constantly revising published poems and adding new poems. Leaves of Grass appeared in six editions, culminating in the ‘‘deathbed’’ edition of 1892. He also published two important books of prose in his lifetime, an autobiographical narrative entitled Specimen Days (1882) and an analysis of post–Civil War America, Democratic Vistas (1871). Richard Wright found much to admire in Whitman since both were literary rebels who revolutionized American literature by writing of matters which tamer, more genteel writers were hesitant to explore. Both men came from proletarian backgrounds and had a deep faith in the masses of ordinary Americans. And they were profoundly self-educated persons who received very little formal education and read widely throughout their lives in a broad variety of fields, including religion, philosophy, literature, and history. Wright first began reading Whitman’s poetry when he lived in Chicago in the early 1930s, and by 1935, he regarded Whitman as the most important American poet, reading his work with 403

Wilson, Addie (Aunt) what Margaret Walker has described as ‘‘passion’’ (Walker 313). As Wright began publishing poems in leftist journals between 1933 and 1939, Whitman became one of the strongest influences on his writing. As Michel Fabre has noted, Wright was deeply impressed by Whitman’s ‘‘poetic and philosophical vision’’ (Fabre 427), sharing his view that the poet was a prophet who both interpreted and shaped his culture. Wright found Whitman’s bold experiments with open form congenial to his own work, sensing that radically free verse could liberate him to say things no other black poet had dared to say. Moreover, Wright enthusiastically embraced Whitman’s broad sympathies for ordinary people and his celebration of an American democracy grounded in freedom, individualism, and justice. Two of Wright’s poems which vividly exhibit Whitman’s strong influence on Wright are ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ and ‘‘Transcontinental.’’ Both poems are written in long, flowing Whitmanian lines of radically free verse which is held together loosely with repetition of key words and parallel phrases. Wright’s poems also reject conventional poetic diction in favor of the brash American vernacular speech which animates Whitman’s best poetry. And Wright, like Whitman, takes on the role of cultural prophet meditating on America and reminding his readers of the American commitment to a free, democratic society. What also connects these poems to Whitman’s art is Wright’s enthusiastic celebration of ordinary people. In ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ he identifies with ‘‘millions and millions’’ of black people who have done the country’s work but who have been excluded from enjoying its fruits. In a long Whitmanian catalogue which constitutes the poem’s entire second section, he extols these people for making the steel, cutting the timber, growing the crops, working the factories, and fighting the wars which have built modern America. The poem concludes with Wright deploring the ways in which blacks have been treated in their own country and calls for them to revolt as a way of

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reclaiming the ‘‘new horizon’’ which Whitman had celebrated in poems such as ‘‘Song of Myself ’’ and books such as Democratic Vistas. ‘‘Transcontinental,’’ which is Wright’s longest poem and has the energy and sweep of Whitman’s journey poems such as ‘‘Song of the Open Road’’ and ‘‘Passage to India,’’ is also a powerful celebration of the common man. It centers on unemployed ‘‘hitch-hikers’’ who during the Great Depression ‘‘commandeer’’ a rich man’s limousine and cruise across the country on ‘‘the highway of Self-Determination,’’ a modern version of Whitman’s open road. As they speed through all parts of America, they bring about a revolution which not only enacts ‘‘Lenin’s dream’’ of a classless society but Whitman’s ideal of a democratic utopia. The final lines of the poem could well have been written by Whitman as the narrator ecstatically proclaims ‘‘America America America’’ as he invokes the purest form of the American dream. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

WILSON, ADDIE (AUNT) (1891–?) Born in 1891, she was Wright’s youngest aunt. She was the only member of the Wilson family to complete her secondary education and became a teacher at Seventh Day Adventist schools in Huntsville, Alabama and Jackson, Mississippi. Like her mother, Margaret Bolden Wilson, Addie was a devout believer who was thoroughly devoted to the values, dogma, and practices of Seventh Day Adventism. When Wright’s mother became partially paralyzed with a serious stroke in 1920, Addie left her teaching job in Alabama and returned to Jackson to help her family. She became strongly involved with the Seventh Day Adventist church and school which were located near her mother’s home. She assumed the roles of church secretary and the school’s only teacher, being responsible

Wilson, Addie (Aunt) for over thirty students ranging from ages five to thirteen. It was Addie and Wright’s grandmother who insisted that Wright attend her religious school rather than nearby Jim Hill Public School. Wright, who was twelve and only nine years younger than his aunt, rebelled from the very beginning and thus established a fierce conflict with Addie which would last for many years. He found the students listless and the school’s routines boring. But Addie considered the school not only a place of serious education but also ‘‘God’s holy ground’’ (Wright 122) and therefore regarded any student misbehavior as an offense to God which must be met with harshly administered corporal punishments. Wright, who had only sporadic formal schooling up to this point and saw himself as formed by a ‘‘street gang code’’ (Wright 123), misbehaved from the beginning and frequently drew his aunt’s ire. When Addie became irritated by her nephew calling her by her first name in class and physically punished him for littering the floor with nutshells (something another boy had done), Wright withdrew into a ‘‘fog of anger’’ (Wright 124) and resolved never again to be beaten by his aunt. After Wright had returned home from school that day, Addie tried to whip him with a switch but Wright defended himself by drawing a kitchen knife on her. The two then wrestled with each other with Wright exclaiming ‘‘I’ll kill you if you don’t let me alone (Wright 127)! The fight ended when Wright’s grandmother and mother entered the room and restored order. This violent episode, which was so vividly rendered in Wright’s autobiography, is important for a number of reasons. It marks a crucial moment in Wright’s life where he consciously lashed out against an adult authority which he considered unjust. Throughout his life he would continue to draw such lines, refusing to be victimized by authorities he did not respect. And it defined in a clear way his alienation from the Wilson household and its ‘‘hard religious regimes’’ (Wright 129). For the next five years, he would

live in his grandmother’s house with a number of relatives, but he drew away from them emotionally and psychologically. As Arnold Rampersad has observed, Wright found himself ‘‘opposed to his family in general, except for his mother, who was too sick to help him’’ (Rampersad 884). After his violent clash with his aunt, she held him ‘‘in cold and distant disdain’’ (Wright 128). His grandmother, uncles, and other relatives tended to view him as an outsider who resembled people in his father’s family whom they held in contempt. By the time Wright left the Wilson household in 1925 to establish a freer life in Memphis, ‘‘Addie and his grandmother rarely spoke to him’’ (Fabre 41). He likewise recoiled from them, viewing them as religious bigots whom he felt just as estranged from as the racial bigots who controlled the society which imprisoned him. Wright’s violent rebellion against his Aunt Addie and the religious school she operated had a very positive immediate effect. It convinced his grandmother to abandon her attempts to impose a religious education on him and to go along with his desire to attend two secular schools, Jim Hill Public School and Smith Robertson Junior High School. It was at these schools that Wright became excited about education and saw his reading and writing as both a lifeline and a doorway to a liberating new life. For the first time, Wright could experience four years of continuous formal education, something which released him from the ‘‘prison’’ (Wright 143) of his environment, ‘‘revitalized [his] being’’ and opened the way to a ‘‘future’’ (Wright 147) of new possibilities. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rampersad, Arnold. ‘‘Chronology’’ in Richard Wright: Early Works. New York: The Library of America, 1991. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

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Wilson, Clark (Uncle)

WILSON, CLARK (UNCLE) (1880–?) He was Wright’s uncle who worked as a carpenter and an independent contractor in Greenwood, Mississippi. Born in 1880, he was the third of nine children and was three years older than Wright’s mother. He and his wife Jody both worked and owned a comfortable four-room house on Walthall Street in Greenwood situated on ‘‘a quiet shady road’’ (Wright 104). He had the financial resources to purchase for his parents their home on Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi. When Wright’s mother suffered a stroke when Wright was ten years old, she became partially paralyzed and had to leave West Helena, Arkansas and return to her parents’ home on Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Her younger son, Leon, was sent to live with his Aunt Maggie in Detroit, and Richard was taken in by his Aunt Jody and Uncle Clark in Greenwood. Michel Fabre has described his time there as ‘‘a disastrous few weeks’’ (Fabre 4) which put an end to his ‘‘turbulent childhood’’ (Fabre 30) and plunged him prematurely into a painful adolescence. From the beginning, Wright balked at being separated from his mother who at that time was the one adult with whom he felt a loving attachment. When he arrived in Greenwood, he felt ill at ease with his aunt’s ‘‘serious reserved manner’’ (Wright 102), and his uncle’s equally cold demeanor which made him feel like a ‘‘stranger’’ (Wright 114). Up to this point in his life, Wright had grown up in a chaotic world where he had very little parental discipline after his father abandoned the family when he was a small child and his mother became prone to chronic illness. He was therefore extremely uncomfortable with the strict routines enforced by his aunt and uncle. They made him do chores in the morning, insisted that he attend school regularly, and made him study in the evening. Moreover, Aunt Jody persistently corrected his bad manners and wanted him whipped when she caught him swearing. When his aunt and uncle required him to attend church, he flatly refused, drawing their stern disapproval. 406

Matters came to a head when Wright discovered that the room he was sleeping in had been previously inhabited by a boy who had died. When Clark refused his request for another room, Wright experienced deep anxiety and was unable to sleep for many days. In his autobiography he points out that ‘‘My sleeplessness made me feel that my days were a hot, wild dream’’ (Wright 112). Fabre has argued that the young Wright became ‘‘an emotional wreck’’ and was ‘‘on the verge of a nervous breakdown’’ (Fabre 30). At this point, Clark relented and agreed to let Wright return to his mother and her parents in Jackson. Although his years on Lynch Street were far from happy ones, they were clearly not as traumatic as his brief stay with his uncle and aunt in Greenwood. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

WILSON, JODY (AUNT) She was Wright’s aunt who was married to his Uncle Clark and lived in Greenwood, Mississippi. Both worked and were able to maintain a middle class lifestyle. Their comfortable four-room house was on Walthall Street in Greenwood, situated on a ‘‘quiet shady road’’ (Wright 104). When Wright’s mother suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed when Wright was ten, she had to leave West Helena, Arkansas and return to her parents’ house in Jackson, Mississippi to recuperate. Her younger son, Leon, was sent to live with his Aunt Maggie in Detroit, and Richard was taken in by his Aunt Jody and his Uncle Clark. Michel Fabre has described his stay there as ‘‘a disastrous few weeks’’ (Fabre 4) which put an end to his ‘‘turbulent childhood’’ (Fabre 30) and plunged him prematurely into a painful adolescence.

Wilson, Maggie (Aunt) Wright seemed to be particularly ill at ease with Jody whom he describes as ‘‘a medium-sized, neat, silent mulatto girl’’ who imposed upon him ‘‘a code unknown to me’’ (Wright 104). She insisted that he do chores in the morning, regularly attend school, and study at night. She persistently corrected what she perceived were his bad manners and was shocked by his occasionally four language. Up to this point in his life, Wright had grown up in a chaotic world which provided him with very little parental discipline, especially after his father abandoned the family when he was a child. So he felt extremely uncomfortable with his aunt’s ‘‘serious reserved manner’’ (Wright 102) and felt that she did not understand him and treated him like an adult. He balked at her strict routines and refused to attend church when his uncle and aunt tried to force him to attend. Matters came to a head when Wright discovered that the room he was sleeping in had been previously inhabited by a boy who had died. When Jody and Clark refused his request for another room, Wright experienced deep anxiety and was unable to sleep for many days. In his autobiography, Wright points out that ‘‘My sleeplessness made me feel that my days were a hot, wild dream’’ (Wright 112). Fabre has argued that the young Wright became ‘‘an emotional wreck’’ and ‘‘was on the verge of a nervous breakdown’’ (Fabre 30). At this point, his Uncle Clark relented and agreed to let him return to his mother and grandparents in Jackson. Although his years on Lynch Street were far from happy ones, they were clearly not as traumatic as his brief stay with his uncle and aunt in Greenwood. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

WILSON, MAGGIE (AUNT) (1886– 20 January 1957) In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright describes her as his favorite aunt and ‘‘another

mother’’ (Wright 77). Unlike his aunts Addie and Cleo, who never understood him and experienced serious conflict with him over a long period of time, Maggie had a keen understanding of Wright’s impatient and rebellious temperament and developed a warm relationship throughout his life. Along with his mother, she was the only member of his family to sustain a long-term positive relationship with Wright. He came to see her as a rare adult whom he could trust and confide in as well as a person who would come to his defense in family quarrels. As Hazel Rowley has noted, ‘‘He liked Aunt Maggie, who powdered her face and painted her lips and was more lively and more modern than the other women in the family’’ (Rowley 11). She was born in 1886 and was three years younger than Wright’s mother, Ella. Fabre has described her as her sister’s ‘‘best friend’’ but one who was ‘‘completely different’’ (Fabre 4) from her. Physically robust and free from the chronic illnesses which plagued Wright’s mother for much of her adult life, she also had an ‘‘iron will’’ and ‘‘energy’’ that ‘‘enabled her to adapt to any situation in her turbulent life’’ (Fabre 4). She was also, for the most part, free of the religious enthusiasms and repressions which consumed so many of the women in Wright’s family. Living in a great variety of places, she could support herself and others by working a number of jobs, including cooking, factory work, dressmaking, and hairdressing. She left her parent’s home in Natchez, Mississippi in 1910 when she married Silas Hoskins, and settled in the lumbering town of Elaine, Arkansas where Silas owned a successful saloon and rented housing to black workers. After Wright’s father, Nathan, abandoned his wife and children in Memphis, Tennessee, Ella Wright suffered a series of illnesses and eventually was unable to support herself and her two sons. Maggie brought them to live with her and her family in Elaine. For a brief period, Wright enjoyed a stable, secure life in which he ‘‘finally felt at home’’ (Fabre 21). Maggie and Silas treated him and his brother Leon as adopted sons. They ate well, and his mother began to recover her health. 407

Wilson, Margaret Bolden (Grandmother) All of this ended abruptly, however, when Hoskins was murdered by whites who coveted his thriving business and resented his independent demeanor. Maggie, along with Wright, his brother, and mother, fled in terror to nearby West Helena and later went to live in Jackson with Grandmother Wilson. This brutal episode engraved in Wright’s consciousness a long-lasting fear of the white world as well as a terrified sense of how powerless blacks were in that world. As he stresses in his autobiography: Aunt Maggie was not even allowed to see his body nor was she able to claim any of his assets. Uncle Hoskins had simply been plucked from our midst and we, figuratively, had fallen on our faces to avoid looking at that white-hot terror that we knew loomed somewhere above us. This was as close as white terror had ever come to me and my mind reeled. (Wright 64)

Aunt Maggie continued to play an important role in Wright’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. When his grandmother’s religious demands became oppressive, Maggie took Ella and her two children back to West Helena to set up a household with her new lover, ‘‘Professor’’ Matthews, a fugitive from the law who eventually escaped to Detroit with Maggie. After Wright’s mother suffered a debilitating stroke in 1919, Maggie agreed to take her son Leon back to Detroit where she cared for him for six years. During this period, she regularly corresponded with Wright, fanning the flames of his desire to leave the South and pursue a new life in the urban North. Wright finally left the South for Chicago in 1927 and was accompanied by Maggie, who helped to support them by working a piecework job in a textile factory. She lived intermittently with Wright and his mother in Chicago for several years. Although she never understood Wright’s literary and political commitments, she always maintained what Fabre characterizes as ‘‘an affectionate relationship’’ (Fabre 5) with him and was always somebody he could count on when his mother’s health deteriorated. 408

In 1953, Maggie returned to Jackson to live with Ella at 1085 Lynch Street, supporting them with monthly checks from Wright and the income she gained from her small hairdressing business. Her sister’s mental and physical health declined steadily, and Maggie was her main caregiver. When his aunt developed cancer and died on January 20, 1957, Wright felt her loss keenly. As Fabre stressed, ‘‘With her died a witness to his childhood, and the only member of his family, aside from his mother, to whom he felt close’’ (Fabre 478). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

WILSON, MARGARET BOLDEN (GRANDMOTHER) (1853– 15 August 1934) Richard Wright’s grandmother was born into slavery and, perhaps because of her light skin and frail build, was a house slave. After the Civil War, she became a mid-wife nurse and later became an assistant to a white doctor. She married Richard Wilson, an ex-slave who fought in the Civil War against the Confederacy, on February 26, 1871 in Woodville, Mississippi and settled on a nearby farm. They had nine children in eighteen years, five boys and four girls. The family moved to Natchez around 1895, living on Woodlawn Street in a neighborhood which Michel Fabre described as that part of the city reserved for ‘‘the best mulatto society’’ and ‘‘colored bourgeoisie’’ (Fabre 3). When she was in her early sixties and her husband experienced health problems which made it difficult to work, they moved to 1107 Lynch Street in Jackson in a much smaller house which her son Clark purchased. The house was located near a Seventh Day Adventist church on the corner of Rose and Pascagoula Street.

Wilson, Margaret Bolden (Grandmother) Despite growing economic and personal hardships, Margaret Wilson worked hard to maintain a respectable middle class status for her family and disapproved of Wright’s mother Ella marrying Nathan Wright, whose family consisted of day laborers and sharecroppers. Four of her children became teachers, one of the few professions open to black southerners at that time. Her son Clark was a successful carpenter and contractor in Greenwood, Mississippi and her son Edward was a Methodist minister. Margaret Wilson came from AfricanAmerican, Irish, and Scottish stock and was so light-skinned that she often was mistaken for a white person. Wright recalls in Black Boy/American Hunger that when he, his brother, and grandmother were shopping on Capital Street in Jackson, she would sometimes be perceived as ‘‘an elderly white woman leading two undeniably Negro boys’’ (Wright 53). When he later asked his mother ‘‘Is Granny white?’’ (53), she grew uncomfortable and avoided giving a direct answer to his question because she felt that he was too young to understand the painful realities of segregation. When he then asked her why his grandmother had not married a white man, his mother became so distraught that she cried and slapped him in an attempt to end the conversation which disturbed her so greatly. Although raised as a Methodist, Wright’s grandmother converted to Seventh Day Adventism and became a staunch believer in its dogmas and practices. According to Michel Fabre, ‘‘she lived her faith and imposed it on her family with unbelievable force’’ (Fabre 33). Margaret Walker described her religious stance as ‘‘Calvinistic to the point of asceticism’’ (Walker 33). She strictly observed the sabbath, attending with her family nearly day-long religious ceremonies and forbade all members of her household from working on Saturdays. Secular books and music were banned from her house and strict dietary regulations were enforced. Wright lived with his maternal grandparents for extended periods of time at extremely formative periods of his life. When his brother Leon

was born in 1910, his family moved to Grandmother Wilson’s home in Natchez where they stayed for almost a year before moving to Memphis. After his father deserted his family in that city to have a relationship with a woman he had met in a Beale Street bar, Wright’s mother became seriously ill, burdened with economic problems, and eventually went to live with her parents in Jackson in the summer of 1916. In his autobiography Wright remembers that summer in a very positive way, describing his grandmother’s home as ‘‘an enchanting place to explore’’ as he and Leon played hide and seek in its big rooms and hallways and enjoyed the ‘‘wide green fields’’ (Wright 43) surrounding the house. Although the young Wright would say that ‘‘there was no finer house in all the round world’’ (Wright 44) than his grandmother’s house in Jackson, he would later take a very different attitude toward this place on 1107 Lynch Street when he and his mother would live there from 1919 to 1925 after a series of strokes had made Ella Wright a semi-invalid. In adolescence, Wright considered himself as an ‘‘uninvited dependent’’ (Wright 120) in his grandmother’s house and rebelled strongly against the strict discipline and religious intensity which prevailed in that place. He resented his grandmother’s burning his books, destroying his radio, and disparaging his writing, which she saw as ‘‘devil’s work.’’ And he balked at attending the nearby Seventh Day Adventist school taught by his Aunt Addie and resisted attending the long, monotonous Saturday services. He had loud, sometimes nearly violent, disagreements with his Uncle Thomas and Aunt Addie, eventually becoming estranged from everyone in the house except for his mother and two cousins, Velma and Gladys. By 1924, Grandmother Wilson ‘‘rarely spoke’’ (Fabre 52) to Wright and a year later, he left her household for good, taking a train to Memphis while she attended church services. Wright’s attitude toward his grandmother was extremely complex and powerfully ambivalent. He emphatically rejected her religious doctrines and deeply resented the restrictions she put on his 409

Wilson, Richard (Grandfather) personal life. He regarded her retreat into a closed Calvinistic world as a troubling sign of how the Jim Crow South had diminished the possibilities of black life by funneling it into a compensatory religious fantasy. But he also respected Margaret Wilson’s formidable character and admired her powerful will, seeing these qualities as the main reasons why their family was able to stay together and support each other in the hardest of times. Late in his life Wright wrote a long essay, ‘‘Memories of My Grandmother,’’ which remains unpublished and part of the Wright Collection at the Beinecke Library at Yale University. In it he revealed that his own personality was in many ways influenced and partially shaped by his grandmother, declaring that his ‘‘present-day actions’’ might ‘‘derive’’ from the ‘‘profound and extreme effects of the emotional conditioning’’ (Fabre 33) which he received from her. Like James Joyce, who consciously rejected the Catholicism which he knew as a child but was deeply influenced by it as a writer, Wright clearly rejected Seventh Day Adventism as a religious institution but was strongly influenced as a novelist by its fiery and dramatic visions. And his grandmother’s fierce will and stubborn individualism were also an important parts of Wright’s inheritance from her. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

WILSON, RICHARD (GRANDFATHER) (21 March 1847–8 November 1921) Wright’s maternal grandfather was an ex-slave who served in the United States Navy in 1865. When he was eighteen years of age, he fled the Mississippi plantation on which he was working and found his way to Cairo, Illinois where he enlisted in the Navy and served from April 22 to July 27, 1865.

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He returned to Mississippi after the war and settled in Woodville where he became a farm worker. He married Margaret Bolden on February 6, 1871 and over the next eighteen years, nine children were born to them. Their five sons were Thomas, Clark, Charles, Lawrence, and Edward. Their four daughters were Cleopatra, Ella, Maggie, and Addie. Wright stressed in Black Boy/American Hunger that his grandfather Wilson had a long-term bitterness toward white people and government officials for denying him the pension he believed that he earned by serving in the Navy during a time of war. Because official records had incorrectly listed his name as ‘‘Richard Vincent,’’ he was unable to prove that he was a Civil War veteran and was never able to collect any pension from the Bureau of Pensions. He pursued this matter for many years with little positive result and came to develop a hatred of white authority. As Wright revealed in his autobiography ‘‘I never heard him speak of white people. I think he hated them too much to talk of them’’ (Wright 163). By the time Wright was born, the Wilson family lived in Natchez and his grandfather was an elderly man in his sixties who was unable to work because of blindness in one eye and severe arthritis. When Wright’s brother Leon was born in September 1910, his mother took herself and her two children to live with her parents in Natchez where they were soon joined by her husband. They stayed with the Wilsons for a year before going to Memphis where they hoped to make enough money to live independently as a family. But when Nathan Wright deserted his family to take up with another woman, Wright’s mother, Ella, became increasingly dependent upon her parents for support. She and her children spent the summer of 1916 in her parents’ house on 1107 Lynch Street in Jackson before moving to Elaine, Arkansas and later to West Helena, Arkansas. After a series of economic and emotional pressures resulted in Ella Wright having several strokes which left her paralyzed, Wright

Wilson, Thomas Booker (Uncle) and his mother settled in the Wilson home in Jackson for a seven-year period. Having lived for so long with the Wilsons, Wright knew his maternal grandfather very well and this was a sharp contrast to his lack of a relationship with his paternal grandfather after his father’s abandonment of the family in Memphis. Grandfather Wilson often took the young Wright fishing. Although a devout Seventh Day Adventist, he did not try to impose religious dogma and practice on Wright and thus was a real contrast with Grandmother Wilson who battled with Wright constantly about religious matters. He never used corporal punishment of any kind and Wright often saw him as ‘‘another playmate’’ (Fabre 18). Moreover, he greatly admired his grandfather’s exploits during the Civil War and deplored the way his pension had been unjustly denied him by government officials. Next to his mother and his favorite Aunt Maggie, his grandfather was the family member he felt most warmly towards. As Fabre has noted, ‘‘he was to remember him as a symbol of both the constant black resistance to the white world and the unjust defeat of black people’’ (Fabre 42). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003.

WILSON, THOMAS BOOKER (UNCLE) (1872–?) Born in 1872, he was the eldest son of Wright’s grandparents, Richard and Margaret Wilson. While Wright had very little contact with his other four uncles on his mother’s side of the family and had almost nothing to do with his three uncles on his father’s side of the family, he came to know his Uncle Thomas well and, for the most part, developed an intense dislike of him. Indeed, he epitomized for Wright everything he found wanting in his family and what he hated about the segregated South.

Like Wright’s mother and his Uncle Edward, Thomas became a teacher in segregated schools even though he did not possess a high school diploma. When Wright was born in 1908, he was teaching in Hazlehurst, Mississippi. But when he and his family came to live in the Wilson house on Lynch Street in Jackson in 1923, he was unable to find work as a teacher and was reduced to scratching out a meager living repairing furniture and re-stuffing chairs. Between the time when Thomas and his wife and daughters moved into Grandmother Wilson’s home in the spring of 1923 and Wright’s departure for Memphis in the fall of 1925, the two lived under one roof and quarreled often. Thomas took a low view of Wright’s reading and writing, become ‘‘critical and contemptuous’’ (Wright 198) of his first published story, ‘‘The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre.’’ And, while he never converted from being a Baptist to being a staunch Seventh Day Adventist, as many members of his family had, he found the fifteen-year-old Wright to be undisciplined and immoral, a ‘‘dangerous fool’’ (Wright 204). At one point, when the two got into an especially heated argument, Thomas tried to beat his nephew with a switch and Wright defended himself with razors. He forbade his daughters from associating with Wright even though they lived in the same house. His battles with his Uncle Thomas, along with the atmosphere of repression and discord that generally prevailed in his grandmother’s house, convinced Wright that he must leave home and seek a new life in Memphis and, later on, Chicago. He saw his uncle as a symbol of ‘‘both failure and subservience to whites’’ (Fabre 4), a sobering reminder of everything he did not want to become but could become if he remained in Mississippi. However, when Wright visited Natchez in 1940 after establishing himself as the successful author of Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son, he revised his earlier harsh estimates of his Uncle Thomas and other relatives, including his father. Thomas was in poor health, suffering from the ravages of Parkinson’s disease, and his father was a broken, toothless man who was less than a 411

Wirth, Louis year from his death. Wright now took a more compassionate view of people who led such blighted lives, seeing them as victims of the Jim Crow South. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Perennial Classics, 1993.

WIRTH, LOUIS (28 August 1897– 3 May 1952) Wirth was an internationally prominent sociologist who was an important part of the ‘‘Chicago School’’ of sociologists and anthropologists who revolutionized the social sciences in the first half of the twentieth century. He had particularly strong interests in minority groups, urban development, and the formation of modern ghettoes. He wrote several important books on these subjects, including The Ghetto and Urbanism as a Way of Life. Like most members of the Chicago School of Sociology, he placed great emphasis in his work on statistics, case studies, and direct involvement with the practical problems of modern urban life. Wright first met Wirth in 1933 through Wirth’s wife, Mary, who was the caseworker for the Wright family. At Wright’s request, Wirth prepared ambitious reading lists of seminal studies in sociology and the two discussed these works at length and in depth. Wirth delivered a talk to Wright’s John Reed Club in 1933 which focused on Jewish ghettoes in American cities and how they affected the psychological development of American Jews, a subject which was of great interest to Wright who at that time was trying to clarify his own thinking of how racial ghettoes had stunted the development of American blacks. And Wirth introduced Wright to Horace Cayton, thus initiating an important friendship. The two men worked together in 1935 when Wright became involved in the Illinois Writers Project which was supervised by Wirth. This job as researcher enabled Wright to apply what he had learned from Wirth and other University of 412

Chicago sociologists to a detailed study of black life in Chicago. Working in the archives of the Newberry Library, Wright did extensive research on black migration to Chicago and the formation of the South Side as a racial ghetto. During the time that he worked for Wirth in this WPA-sponsored project, Wright wrote two unpublished essays ‘‘Some Ethnographic Aspects of Chicago’s Black Belt’’ and ‘‘A Bibliography of Chicago’s Negroes.’’ As members of despised minorities (Wirth was Jewish) who were deeply committed to using their work as a means of creating a more just society, Wright and Wirth had much in common and their long-term friendship was mutually beneficial. When Wright visited Chicago in 1949 for part of the filming of Native Son, it was Wirth who secured him rooms at the Palmer House, a hotel which at that time did not cater to black people. Wirth and his wife Mary also visited Wright in Paris on several occasions and maintained an active correspondence with Wright for many years. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988.

WIRTH, MARY (1916–1975) Wright met Mary Wirth in 1933 when he lost his job digging ditches in the Cook County Forest Preserves and went to the welfare office on Prairie Street where he was interviewed by her as part of his job search. She became his family’s caseworker and secured a position for him working as an orderly in the Michael Reese Hospital, a large Jewish hospital located on the South Side of Chicago. His experiences there, which he would later record so powerfully in American Hunger, were important since they gave Wright a lucid insight into the ‘‘underground’’ existences endured by black employees who were given the dirtiest jobs at the lowest pay and were rendered virtually invisible to white people occupying the upper floors of the hospital. (Wright’s status as a menial

Wittenber, Jan worker in the basement of the hospital would also provide him with insights which would also be useful as he wrote ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground’’ in the early 1940s.) Mary Wirth played another important role in Wright’s life when she introduced him to her husband, Louis Wirth, an internationally prominent sociologist from the University of Chicago who had published two groundbreaking works about modern American urban life, The Ghetto and Urbanism as a Way of Life. Dr. Wirth took a strong interest in Wright and compiled reading lists of seminal works in sociology which Wright read avidly and the two discussed on a regular basis. Wirth also gave a talk at Wright’s branch of the John Reed Club in 1933. It was Mary Wirth who arranged in 1935 for Wright to have a supervisory job on the WPAsponsored Illinois Writers Project. This position, which Hazel Rowley describes as ‘‘probably . . . the most prestigious job for a black man in the whole of Chicago’’ (109) during the Great Depression, was important since it provided Wright with the time and support he needed to do serious research on the history of black people in Chicago, something which would prove useful when he came to write Native Son and 12 Million Black Voices. Such WPA work also put Wright in close contact with like-minded writers such as Margaret Walker, Nelson Algren, and Samuel Sillen. Selected Bibliography: Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad Press, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper/Perennial, 1993.

WITTENBER, JAN A painter and communist organizer whom Wright used as a model for Jan Erlone in Native Son. Wright first met him in the autumn of 1933 at a forum of leftists organized by Thyra Edwards. Wittenber and Abe Aaron, Wright’s colleague at the Chicago Post Office, then invited

Wright to attend meetings of Chicago’s newly formed John Reed Club. Although Wright was skeptical of political organizations because he feared that they might encroach upon his freedom as a writer, he attended his first John Reed Club meeting in late fall 1933 when assured by Wittenber and Aaron that he did not have to be a member of the Communist Party to attend the club’s meetings. Wittenber was an active member of the club and was its delegate to the ‘‘First National Congress’’ of the John Reed Club held in Chicago in May 1932. Michel Fabre has described him as ‘‘the most experienced and influential member’’ (Fabre 101) of the Chicago club, a group that included novelist Nelson Algren, painter Jackson Pollock, editor Bill Jordan, and filmmaker Herbert Klein. Wright, after some discomfort with a group of people coming from a background so unlike his own, soon became one of the group’s ‘‘keenest members’’ (Rowley 77) and was elected its executive secretary. He officially joined the Communist Party in 1934. For the first time in his life, he established a strong sense of community with a collection of artists, intellectuals, and activists who shared many of his ideas and encouraged him to write. Wittenber was a painter who used Wright as a model for one of his proletarian paintings and was impressed by Wright’s poetry, particularly ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands,’’ ‘‘A Red Love Note,’’ and ‘‘Child of the Dead and Forgotten Gods,’’ which he advised Wright to publish in leftist journals such as Left Front, Anvil, and New Masses. Wittenber was a Canadian Jew whom Wright saw as an outsider to mainstream American culture and whose life, therefore, was subject to some of the same discriminations suffered by African Americans. When portraying as Jan Erlone, he wanted to present him ‘‘in a favorable light’’ (Fabre 173) as one of the few people in that novel who tries to develop a genuine understanding of Bigger Thomas. Constance Webb explains Wright’s choice of last name for his character as stressing that Wittenber ‘‘alone during that period’’ was ‘‘a man of humanity’’ and had ‘‘a 413

Women in Richard Wright’s Fiction depth of understanding not found in many white comrades’’ (Webb 403). Whatever Wright’s intentions to portray Wittenber in an affirmative way, many readers of Native Son found the character of Jan Erlone to be weak and unconvincing. Communist reviewers and critics were particularly critical of this character, seeing him as an extremely naı¨ve and poorly developed figure. Michael Gold found Jan Erlone to be untypical of actual communists and Samuel Sillen was disappointed that Wright did not give more active and effective roles to Jan and other communist characters. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. ‘‘Richard Wright and the Communist Party.’’ In Richard Wright: Impressions and Perspectives, edited by David Ray and Robert M. Farnsworth. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973. 35–46. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

WOMEN IN RICHARD WRIGHT’S FICTION Richard Wright’s literature is directly influenced by the experiences of his childhood. In particular, his observations of his parents and grandmother greatly inspired the depictions of women in his literature. Consequently, sexuality and/or religious beliefs are prominent characteristics of Wright’s literary women. When Wright was five years old, his father, Nathan Wright deserted his wife and two sons to live with another woman. One of the most vivid memories Wright describes in his autobiography, Black Boy, is a meeting with his father at the request of his mother and in the presence of his mistress whom Wright describes as ‘‘the strange woman.’’ Wright stands in a hot room where a fire blazes in a fireplace to ask his father for money. ‘‘The strange woman’’ laughs at him, calls him cute, and tells the older Wright to give him a nickel. His father acquiesces, but the son rejects it and him. Eventually, his mother suffers

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from too many strokes and is left dependant on her family to care for her and her children. As a result of his mother’s health problems and his father’s absence, Wright is left mostly in the care of his maternal grandmother who is a devout Seventh Day Adventist. Although his mother is not a Seventh Day Adventist, she too is a Christian, and both women want young Wright to accept Christianity as his religion. However, Wright would not submit. In fact, as he makes clear in one of his essays, he never accepts religion: ‘‘I rejected that religion [Christianity] and would reject any religion which prescribes for me an inferior position in life; I reject that tradition and any tradition which proscribes my humanity’’ (White Man, Listen! 55). In the bulk of Wright’s fiction religion and women become the writer’s two unreconciled dilemmas and thus figure as prominent concerns. As such, his representations of women are inextricably bound to his feelings about religion. Therefore, we find that many of his women characters, with rare exceptions, are devoutly religious or are immoral promiscuous women. Similar to his mother and grandmother, black mothers in Wright’s novels are profoundly Christian. The religious beliefs of the mothers in Wright’s novels—Mrs. Thomas of Native Son (1940), Mrs. Damon of The Outsider (1953), and Mrs. Tucker of The Long Dream (1958)— cause a rift between them and their sons. It is no wonder then that the relationships the sons have with their mothers are emotionally and psychologically complex as we see with the relationship Richard of Black Boy has with his mother and grandmother. They, like Wright, reject their mother’s religion, and their rejection proves to jeopardize the emotional bond between mother and son. Wright’s black mothers in his shorter works offer more varied depictions. Two mothers with religious backgrounds appear in Wright’s first short story collection, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). In ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ when Big Boy runs to his mother for protection from a

Women in Richard Wright’s Fiction pursuing white lynch mob, she tells him ‘‘only the Lord can help you now.’’ However, Aunt Sue of ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ is not limited by her religion. In fact, it seems that her religion inspires her to action through communist activism. Mrs. Taylor of ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ is a wife and mother whom her husband feels is in need of ‘‘looking after’’ by their son when Rev. Taylor is absent. The mothers in his collection of short stories in Eight Men (1961) are married and include ‘‘The Man Who Was Almost a Man’’ who is part of a religious family and feels as though her son is lacking in maturity and therefore treats him as ‘‘almost a man.’’ The mothers in ‘‘The Man Who Saw a Flood’’ and ‘‘Man of All Work’’ are part of families that struggle economically but enjoy familial harmony. Wright’s novella, Rite of Passage (1978), shows a favorable relationship between a foster mother, Mrs. Gibbs, and her young son who rebels against a threat to their bond. Wright offers two white mothers. The earliest is Mary Dalton’s mother and hypocritical philanthropist in Native Son whom Mrs. Thomas appeals to to help save her son from execution. Mrs. Dalton flows in white, representing social innocence, and her polar opposite is the sexually promiscuous mother, Mabel, in Savage Holiday (1954) who parades men in and out of her apartment without considering the effect her behavior will have on her young son. Promiscuity among black women is prominent in Wright’s work. ‘‘The strange woman’’ resurfaces in Wright’s fiction in the guise of young black women who are the lovers of the black protagonists. These immoral women include Bessie Smith of Native Son, Dot of The Outsider, and Gladys of The Long Dream. Arguably Sara, the wife of Silas in ‘‘Long Black Song’’ who has sex with a traveling salesman for ambiguous reasons, may also be included in this category. These women’s primary role is to satisfy the protagonists’ desires. They closely resemble a woman Wright describes as having met on his journey from Mississippi. This young African-American woman is illiterate, and she has sex with Wright in exchange

for her insurance premium payments. Another woman’s mother wants Wright to marry her young daughter, Bess. Both Bess and his lover are problematic for Wright, as are the lovers of his protagonists, for they are not intellectual matches. Instead, these women can only hinder the protagonists’ quest for a better life outside the south. Ultimately, in Wright’s fiction there are no healthy relationships between young black men and their black lovers. In contrast, the young white women characters are defined largely by their purity or lack thereof. White women characters are usually either sexually innocent or sexually deviant. According to southern mores, white women were not to be touched by black men. These women became the pawns for violent acts of white male aggression towards black men. In ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ Native Son, and The Long Dream, the idea of preserving white men’s virgins results in the death of black men. Big Boy and his friends, while swimming naked in a pond, come in close proximity of a white women. Two of them are killed and Big Boy escapes. In Native Son, Mary Dalton’s death becomes the catalyst for Bigger’s execution. Without any evidence, he is wrongly accused of raping Mary—certainly named for the biblical character—and other white women. In his last novel, Wright returns to violence against black men when Chris of The Long Dream is lynched for having sex with a white woman. While the above white women are viewed as victims of black men, there are others who are sexualized to the detriment of men. They are ‘‘Mrs. Carlson’’ of The Long Dream who falsely accuses Fish of raping her. The white woman character of ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ entices the black male protagonist to touch her between her legs and treats him rudely. In response, the protagonist kills her. With such a wide body of work, there are always exceptions. Wright presents two relationships between black men and white women that do not end violently. One of his black men who has a relationship with a white woman that does not result in a lynching is Cross Damon of The 415

Women in Richard Wright’s Fiction Outsider who has an affair with the innocent Eva Blount. This relationship is the only intimate relationship Wright’s protagonist has with a woman that may go beyond a thirst for sexual satisfaction. Additionally, the sailor in ‘‘Big Black Good Man’’ has a satisfying relationship with Lena, a prostitute that does not end with his violent death. Review of Literary Criticism As early as 1976, Wright’s women characters received criticism for their depictions. Sylvia Keady writes, ‘‘After reading a large number of Richard Wright’s short stories and novels, I came to feel that his characterization of women must be termed prejudiced and stereotyped’’ (124). She goes on to describe Fish’s mother in The Long Dream as ‘‘submissive;’’ Bessie in Native Son as ‘‘dull and mindless;’’ Sarah as ‘‘intellectually inferior;’’ and, Eva of The Outsider as ‘‘childlike, helpless.’’ Many other scholars have offered such critiques of the female characters. Sherley Anne Williams notes that the black mothers in Wright’s ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ Native Son, The Outsider, and Black Boy are ‘‘ineffectual in the face of poverty and racism’’ as a result of their sole reliance on their religious beliefs (72). Maria Mootry argues that religion is one of the ‘‘anodynes’’ used to ‘‘narcotize [the] intelligent, questioning spirit’’ of women in several of his works (19). Nagueyalti Warren describes the women as amounting to ‘‘castrating mothers; whorish, morally depraved lovers; hysterical, weeping black girls’’ (60). She notes further, ‘‘all of Wright’s women, . . . are Mothers or Whores’’ (123). Others agree with these critics’ assessments. While most of Wright’s literary women have been the subject of criticism from feminist scholars in particular, other critics go beyond the characterization of these women to offer critiques of Wright’s intent in forming his characterizations, especially those of his southern black women characters. Miriam DeCosta-Willis agrees with scholars that the women are influenced by the ‘‘writer’s own experiences, attitudes, and feelings’’ (541), but, she further argues that they ‘‘represent

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the dark side of a Southern womanhood that has been violated and distorted in the crucible of racism and sexism’’ (548). Joyce Ann Joyce, in her critique of ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ offers a positive review of Sarah. Similar to DeCosta-Willis, Joyce argues that Wright uses Sarah ‘‘to reflect his picture of the world.’’ Further, Joyce argues, she acts as Wright’s ‘‘moral point of view and emerges as both Silas’s and the young man’s emotional superior’’ (384–385). More recently, Cheryl Higashida asserts that focusing on the ‘‘rural, working-class (folk), black, female subjectivity’’ of Uncle Tom’s Children is tantamount to ‘‘understanding how and why Wright articulates . . . gender(ed) politics . . . ’’ (397). There remains a number of questions that have been unasked and unanswered regarding the women of Wright’s fiction. Could all of the women of Wright’s fiction be the moral consciousness of a changing society? Why is the mother of Native Son, the novel, drastically revised in Wright’s film version of the novel? Further, why is Bessie of Wright’s film more prominently featured than Bessie of the novel? Does Wright’s characterization of women change during his twenty year career, during which time he becomes a husband, a father of two daughters, and a motherless child? As we move forward in Wright studies, we must offer new perspectives in critiquing the women in Wright’s fiction. Selected Bibliography: DeCosta-Willis, Miriam. ‘‘Avenging Angels and Mute Mothers: Black Southern Women in Wright’s Fictional World.’’ Callaloo, 9.3 (1986): 541–549. Higashida, Cheryl. ‘‘Aunt Sue’s Children: Re-viewing the Gender(ed) Politics of Richard Wright’s Radicalism.’’ American Literature, 75 (2003): 366–425. Joyce, Ann Joyce. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Long Black Song’: A Moral Dilemma.’’Mississippi Quarterly, 42 (1989): 379–385. Keady, Sylvia H. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Women Characters and Inequality.’’Black American Literature Forum, 10 (1976): 124–128. Mootry, Maria K. ‘‘Bitches, Whores and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies in the Art of Richard Wright.’’ In Richard Wright: a Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Richard Macksey. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984. Warren, Nagueyalti.

World War II ‘‘Black Girls and Native Sons: Female Images in Selected Works by Richard Wright.’’ In Richard Wright: Myths and Realities,edited by James Trotman. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1988. 59–77. Williams, Sherley Anne. ‘‘Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright.’’ In American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminine Criticism,edited by Fritz Fleischman. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1982. Wright, Richard.White Man, Listen! New York: HarperPerennial, 1995.

WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA) A series of government-sponsored programs developed during the Great Depression as part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. They were designed to stimulate the economy by providing paid jobs to unemployed people and also to complete projects of social and cultural importance. Wright worked on two WPA projects during the mid-1930s, the Federal Writers Project and the Federal Theatre Project. The Chicago branch of the WPA was headed by Louis Wirth, the distinguished sociologist from the University of Chicago who was also Wright’s friend and advisor. Created in 1935, the Federal Writers Project supported more than 6,600 writers, editors, and researchers during its four years of federal funding. Many writers who would go on to become distinguished novelists and poets worked for the WPA including Saul Bellow, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Nelson Algren, Margaret Walker, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, Studs Terkel, Arna Bontemps, and Conrad Aiken. The Federal Theatre Project, likewise, included many playwrights, actors, and directors who would make important contributions to American Theatre, among them Orson Welles, John Houseman, and Theodore Ward. Wright’s involvement in WPA projects came at a pivotal moment in his life and had strongly influenced him both as a writer and thinker. According to Margaret Walker, the emergence of the WPA coincided with the ‘‘explosion’’ of Wright’s ‘‘creative genius’’ (Demonic 81) providing him with a

large group of like-minded friends and colleagues who provided ‘‘rich intellectual camaraderie’’ (Demonic 70). His friendships with Walker, Farrell, Algren, Bontemps, Ward, and Houseman were particularly important. The Federal Writers Project and Federal Theatre Project, along with the John Reed Club and the South Side Writers Group, put an end to Wright’s isolation both as a writer and a person, placing him at the center of an intellectual and artistic ferment which would deepen his thinking and enrich his art. All of these involvements would enable Wright to become a catalyst and leader of the Chicago Renaissance which would transform African-American literature. Selected Bibliography: Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1968.

WORLD WAR II This war, which began with the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and concluded with atomic bombs detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, was fought between the Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan and the Allied nations of France, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States. A truly global war, it resulted in a cataclysmic loss of human life and property. Thirty million people died in Europe as a result of the war, almost half of them civilians. Fifteen percent of the entire population of Poland died and Europe’s Jewish population was reduced from 9. 2 million to 3.8 million. As a result of the war, 16 million Europeans became refugees, being permanently transplanted from their homelands. Wright’s response to World War II, and especially American involvement in the war, changed over time as historical circumstances developed. At first he was strongly opposed to the war as a communist who viewed it as a capitalist war of aggression and colonialist control. As an 417

World War II American black man, he also had serious reservations about supporting American entry into war because the U.S. armed forces were rigidly segregated, as was American society itself. The South practiced a brutal form of de jure segregation, and the North employed a subtler but no less dehumanizing variety of de facto segregation. Armed services such as the Navy restricted blacks to menial roles as stewards while the Air Corps, at the beginning of the war, would not train African-American men as pilots. Incredibly, the Red Cross initially refused black blood donations, and, when circumstances forced them to do so, they kept the blood of African-Americans in separate bottles. War industries offered black workers less pay and fewer benefits than white workers. So it is understandable that Wright had no enthusiasm for fighting a war of liberation in Europe and Asia while his people were not free in his own country. In 1940, he was a member of the ‘‘American Peace Mobilization,’’ a communist group which was vehemently opposed to American entry into the war. (Since the signing of the German-Soviet Union Non-Aggression Pact in 1940, the Communist Party was officially opposed to war with Germany, seeing it as a capitalist venture which did not further the interests of Marxist revolution.) Wright made his views clear in a June 1940 New Masses article entitled ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ that American blacks should not support the war effort and should work hard to keep America neutral. But after Hitler invaded Russia on June 2, 1941, the day after the ‘‘American Peace Mobilization’’ had organized ‘‘National Peace Week,’’ things changed drastically for communists in America and all over the world. The ‘‘American Peace Mobilization’’ changed its name to the ‘‘American People’s War Against Germany,’’ viewing it now as a ‘‘people’s war’’ against fascism. Wright, who had planned to give his acceptance speech to the Spingarn Medal in Houston as an antiwar plea, was pressured by the Communist Party to reverse his field and give a speech in support of the war, something he did ‘‘very

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unwillingly’’ (Fabre 226) and which contributed to his growing unhappiness as a party member. By the time Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941, however, Wright no longer opposed entry into the war, and on December 16 of that year he signed a petition appearing in New Masses which urged American writers to support the war against Germany and Japan. In September of 1941, Wright spoke out emphatically in favor of the war, declaring ‘‘I shall through my writing seek to rally the Negro people to stand should to shoulder with the administration in a solid national front to wage war until victory is won’’ (Fabre 227). Like many African-American writers and political leaders of the time, Wright continued to harbor suspicions of America fighting a war of liberation when black people were denied freedom and justice in their own country. But they came to adopt a strategy called the ‘‘Double V’’ as a way of justifying Negro involvement in World War II. Blacks, according to this strategy, would fight their own two-fronted war, for victory against Japan and Germany and also victory against racism at home. In this way, World War II would be a means of creating a more just society for American blacks during the war and it would be a preamble for the struggle for civil rights after the war. Wright clearly articulated this concept in his introduction to the condensed version of 12 Million Black Voices: We are fighting to defeat those enemies (Germany and Japan). But we must also fight to preserve the kind of America where the struggle for the extension of democracy can be taken up with renewed vigor when our enemies are crushed. (Fabre 227)

At the outset of the war, Wright offered his services to the American government, but because he was viewed suspiciously as a communist, his talents were not put to use. Unlike white writers such as John Steinbeck and John Dos Passos, thirties leftists who were given significant roles to play by the American government during the war, Wright’s talents as a writer and organizer

Wright, Ella (Mother) went unutilized. Because of his age, thirty-three, and his two dependants, his wife and his mother, Wright was classified 3-A by his draft board and received no calls from the government to serve his country as a combatant. He spent the war years in Brooklyn writing American Hunger and ‘‘The Man Who Lived Underground,’’ and his offer ‘‘to serve the national democratic cause through my writing’’ (Rowley 261) went unanswered. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Wright, Gordon. The Ordeal of Total War. New York: Harper, 1968. Wright, Richard. 12 Million Black Voices. New York: Viking Press, 1941.

WPA See Works Progress Administration (WPA).

WRIGHT, ELLA (MOTHER) (June 1883– 13 January 1959) Richard Wright’s mother was the daughter of Richard Wilson and Margaret Bolden Wilson, ex-slaves who, through hard work and great determination, were able to maintain their family in ‘‘black lower-middle class’’ (Fabre 2) circumstances during a time of extraordinary economic hardship for African Americans in Mississippi. Ella, like her siblings Tom, Edward, and Addie, became a schoolteacher and taught children of sharecroppers in a small rural hamlet of Cranfield, approximately twenty miles from Natchez. At age twenty-six, she met Nathan Wright at a party given by the Cranfield Methodist Church and married him on March 19, 1908 against the wishes of her parents who considered her husband irresponsible and of a lower social class. Ella soon gave up teaching to work on the farm where her husband was a laborer. Their first son, Richard, was born on September 4, 1908 at Rucker’s plantation near the small village of Roxie, approximately twenty-two miles east of Natchez. Their

second son, Leon, was born two years later. Because she had difficulty tending two young children while also doing farm work, she and her sons went to live with her parents in Natchez. Her husband joined them shortly thereafter, finding employment at a local sawmill. In 1911, the Wrights moved to Memphis, Tennessee in search of better paying work which would enable them to live independently as a family. It was there that they experienced severe emotional and economic hardships when Nathan Wright abandoned his family in 1912 to live with another woman, and Ella was unable, either through personal persuasion or legal coercion, to get her husband to pay child support. She tried to support herself and her sons by working as a cook but was unable to make enough money to buy sufficient food or pay rent. When she became seriously ill, she was forced to place her children in Settlement House, a Memphis orphanage. Ella’s mother then took her daughter and two sons to live with her in her newly purchased home in Jackson, Mississippi where they spent the summer before moving to Elaine, Arkansas where they lived with her sister Maggie and her husband, Silas Hoskins. After Hoskins was murdered by whites who coveted his prosperous saloon business, the Wrights fled in terror to West Helena, Arkansas. The pressures of such an unstable life resulted in Ella’s suffering a serious stroke which left her partially paralyzed. She was forced to divide her family, sending Richard to live with his Uncle Clark in Greenwood, Mississippi and sending Leon to live with his Aunt Maggie in Detroit. She returned to Jackson where she was cared for by her mother. For the remainder of her life, Ella suffered from serious health problems and was unable to secure adequate medical attention because of her lack of financial resources and Mississippi’s rigidly segregated health facilities which provided black people with the barest minimum of health care. After her third stroke in the summer of 1923 when Wright was fourteen, she became a semiinvalid who was unable to work and needed substantial care. As Wright reveals in Black Boy/ 419

Wright, Ellen (Wife) American Hunger, he came to see his mother’s plight as a terrifying symbol of people caught helplessly in the forces of a deterministic universe: My mother’s suffering grew into a symbol in my mind, gathering to itself all the poverty, the ignorance, the helplessness; the painful, baffling, hunger-ridden days and hours; the restless moving, the futile seeking, the uncertainty, the fear, the dread; the meaningless pain and the endless suffering. Her life set an emotional tone for my life. . .A somberness of spirit that I was never to lose settled over me . . . . (Wright 117)

Wright’s adult life can be seen as his attempt to transcend such ‘‘meaningless suffering’’ by ‘‘struggling to wring a meaning’’ (Wright 118) out of it. His political commitments, first with the Communist Party in the 1930s and later with PanAfrican groups in the 1950s, were his attempts to transform the environments which victimized his mother and all oppressed people. His belief in existentialism, likewise, gave him a faith in achieving the free will which was slowly taken from his mother by harsh circumstances. And he became an artist to achieve a powerful voice which could speak out against injustice and thus provide himself and his people with an alternative to suffering in silence. Although Wright often came into conflict with his mother when she tried to discipline his rebellious spirit, he always maintained his responsibilities to her as a son and regarded his relationship with her as one of the most important relationships of his life. After he left Mississippi in 1925 to establish a new life in Memphis, he soon sent for her and his brother Leon and the three of them established a household with his Aunt Maggie on 370 Washington Street. After he and his Aunt Maggie relocated to Chicago in 1929, they were joined less than a year later by his mother, brother, and Aunt Cleo. For nine years, Wright shared close quarters with his mother and other relatives in Chicago kitchenettes. As Fabre has noted, in Chicago ‘‘Richard was technically the head of the family and never shirked his responsibilities, contributing his entire salary for their 420

support’’ (108). Although his mother had very little understanding of Wright’s reading, writing, and political life and often worried as a staunch religionist that he was losing his soul, Wright continued to care for her and support her. With part of the royalties he received from Native Son, he bought a house on Vincennes Street in Chicago and provided an apartment for her and his Aunt Cleo. After he moved to Paris, he continued to send monthly checks to her until her death from ‘‘cerebral apoplexy’’ (Rowley 496) in 1959. It is therefore not surprising that when Wright received the Spingarn Medal in 1941, he accepted the award partly ‘‘in the name of my mother who sacrificed her health on numerous underpaid jobs’’ (Rowley 238–39). And he also honored her by dedicating his masterwork, Native Son ‘‘To my mother who when I was a child taught me to revere the fanciful and imaginative’’ (Wright iv). As Margaret Walker has stressed, Wright was in many important ways ‘‘his mother’s son’’ (Walker 309). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Native Son. New York: Perennial Classics, 1993. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

WRIGHT, ELLEN (WIFE) (3 September 1912–6 April 2004) Wright’s second wife was the daughter of RussianJewish parents, Isidore and Rose Poplowitz, who emigrated to the United States in 1912. A few months after they arrived in New York, Freda [Ellen] was born, and the family established a household in the Jewish ghetto of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Ellen’s father became a successful designer of shoes and was able to move his family to Brooklyn in the early 1920s. Although Ellen’s childhood was not scarred by the Jim Crow practices Wright faced growing up

Wright, Ellen (Wife) in the Deep South, there were some psychological similarities between the Wright and Poplowitz families. Ellen’s father was a distant authority figure. Her mother, who could neither read nor write, never became emotionally close to her. Ellen never developed strong bonds with her younger brother Martin or her older sister Florence. She was tempermentally shy and had few friends. Like Wright, she spent much of her early years as a loner; she was a serious student who found ‘‘refuge’’ in ‘‘books’’ (Rowley 232). Also like Wright, she was fiercely independent and left home at seventeen because of disputes with her parents. Both she and Wright were drawn to communism because social action provided the sense of human connectedness so missing in their early lives. She joined the Communist Party in 1930, rose quickly through the party ranks as an organizer and street speaker, and became head of the party’s Fulton Street branch in the late 1930s (Rowley 232). In the spring of 1939, Wright was introduced to her by Herbert Newton, a party organizer who was he husband of Jane Newton, one of Wright’s closest friends and most valued confidante. After Wright’s short-lived marriage to Dhimah Rose Meadman failed in 1941, Ellen and Wright moved in with the Newtons at 343 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn. They were married in a quiet ceremony in Coytesville, New Jersey on March 12, 1941 with Wright’s friends Abe Aaron and Benjamin Davis serving as witnesses. No member of either of their families was present. Ellen’s marriage to a black man caused a serious rift between her and her family. Her father never agreed to meet Wright and saw little of his daughter after the wedding. Her mother tried desperately to prevent the marriage and visited the Wrights only after their daughter Julia was born. Her sister rejected her as a disgrace to the family. Only her brother Martin supported her marriage. Wright himself never visited the Poplowitz home and developed a friendly but essentially distant relationship with his mother-in-law when she phoned or visited.

Despite these problems with Ellen’s family and the abuse which the Wrights received from neighbors and strangers in New York who objected to biracial couples, the first nine years of the marriage were happy. The royalties from Native Son and Black Boy enabled the Wrights to maintain a comfortable lifestyle. Their relationship was deepened by the births of their daughters Julia and Rachel, and such friends as Constance Webb and Simone de Beauvoir noted they were proud and doting parents. By the time they were established in Paris in the late 1940s, the Wrights seem to enjoy a deeply satisfying family life which had been missing in their childhood and adolescence. As Michel Fabre has noted, ‘‘Ellen had become an essential part of [Wright’s] stability’’ (Fabre 275). In the 1950s, Wright’s philandering created serious marital difficulties. Although he and Ellen remained together for the sake of their children, their marriage became increasingly more strained and eventually deteriorated. Ellen left Paris in 1958, taking her daughters to London where they attended school and she worked as a literary agent. Although Wright tried to join them, British officials would not grant him the visa he needed for an extended stay. Ellen made no attempt to return to Paris. When the Wrights sold their summer home in Ailly and their apartment in Paris in 1959, Wright moved to a one-bedroom apartment on 4 rue Re´gis. After Wright’s death, Ellen became his literary executor. It was through her determined efforts that Eight Men, Lawd Today!, Richard Wright Reader, American Hunger, Rite of Passage, Haiku: This Other World, and the Library of America restored editions were published. She also oversaw the placing of the huge collection of Wright’s papers, notebooks, unpublished manuscripts, and other materials in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Ellen Wright died on April 6, 2004. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and 421

Wright, Julia (Daughter) Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2006. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

WRIGHT, JULIA (DAUGHTER) (15 April 1942– ) Born on April 15, 1942 in New York, Julia Wright, as Margaret Walker has observed, enjoyed a relationship of ‘‘love and affection and close rapport’’ (108) with her father until his death in 1960. She has extended his legacy through her work as a noted journalist, essayist, and political activist. For many years, she has worked on ‘‘Daughter of a Native Son,’’ a memoir about Richard Wright, and after her mother’s death, Julia Wright became executor of the Richard Wright estate. Shortly after Julia’s birth, the Wrights moved to 7 Middagh Street in Brooklyn where they became part of a writers’ colony which included Carson and Reeves McCullers, George Davis, and several artists. After a year there, they moved to 89 Lefferts Place because they were worried that the heavy drinking of the McCullers and the bohemian behavior of Davis and other tenants would not provide a proper environment in which to raise their daughter. By 1945, the Wrights had purchased a townhouse on 13 Charles Street in Greenwich Village in an attempt to find a neighborhood which would provide better schooling for Julia and a less racially hostile place to live as a family. Greenwich Village was not immune to the racial tensions which were common in post– World War II New York; Wright, his wife and his daughter were the objects of repeated racial insults. One incident in New York involving Julia proved especially painful for the Wrights and was one of the factors which prompted them to leave the United States in 1947 to begin a new life in Paris. When the Wrights’ friend Constance Webb took Julia to Bergdorf Goodman department store to use the ladies room, Julia was denied access because of her skin color. As Michel Fabre has noted, Wright worried about Julia’s

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being ‘‘traumatized’’ (Fabre 312) by such racial discrimination. When asked in a 1958 interview whether he would ever return to America with his family, Wright answered that he would not because he did not want ‘‘to expose [his] daughters to the conditions I object to in America’’ (Kinnamon 188). In Paris, Julia was enrolled first in Pere Castor, a private experimental school, and later at L’E´cole Alsacienne, both chosen by her father. She excelled academically throughout her childhood and adolescence, graduating from the French Lyce´ e at age sixteen and passing the entrance exams for Cambridge University in England. She later decided not to stay at Cambridge, choosing instead to study sociology at the Sorbonne where she could be closer to her father who was experiencing the health problems that would claim his life in November 1960. While Ellen and Rachel Wright remained in London during Wright’s final years, Julia looked after him in Paris. She was with him during Martin Luther King’s visit on February 6, 1959 and also present when Langston Hughes visited Wright’s apartment two days before his death. She was so disturbed by Wright’s sudden death that she dropped out of school and never completed a university degree. Strongly influenced by her father’s Pan-African ideas and by African decolonization, Julia went to West Africa after her father’s death, first tutoring in a school in the Ivory Coast and then settling in Ghana where President Kwame Nkrumah appointed her to establish the French version of the Pan-africanist weekly, The Spark. When Dorothy Padmore died, Julia Wright was named acting head of Nkrumah’s research office, a position she held until the president was overthrown in 1966. She was deported from Ghana that same year. Returning to Paris, Julia Wright continued her journalism, writing for Jeune Afrique and Le Monde. In the late 1960s, she worked with James Forman, who was the foreign affairs representative for SNCC, and traveled with him in 1968 to Algiers to do research on Frantz Fanon. The

Wright, Leon Alan (Brother) next year, she worked with Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver to establish the Algiers Black Panther branch. She spent three years in Nigeria, serving as a war-front reporter during the NigerianBiarfran crisis and later as a researcher in African and African-American foreign affairs. Combining her political and literary interests, Julia Wright is a co-founder of the Richard Wright Circle and the Richard Wright Newsletter; she has written introductions for Wright’s Haiku: This Other World and A Father’s Law, Ollie Harrington’s Dark Laughter, and Mumia Abu Jamal’s ‘‘death blossoms.’’ She founded the French branch of ‘‘International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal’’ in 1995. She continues to lecture internationally on his father’s work, social justice and human rights issues, and the need to abolish the death penalty in the United States. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre, eds. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Julia. Curriculum Vitae. Copyright Julia Wright. Undated.

WRIGHT, LEON ALAN (BROTHER) (1910–1999) Wright’s younger brother was born on September 24, 1910, two years and a few days after Wright was born. The family lived in an unpainted log house and both parents worked on a plantation near Roxie, Mississippi, a small hamlet which was twenty-two miles east of Natchez. Because his mother was unable to care adequately for two young children while also doing farm work, she took herself, Richard, and Leon to live with her parents in Natchez. Her husband, Nathan, soon followed, finding work in a local sawmill. To secure better paying jobs which would enable them to live independently as a family, the

Wrights moved to Memphis, Tennessee in 1911, thus beginning a long series of destabilizing moves which would characterize Leon’s childhood and adolescence. When his father deserted the family in 1912 to live with another woman, his mother became overwhelmed by economic, physical, and emotional burdens, suffering a serious illness which forced her to place Leon and Richard in Settlement House, a Memphis orphanage. His grandmother Wilson then took the family to live with her on Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi where they enjoyed a summer of relative peace and stability. But later that year, Ella Wright decided to take her two children to Elaine, Arkansas to live with her sister Maggie and her husband, Silas Hoskins. When Hoskins was killed by whites who were envious of his prosperous saloon business, the family fled in terror to West Helena, Arkansas where they lived in precarious circumstances for several months. When Ellen Wright suffered a stroke which left her partially paralyzed, a family council was convened and separated Ella and her two sons. She returned to Jackson to be cared for by her parents and sister Addie, Richard was sent to Greenwood, Mississippi where he lived with his Uncle Clark and Aunt Jody, while Leon went to Detroit to stay with Aunt Maggie. Leon stayed in Detroit with his aunt for six years, and when he rejoined his mother and brother in Jackson in 1924, he found himself in a household wracked with financial problems, personal frictions, and emotional tensions. Because he had spent six of his most formative years away from his brother, he was not able to establish a strong fraternal relationship with him and the two remained at some distance from each other for the rest of their lives. As Leon revealed in a 1967 letter to Wright’s first biographer, Constance Webb: I went to live with my Aunt Margaret at the age of ten and in later years was with my brother for only brief periods of time, during which I recall he read continuously and seemed to live almost

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Wright, Nathan (Father) exclusively in a world of books and ideas. (Rowley 235)

WRIGHT, NATHAN (FATHER) (1879?– 1940)

Leon and Richard did live for about two years at their grandmother’s house on Lynch Street in Jackson, but their relationship was strained because of family tensions and their having little in common with each other. After Wright went to Memphis in 1925, his brother and mother joined him in the early fall of 1927, establishing a household for several months on 370 Washington Street. Wright and his Aunt Maggie left for Chicago in December of that year while Leon and Ella returned to Jackson. Leon thereafter lived with Wright and his mother in very cramped quarters in Chicago but frequently moved to Toledo, Ohio to work as a gardener with his Uncle Charles. Given their sharp differences, it is not surprising that Leon took little interest in Wright’s work and was especially critical of Black Boy. When Webb contacted him in 1967, he expressed anger over what he felt were ‘‘misrepresentations’’ in Wright’s autobiography and was especially critical of what he judged to be ‘‘irresponsible statements involving members of the family’’ (Rowley 325). He was so offended by the book that he insisted that Webb refer to him only as ‘‘Alan’’ so that people he knew in Chicago would not suspect that he was Wright’s brother, who is always referred to as ‘‘Leon’’ in the book. Wright’s mother spent her final eighteen months with Leon and his family in Chicago. It was Leon who kept Wright apprised of his mother’s health in her final months and notified him of her death on January 13, 1959. Despite persistent health problems for much of his life, particularly difficulties with a gastric ulcer, Leon survived all of his family members and died at the age of eighty-nine in 1999.

Richard Wright’s father, Nathan, was born ‘‘a little before 1880’’ (Fabre 1) near Stanton, Mississippi to Nathanial and Laura Wright, ex-slaves who worked as sharecroppers in cotton plantations near Natchez. He died in 1940 shortly after Wright visited him and was buried in an unmarked grave beside his father and brother. (His birth date is approximate because birth records in that part of Mississippi were not kept until 1916, and death records for African Americans were not carefully maintained in parts of rural Mississippi even as late as 1940.) Nathan Wright grew up in a thoroughly segregated world in which black people were given very bleak options for employment and were severely discriminated against in every aspect of public life. Nathan Wright therefore lived in extreme poverty and had little or no chance to improve his life through education. He married Ella Wilson, a schoolteacher, in Natchez on March 29, 1908 and their first son, Richard, was born on September 4, 1908 on Rucker’s Plantation, a farm near Roxie, Mississippi which was twenty-two miles east of Natchez. They lived in an unpainted log house, and Nathan and Ella worked as sharecroppers. Two years later, a second son, Leon, was born. Because he had difficulty supporting his family with the meager wages supplied by sharecropping, Nathan moved his wife and sons in 1910 to Natchez where they lived with his wife’s parents, and he secured work at a local sawmill. Financial problems, however, continued to plague the Wrights, and in 1911, they moved to Memphis, Tennessee where Nathan worked as a porter in a Beale Street drugstore. While in Memphis he engaged in an extramarital affair, and by 1912, he deserted his family to live with his lover. As Margaret Walker has observed, Nathan Wright’s abandonment of his wife and children was a traumatic experience for Richard Wright which left deep ‘‘scars’’ on his personality that would ‘‘last a lifetime’’ (Walker 23). In Black Boy/

Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Man and His Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1968.

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Wright, Nathanial (Grandfather) American Hunger, Wright stressed that his father’s desertion of the family implanted in him ‘‘a deep biological bitterness’’ and a ‘‘vague dread’’ (Wright 18) that plagued his entire childhood. These feelings were intensified when his mother took his father to court to force him to pay child support, and Nathan was allowed by the judge to shirk his responsibilities. When his mother later made a personal appeal to Nathan for child support by visiting him and his lover in their apartment, she was met by his indifference and scornful laughter. Wright became so enraged that he tried to strike his father with a poker and screamed at the ‘‘strange’’ woman ‘‘You ought to be dead’’ (39). It is little wonder that Wright in Black Boy/ American Hunger says of his father: ‘‘He was always a stranger to me, alien and remote’’ (Wright 11). He blamed his father for bringing about his mother’s chronic illnesses by forcing her to assume economic and emotional burdens which overwhelmed her. His father’s irresponsibility and his mother’s fragility induced in Wright a physical ‘‘hunger’’ (Wright 32) and a psychological ‘‘dread’’ which became ‘‘a daily part of [his] being’’ (Wright 35) and haunted him for most of his childhood and adolescence. At age four, as Hazel Rowley has pointed out, Wright ‘‘learned that men could not be trusted, and women by themselves were weak and afraid’’ (Rowley 7). This lesson would be engraved on Wright’s personality for the rest of his life. In later years, Wright’s view of his father softened him in certain ways. When he received the Spingarn Medal in January 1941, he revealed that ‘‘I accept this award in the name of my father, a sharecropper on a Mississippi plantation, and in the name of my mother who sacrificed her health on numerous underpaid jobs (Rowley 238–39). This more compassionate view of Nathan Wright, no doubt, was generated by Wright’s last meeting with his father when he visited him in Natchez in the spring of 1940 and found him a broken man near death. Wright’s anger toward him was replaced by understanding and some degree of sympathy as he came to see him as a victim of a brutal social system which stripped him of the

resources he needed to lead a fuller human life. In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright describes his father more as a victim than a victimizer: I stood before him, poised, my mind aching as it embraced the simple nakedness of his life, feeling completely how his soul was imprisoned by the slow flow of the seasons, by wind and rain and sun, how fastened were his memories to a crude and raw past, how chained were his actions and emotions to the direct, animalistic impulses of his withering body . . . From the white landowners above him there had not been handed to him a chance to learn the meaning of loyalty, of sentiment, of tradition . . . I forgave him and pitied him as my eyes looked past him to the unpainted wooden shack. (Wright 40–41)

Nathan thus became for Wright a sobering object lesson and a powerful reminder of the life which he rejected when he fled the South and went North to pursue a new life. While he regarded his father as a ‘‘black peasant’’ who ‘‘failed in the city’’ (Wright 41) of Memphis by rejecting his responsibilities to his family, Wright came to see himself as a man who had triumphed over the pathological environment which had destroyed his father. While his father had become ‘‘hopelessly snarled in the city,’’ Wright’s experiences in Chicago and New York had brought him to ‘‘undreamed shores of knowing’’ (Wright 41), thus empowering him to achieve the humanly meaningful life denied to his father and millions of other oppressed people. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988. Wright, Richard. Black Boy/American Hunger. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.

WRIGHT, NATHANIAL (GRANDFATHER) Wright’s paternal grandfather was a freed slave who fought in the Civil War with the ‘‘Colored 425

Wright, Rachel (Daughter) Infantry’’ when Natchez was invaded by Union troops in 1863. After the war, he was one of the few ex-slaves who was given a plot of land to farm by the military government. He farmed this land near Natchez and was greatly respected by fellow blacks for making the land productive and keeping it out of the hands of whites for a significant period of time. After the Civil War, he married Laura Calvin, a mulatto woman who was believed to be threequarters Choctaw Indian. They had four sons, Solomon, Nathan, Rias, and George. While Solomon stayed on to farm the family land with his father, the other three sons eventually left home to work as laborers on the large plantations owned by whites. Nathan, Wright’s father, became a sharecropper, working on Rucker’s Plantation near the hamlet of Roxie, which was twenty-two miles east of Natchez. Wright was named for both his grandfathers, taking his first name from his mother’s father, Richard Wilson, and his middle name from Nathanial Wright. After his father’s abandonment of the family when Wright was a small child, he had very little contact with his father’s people and therefore had little or no relationship with Nathanial Wright. He is not mentioned in Black Boy/American Hunger. Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001.

WRIGHT, RACHEL (DAUGHTER) (17 January 1949– ) The birth of Wright’s younger daughter Rachel on January 17, 1949 in the American Hospital in Paris changed his status in France. He now became a ‘‘resident privile´gie´’’ (Fabre 382) which enabled him to become a naturalized French citizen. Although Wright’s relationship with his older daughter Julia was very close, his relationship with Rachel was marked by frustration (Walker 108). Wright’s problems with Rachel can be at least partially explained by the fact that his work 426

required him to travel extensively, a situation which kept him away from his family for lengthy periods of time. When Rachel was seven months old, Wright left Paris to work on the filming of Native Son in Chicago and Buenos Aires; when he returned a year later, Rachel did not recognize him. Indeed, Wright’s travel to do research on his books in Africa, Spain, and Indonesia and certain marital problems may have contributed to his strained relationship with Rachel. The serious rift between Wright and Rachel is attested by her often refusing to speak English in his presence, her insisting on conversing in French, a language in which Wright never became fully fluent. Her behavior at his funeral also reflected Rachel’s distance from her father. She did not enter the chapel at Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery where the service was held, choosing to remain outside in an automobile (Rowley 525). Selected Bibliography: Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. New York: William Morrow, 1973. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

THE WRIGHT SCHOOL A group of African-American writers, including Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Lloyd Brown, William Demby, William Attaway, and Willard Motley, who were strongly influenced by Wright’s artistic practice and theory. This generation of writers grew up during the Depression and did their best work from the early 1940s to the early 1950s. Like Wright, they regarded art as an important means of social protest and used hard-boiled naturalistic techniques to study the impact of social environment on human behavior, often concluding that people are hapless victims of environmental forces which they are unable to understand or control. The most important novels produced by this group are Attaway’s Blood on the Forge (1941), Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), Petry’s

Wright’s Poetry The Street (1946), Motley’s Knock on Any Door (1947), and Brown’s Iron City (1951). Each book uses a harshly naturalistic style to describe the economic, social, and racial problems which black people encounter in American urban ghettoes. Selected Bibliography: Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1958. Capetti, Carla. ‘‘Sociology of an Existence: Richard Wright and the Chicago School.’’ MELUS 12

(summer 1985), 25–43. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Amistad, 1988.

WRIGHT’S PHOTOGRAPHY See Photography of Richard Wright.

WRIGHT’S POETRY See Poetry of Richard Wright.

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Z ZERO Themistocles Hoetis and Asa Benveniste founded the magazine Zero in 1948. It ‘‘can lay claim to being the first entirely English-language literary magazine in Paris after the war’’ (Campbell 22). Among works by such writers as Christopher Isherwood and Keneth Patchen, Wright’s ‘‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow’’ and James Baldwin’s ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’’ appeared in the Spring 1949 issue (Campbell 23). The publication of Baldwin’s essay drew attention to his mastery of prose, but it had the negative effect of creating a serious rift between him and Wright. Wright never forgave Baldwin for his scathing attack on Native Son. Selected Bibliography: Campbell, James. Exiled in Paris. New York: Scribner, 1995. Fabre, Michel. From Harlem to Paris: Black American Writers in France, 1840–1980. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.

ZOLA, EMILE (2 April 1840– 29 September 1902) A nineteenth-century French novelist and literary theorist who is often credited with being the father and leading practitioner of naturalism as a literary movement. In his essay ‘‘The Experimental Novel,’’ Zola laid the foundation of

naturalism, stressing its scientifically rigorous style which would carefully observe human experience in much the same way that a scientist would examine data in a laboratory. Zola also stressed in this essay a consistently deterministic vision of life, arguing that human behavior was ‘‘determined’’ by environmental forces such as heredity, economic conditions, biological compulsion, and social conditioning which were largely beyond man’s control. Zola’s major works include Germinal, The´ re` se Raquin, The Debacle, La Beˆ te Humaine, L’Assomoir, Nana, and La Terre. In Black Boy/American Hunger, Wright cites Zola as one of the writers who exerted such a strong influence on him when he was beginning to emerge as a writer in Memphis. Along with Dreiser, Crane, Ibsen, and Anderson, Zola provided Wright with a new way of seeing himself and his social environment, giving him ‘‘a sense of life itself ’’ (Black Boy 274) which sharply contradicted the visions of human experience provided by his family, religious institutions, and all other conventional authorities. Zola’s novels and naturalistic fiction in general gave Wright a powerful new lens through which he could view his own experience as he was caught in the environmental traps of poverty, southern segregation, and northern racism. As Houston Baker has pointed out, ‘‘Comparing Wright’s life with 429

Zola, Emile almost any of Zola’s protagonists, one immediately recognizes the similarity. Wright’s existence in the Black Belt and the urban ghettos of America was one in which events seemed predetermined by heredity . . . and the environment seemed under divine injunction to destroy’’ (Baker 127). Zola’s The´re`se Raquin and La Beˆte Humaine were particularly strong influences on Wright, especially in the writing of Native Son. These two novels by Zola provided Wright with important symbols and image patterns which Wright ‘‘signified upon,’’ providing them with startling new meanings relevant to Wright’s experience as an American black man. Zola’s documentary procedures in which he patterned his fictional narratives upon actual criminal cases which he carefully studied also inspired Wright who

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modeled some of Bigger’s fictional narrative on the Robert Nixon case. It is important to realize, though, that Wright did not simply copy Zola’s form and content; rather, he both used and transformed the materials he got from Zola to express his own unique vision of African-American life. Although growing in part out of the deep naturalistic soil of naturalistic masterpieces such as The´re`se Raquin and La Beˆte Humaine, Native Son and all of Wright’s subsequent fiction flowered in their own unique way. Selected Bibliography: Baker, Houston. Singers at Daybreak. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1983. Butler, Robert. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Native Son and Two Novels by Zola: A Comparative Study,’’ Black American Literature Forum, XVII, no. 3 (fall 1984), 93– 100. Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson, Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press, 1985.

Selected Bibliography

PRIMARY WORKS In chronological order by publishing date.

Pagan Spain. New York: Harper and Row, 1957. White Man, Listen. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957. American Hunger. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Fiction Uncle Tom’s Children: Four Novellas. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1938. Uncle Tom’s Children: Five Long Stories. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. Native Son. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940. The Outsider. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1953. Savage Holiday. New York: Avon Books, 1954. The Long Dream. New York: Doubleday, 1958. Eight Men. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1961. Lawd Today! New York: Walkers and Co., 1963. Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. A Father’s Law. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Nonfiction ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing.’’ New Challenge 2 (fall 1937): 53–65. ‘‘The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.’’ In American Stuff: A WPA Writer’s Anthology. New York: Viking Press (1937): 39–52. ‘‘How Bigger Was Born’’ (pamphlet). New York: Harper, 1940. Twelve Million Black Voices. New York: Viking Press, 1941. ‘‘I Tried To Be a Communist.’’ Atlantic Monthly August 1944: 61–70. Black Boy. New York: Harper, 1945. Black Power. New York: Harper, 1954. The Color Curtain. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1956.

Drama Green, Paul, and Richard Wright. Native Son: The Biography of a Young American: A Play in Ten Scenes. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1941.

Poetry Haiku: This Other World. Edited by Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert Tener. New York: Arcade, 1998.

SECONDARY WORKS Bibliographies Fabre, Michel, and Charles T. Davis. 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 Criticism and Commentary, 1933–1982. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1988. Kinnamon, Keneth. Richard Wright: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism and Commentary, 1983–2003. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2006. Reilly, John. ‘‘Richard Wright: An Essay in Bibliography.’’ Resources for American Literary Study (autumn 1971): 131–180. Williams, John A. The Most Native of Sons. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1970.

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Selected Bibliography Books Bakish, David. Richard Wright. New York: Ungar, 1973. Brignano, Russell. Richard Wright: An Introduction to His Works. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1970. Butler, Robert. Richard Wright’s Native Son: the Emergence of a New Black Hero. New York: Twayne, 1990. Fabre, Michel. The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright. Translated by Isabel Barzun. New York: Morrow, 1973. ___. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. ___. Richard Wright: Books and Writers. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1990. Felgar, Robert. Richard Wright. Boston: Twayne, 1980. Fishburne, Katherine. Richard Wright’s Hero: The Faces of a Rebel-Victim. Metkuchen, New Jersey: Scarecrow Press, 1977. Gayle, Addison. Richard Wright: Ordeal of a Native Son. New York: Doubleday, 1980 Hakutani, Yoshinobu. Richard Wright and Racial Discourse. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1996. Jan Mohamed, Abdul R. The Death-Bound-Subject: Richard Wright’s Archaeology of Death. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2005. Joyce, Joyce Ann. Richard Wright’s Art of Tragedy. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1986. Kinnamon, Keneth. The Emergence of Richard Wright: A Study in Literature and Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Lynch, Michael F. Creative Revolt: A Study of Wright, Ellison, and Dostoevsky. New York: Peter Lang, 1990. McCall, Dan. The Example of Richard Wright. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Reilly, John. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Burt Franklin, 1978. Rickles, Milton and Patricia. Richard Wright. Austin, Texas: Steck-Vaughn, 1970. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Henry Holt, 2001. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Demonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work. New York: Warner/Amistad Books, 1988. Warnes, Richard Wright’s Native Son. London: Routledge, 2007. Webb, Constance. Richard Wright: A Biography. New York: Putnam, 1968. Weiss, Lynn. Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright: The Politics of Modernism. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

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Williams, John A. The Most Native of Sons. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1970.

Chapters in Books Baker, Houston. Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1972. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. ___. Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son. New York: Dell, 1961. Bell, Bernard. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1958. Cleaver, Eldridge. Soul on Ice. New York: Dell, 1968. Cooke, Michael. Afro-American Literature in the Twentieth Century: The Achievement of Intimacy. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1984. Davis, Arthur P. From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers , 1900–1960. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1974. Dawahare, Anthony. Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora’s Box. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Diawara, Manthia. In Search of Africa. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1998. Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1964. Franklin, V. P. Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths. New York: Scribner, 1995. Gayle, Addison. The Way of the New World: The Black Novel in America. Garden City, New Jersey: Doubleday, 1975. Gibson, Donald B., ed. Five Black Writers. New York: New York University Press, 1970. Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness.Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1993. Gloster, Hugh M. Negro Voices in American Fiction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948. Gounard, Jean-Francois. The Racial Problem in the Works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin. Translated by Joseph J. Rodgers. Jr. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1992. Howe, Irving. A World More Attractive. New York: Horizon, 1963. Jackson, Blyden. The Waiting Years. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. Leibowitz, Herbert. Fabricating Lives. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989.

Selected Bibliography Margolies, Edward. Native Sons: A Critical Study of Twentieth Century Negro American Authors. New York: Lippincott, 1968. Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Scruggs, Charles. Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993. Smith, Valerie. Self-Discovery and Authority in AfroAmerican Narrative. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Collections of Essays Abcarian, Richard. Richard Wright’s ‘‘Native Son’’: A Critical Handbook. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1970. Andrews, William L., and Douglas Taylor, eds. Richard Wright’s Black Boy (American Hunger): A Casebook. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Baker, Houston. Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘‘Native Son.’’ Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Bloom, Harold. Richard Wright. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. ___.Richard Wright’s Native Son. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. ___. Bigger Thomas. New York: Chelsea House, 1990. Butler, Robert, ed. The Critical Response to Richard Wright. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1995. Fabre, Michel. The World of Richard Wright. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1985. Gates, Henry Louis, and K. A. Appiah, ed. Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Hakutani, Yoshinobu, ed. Critical Essays on Richard Wright. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982. Kinnamon, Keneth. New Essays on Native Son. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1990. ___. ed..The Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s Native Son. New York: Twayne, 1997. Kinnamon, Keneth and Michel Fabre eds.. Conversations with Richard Wright. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1993. Macksey, Richard, and Frank Moorer. Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1984. Miller, James, ed.. Approaches to Teaching Wright’s Native Son. New York: Modern Language Association, 1997. Mitchell, Hayley R., ed.. Readings on Native Son. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, 2000. Smith, Virginia Whatley, ed.. Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections.. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001.

Trotman, James C. Richard Wright: Myths and Realities. New York: Garland, 1988.

Articles Adell, Sandra. ‘‘Richard Wright’s The Outsider and the Kierkegaardian Concept of Dread.’’ Comparative Literature Studies 28 (Fall 1991): 379–95. Alexander, Margaret Walker. ‘‘Natchez and Richard Wright in Southern American Literature.’’ The Southern Quarterly 29 (Summer 1991): 171–75. Andrews, William L. ‘‘In Search of a Common Identity: The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies.’’ The Southern Review 24 (Winter 1988): 47–64. Baldwin, James. ‘‘Everybody’s Protest Novel.’’ Partisan Review (June 1949): 25–39. Baldwin, Richard E. ‘‘The Creative Vision of Native Son.’’ Massachusetts Review 14 (1973): 278–90. Bingall, Elizabeth. ‘‘Burbanking Bigger and Betty the Bitch.’’ African American Review 40 (Fall 2006): 475–493. Brivic, Sheldon. ‘‘Conflict of Values: Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ Novel VII (Spring 1974): 231–45. Bryant, Earle V. ‘‘The Sexualization of Racism in Richard Wright’s ‘The Man Who Killed a Shadow.’ ’’ Black American Literature Forum 16 (Fall 1982): 119–121. Bryant, Jerry. ‘‘The Violence of Native Son.’’ Southern Review 17 (April 1981): 303–19. Butler, Robert James. ‘‘The Quest for Pure Motion in Richard Wright’s Black Boy.’’ MELUS 10 (Fall 1983): 5–17. ___.‘‘The Function of Violence in Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ Black American Literature Forum 20 (Spring–Summer 1986): 9–25. ___.‘‘Farrell’s Ethnic Neighborhood and Wright’s Urban Ghetto: Two Visions of Chicago’s South Side.’’ MELUS 18 (Spring 1993): 103–11. ___.‘‘The Loeb and Leopold Case: A Neglected Source for Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ African American Review 39 (Winter 2005): 555–567. Campbell, James. ‘‘The Wright Version.’’ Times Literary Supplement (December 13, 1991): 14 Carson, Warren. ‘‘ ‘They Don’t Look So Good, Mistah’: Realities of the South in Richard Wright’s Black Boy and Selected Short Fiction.’’ CLA Journal 47 (March 2004): 299–309. Cobb, Nina Cresser. ‘‘Richard Wright and Individualism Reconsidered.’’ CLA Journal 21 (1978): 335–54. Davis, Thaddeus. ‘‘The Metamorphosis of Richard Wright’s Black Boy.’’ American Literature 5 (May 1985): 199–214. Ellison, Ralph. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Blues.’’ The Antioch Review (Summer 1945): 20–35. 433

Selected Bibliography ___. ‘‘Remembering Richard Wright.’’ Delta 18 (April 1984): 1–13. Emmanuel, James. ‘‘Fever and Feeling: Notes on the Imagery of Native Son.’’ Negro Digest 18 (December 1968): 16–26. Fabre, Michel. ‘‘Margaret Walker’s Richard Wright: A Wrong Righted or Wright Wronged?’’ Mississippi: Quarterly 42 (Fall 1989): 429–60. France, Alan W. ‘‘Misogyny and Appropriation in Wright’s Native Son.’’ Modern Fiction Studies 34 (Autumn 1988): 413–423. Gallagher, Katherine. ‘‘Bigger’s Great Leap to the Figurative.’’ CLA Journal 27 (March 1984): 293–314. Gibson, Donald. ‘‘Wright’s Invisible Native Son.’’ American Quarterly 21 (Winter 1969): 728–39. ___.‘‘Richard Wright’sBlack Boy and the Trauma of Autobiographical Rebirth.’’ Callaloo 9 (Summer 1986): 492–98. Graham, Maryemma. ‘‘Richard Wright.’’ Callaloo 9 (Summer 1986): 21–30. Griffiths, Frederick. ‘‘Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright and the Case of Angelo Herndon.’’ African American Review 35 (Winter 2001): 615–36. Hakutani, Yoshinobu. ‘‘Native Son and An American Tragedy: Two Different Interpretations of Crime and Guilt.’’ The Centennial Review 23 (Spring 1979): 208–26. ___.‘‘Richard Wright, Toni Morrison and the African Primal Outlook on Life.’’ Southern Quarterly 40 (Fall 2001): 39–53. ___. ‘‘Richard Wright’s The Outsider and Albert Camus’s The Stranger.’’ Mississippi Quarterly 42 (Fall 1989): 365–378. Hernton, Calvin. ‘‘The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers.’’ Black American Literature Forum 18 (Winter 1984): 139–45. Jackson, Esther Merle. ‘‘The American Negro and the Image of the Absurd.’’ Phylon X III (1962): 359–71. Jan Mohamed, Abdul R. ‘‘Negating the Negative as a Form of Affirmation in Minority Discourse.’’ Cultural Critique 7 (Fall 1987): 245–66. Joyce, Joyce Ann. ‘‘Style and Meaning in Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ Black American Literature Forum 16 (Summer 1982): 112–15. Kent, George B. ‘‘Richard Wright: Blackness and the Adventure of Western Culture.’’ CLA Journal 12 (June 1969): 322–43. Kinnamon, Keneth. ‘‘How Native Son Was Born.’’ In Writing the American Classics, edited by James Barbour and Tom Quirk. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. ___.‘‘Richard Wright’s Use ofOthello in Native Son.’’ CLA Journal 12 (June 1969): 358–59. 434

Kiuchi, Toru. ‘‘The Critical Response in Japan to Richard Wright.’’ Mississippi Quarterly 50 (Spring 1997): 353–64. Lenz, Gunter. ‘‘Southern Exposures: The Urban Experience and the Reconstruction of Black Folk Culture and Community in the Works of Richard Wright and Zora Neal Hurston.’’ New York Folklore 7 (Summer 1981): 3–39. Lynch, Michael. ‘‘Haunted by Innocence: The Debate with Dostoevsky in Wright’s ‘Other Novel,’ The Outsider’’ 30 (Summer 1996): 255–66. Mackethan, Lucinda. ‘‘Black Boy and Ex-Colored Man: Version and Inversion of the Slave Narrator’s Quest for Voice.’’ CLA Journal 32 (December 1988): 123–47. McCluskey, John. ‘‘Two Steppin’: Richard Wright’s Encounter with Blue Jazz.’’ American Literature 55 (1983): 332–44. Miller, James A. ‘‘Bigger Thomas’s Quest for Voice and Audience in Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ Callaloo 9 (Summer 1986): 501–06. Nagel, James. ‘‘Images of ‘Vision’ in Native Son.’’ University Review 35 (December 1969): 109–15. Pudaloff, Ross. ‘‘Celebrity as Identity: Richard Wright, Native Son, and Mass Culture.’’ Studies in American Fiction 11 (Spring 1983): 3–18. Redden, Dorothy. ‘‘Richard Wright and Native Son. Not Guilty.’’ Black American Literature Forum 10 (Winter 1976): 111–16. Reilly, John. ‘‘Richard Wright Preaches the Nation: 12 Million Black Voices.’’ Black American Literature Forum 16 (Fall 1982): 116–19. Rodgers, Lawrence. ‘‘Richard Wright, Frank Marshall Davis and the Chicago Renaissance.’’ Langston Hughes Review 14 (Spring–Fall 1996): 4–12. Rowley, Hazel. ‘‘The Shadow of the White Woman: Richard Wright and the Book-of-the-Month Club.’’ Partisan Review 66 (Fall 1999): 625–34. Scott, Nathan. ‘‘Search for Beliefs: The Fiction of Richard Wright.’’ University of Kansas City Review XXIII (1956): 19–24. Scruggs, Charles. ‘‘The Importance of the City in Native Son.’’ Ariel 9 (1978): 37–47. Siegel, Paul. ‘‘The Conclusion of Richard Wright’s Native Son.’’ PMLA 89 (May 1974): 517–23. Singh, Amritjit. ‘‘Richard Wright’s The Outsider Existentialist Exemplar of Critique?’’ CLA Journal 27 (June 1984): 357–70. Skerrett, Joseph T. ‘‘Richard Wright: Writing and Identity.’’ Callaloo 2 (October 1979): 84–89. Smethurst, James. ‘‘Invented by Horror: The Gothic and African American Literary Ideology in Native Son.’’ African American Review 35 (Spring 2001): 29–40.

Selected Bibliography Tate, Claudia C. ‘‘Black Boy: Richard Wright’s ‘Tragic Sense of Life.’ ’’ Black American Literature Forum 10 (1976): 117–19. Tremaine, Louis. ‘‘The Dissociated Sensibility of Bigger Thomas in Wright’s Native Son.’’ Studies in American Fiction 14 (Spring 1986): 63–76. Ward. Jerry W. ‘‘Richard Wright’s Hunger.’’ Virginia Quarterly Review 5 (1978): 148–53. ___.‘‘The Wright Critical Paradigm: Facing a Future.’’ Callaloo 9 (Summer 1985): 25–43.

Wertham, Frederic, M.D. ‘‘An Unconscious Determinant in Native Son.’’ Journal of Clinical Psychopathology and Psychotherapy 6 (Winter 1944): 111–15. Williams, Sherley Ann. ‘‘Papa Dick and Sister Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright.’’ In American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Fritz Fleischmann. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. 394–415. Witt, Mary Anne. ‘‘Rage and Racism in The Stranger and Native Son.’’ The Comparatist 1 (1977): 35–47.

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Index

Aaron, Abe, 5, 22, 23, 75, 77, 209, 355 Aaron, Daniel, 253 Abrahams, Peter, 13, 117 Absurdity of the universe, 7–8, 34, 334 Africa, 14–15, 166, 187; Algeria, 123; freedom movements in, 69–70, 100–101, 107, 123, 204, 260–61, 296–97, 298–99; Ghana (Gold Coast), 14, 17, 46–47, 62–63, 86, 100–101, 147–48, 165, 260–61, 285–86, 296–97. See also Pan-Africanism African American writing: Wright’s beliefs on, 6, 48, 237– 39, 402; Wright’s influence on, 8, 10–11, 28, 48, 76, 176, 263, 279, 426–27 ‘‘Ah Feels It in Mah Bones’’ (Wright), 15, 333 Ailly, France, 15–16 Alger, Horatio, 16–17, 99, 352 Algeria, 123 Alger myth, 16 Algren, Nelson, 5, 17, 22, 75, 83, 263, 413 Alienation, 5, 75, 76, 111, 210, 257 ‘‘Almos’ a Man’’ (Wright), 17–18, 170–71 American Century, The (journal), 51

American consciousness, impact of Native Son on, 7 American Dilemma, An (Myrdal), 265–66 American Dream, 17 American Hunger (Wright), 18– 20, 42, 53, 116, 134, 194, 213; publishing history of, 313; themes in, 289–90, 306–7, 347; translations of, 207. See also Black Boy American Mercury, The (journal), 20, 27, 83 American Writers’ Congress, 186, 357 Anderson, Lewis, 21 Anderson, Sherwood, 21, 382 Angelo Herndon case, 21–22, 93 Anvil (journal), 22–23, 78, 83, 301 Aragon, Louis, 23, 30, 375 Argentina, 23, 74 Arkansas, 25–26, 113–15, 239– 40, 257, 316, 399–400, 406 Aswell, Edward, 13, 19, 26–27, 58, 132, 135, 194, 199, 224, 237, 265, 271, 281, 321, 402 Atlanta Six, 282–83 Atlantic Monthly, The (magazine), 27–28 Attaway, William, 28–29, 426 ‘‘Attributes of Life’’ (Wright), 29– 30, 124 Avant garde writers, 162

‘‘Avant Garde Writing’’ (Wright), 30 Awards and prizes, 6, 18, 26, 132, 186, 252, 271, 281, 287, 309, 358, 361, 362–63, 418, 425 Back to Africa project, 14 Baldwin, James, 11, 31–32, 134, 153, 181, 200, 207, 238, 299 Bandung Conference, 81, 195–96, 311 Baraka, Amira, 251 Beale Street, 32–33 Beat generation, 165, 236 Beauvoir, Simone de, 7, 33–35, 120–21, 299, 335 Beiles, Sinclair, 165 Belgium, 35–36 Bellow, Saul, 378 Berry, Abner, 36–37 ‘‘Between Laughter and Tears’’ (Wright), 37–38, 188 ‘‘Between the World and Me’’ (Wright), 38–39, 157–58, 177, 206–7, 246, 289, 290, 306, 307, 322, 328, 347 ‘‘Big Black Good Man’’ (Wright), 112 ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home’’ (Wright), 18, 38, 39–41, 54, 105, 240– 41, 246, 279, 308, 328, 355, 381, 382 Bilbo, Theodore Gilman, 41–42 Birdoff, Harry, 272 437

Index Black Arts Movement, 57 Black Boy (Wright), 1, 4, 19, 42– 43, 165–66, 213, 258; as book-of-the-month, 53, 134; changes made to, 26–27, 42, 235; criticism of, 41–42; existentialist philosophy in, 7–8; fire imagery in, 322–23; inspiration for, 267–68; Library of America edition, 235, 236; publishing history of, 313; reaction to, 7–8; reviews of, 95, 110; significance of, 42–43; silencing motif in, 29; themes in, 289–90, 306–7, 347; violence in, 38 Blackburn, D. C., 47–48 Black folk art, 6 Black Hope (Wright), 43 Blacklisting, 178–79 Black Marxism, 44–45, 253 Black Metropolis (Drake and Cayton), 45–46, 68, 69, 78, 106–7, 197–98, 378, 386 Black nationalism, 14, 44, 298. See also Pan-Africanism Black Power movement, 57, 354, 374 Black Power (Wright), 10, 14, 46– 47, 86, 100–101, 285–86, 297, 299, 302–3, 313, 344 Black schools, 2, 29, 352–53 Black writers. Wright’s influence on, 8, 10–11, 28, 48, 76, 426– 27. See also African American writing; specific writers by name Blood on the Forge (Attaway), 28 ‘‘Blueprint for Negro Writing’’ (Wright), 6, 21, 48, 49, 158, 165, 186, 253, 259, 279, 302, 309 Blues Fell This Morning (Oliver), ‘‘Foreword,’’ 138 Blues music, 48–49, 287, 317 Bokanowski, He´le`ne, 16, 49–50 Bokanowski, Michel, 16, 49–50 Bontemps, Arna, 9, 50–51, 83, 185, 211, 227, 269, 292 Booker, Perry, 53–54 Book of Prefaces, A (Mencken), 3, 51–53, 257–59, 284 Book of Prejudices, A (Mencken), 52, 257, 258–59, 309–10 438

Book-of-the-Month Club, 19, 29, 42, 53, 134, 235, 271, 313 Boulton, Inez, 57 Brewer, Clinton, 54–55, 91, 153, 168, 336, 398 ‘‘Bright and Morning Star’’ (Wright), 26, 55–56, 170, 206, 381, 382, 400 Brooklyn, 56–57 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 57–58 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 252 Browder, Earl, 58–59, 308, 359, 365 Brown, Joe, 4, 29, 59–60, 75 Brown, Lloyd, 426 Brown v. Board of Education, 79 Buenos Aires, 24 Burns, Ben, 61–62, 192, 349 Busia, Kofi Abrefa, 62–63 Cafe´ Tournon, 16, 65–66, 98, 172, 299, 299–300 Camus, Albert, 7, 9, 66–67, 121– 22, 291 Canada, 67–68 Cayton, Horace, 45–46, 68–69, 78, 106, 168, 197, 303, 330, 332, 378 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 254 Ce´saire, Aime´, 14, 69–71, 123, 253, 277, 286, 343 ‘‘Cesspool’’ (Wright), 71–72. See also Lawd Today! Challenge (journal), 72–73 Chapman, Abraham, 73 Chenal, Pierre, 24, 73–74, 272, 273, 348, 361 Chicago, 4–6, 17, 45–46, 60, 68– 69, 74–76, 116, 332–33; Black Metropolis, 197–98; during Depression, 157–58, 362; ghetto life, 220–21, 348–49, 378; Great Migration and, 158–59; race riots in, 315–16 Chicago Post Office, 4–5, 71–72, 74–77, 137, 157, 211, 280, 354–55 Chicago Renaissance, 77–78, 157, 211, 332 Chicago School of Sociology, 78, 197, 300, 385–386, 412 Childhood, 2–4, 25, 33, 114,

141–42, 154, 177, 183, 202–3, 256–58, 267–68, 345–47, 399–400, 404–7 ‘‘Child of Dead and Forgotten Gods’’ (Wright), 22, 78–79, 83, 116, 306 Civil rights movement, 28, 79–80, 175, 219–20, 265, 304, 326, 373, 374 Cobbins, O. B., 302 Cold War, 34, 59, 62, 65, 80–81, 85, 93, 135, 138, 140, 233, 253–54 Colonialism, 10, 14, 69–70, 100, 148, 251, 296 Color Curtain, The (Wright), 10, 36–37, 81, 196, 266, 299, 302– 3, 313, 371 Comintern, 44 Communism, 5–6, 23, 247; appeal of, 22, 76, 319, 341, 343; Black Marxism and, 44– 45; Cold War and, 80–81; disillusionment with, 7, 20, 27– 28, 44–45, 150, 191, 194, 210, 222, 225, 253, 296, 302, 351– 52; fictional treatment of, 55– 56; HUAC and, 178–79; imperialism and, 14; influence of, 323; Popular Front and, 58– 59, 225, 227, 308–9. See also John Reed Club; Marxism; Socialism Communist Party of America, 5, 7, 20, 22, 27–28, 44–45, 76, 151–52, 209, 296, 319, 365– 66; Browder and, 58–59, 308, 359, 365; Daily Worker, 6, 36, 90–91, 94, 138, 157, 169, 316, 340; Davis and, 93–94; New Masses, 172, 185, 193, 209, 227, 229, 280; Concept of Dread (Kierkegaard), 9 Congress of Negro Writers and Artists, 277 Conquerors, The (Malraux), 247 Conrad, Joseph, 82 Conroy, Jack, 5, 22, 75, 78, 83– 84, 119, 278–79, 340 Conversion motif, 347 Crane, Stephen, 4, 84–85, 258, 277 Criminal cases, 284–85, 324–25, 340, 372–73; Angelo Herndon

Index case, 21–22, 93; Leopold and Loeb case, 71, 91, 92, 230–32, 248; Moscow show trails, 262– 63; Scottsboro Trial, 21, 93, 185, 340 Cripps, Thomas, 272, 273 Crossman, Richard, 19, 85 Cullen, Countee, 14, 31, 85–87, 400 ‘‘Daddy Goodness’’ (Wright), 89– 90 Daily Worker (newspaper), 6, 36, 90–91, 94, 138, 157, 169, 316, 340 Dark Laughter (Anderson), 382 Dark Legend: A Study in Murder (Wertham), 91 Darrow, Clarence, 91–93, 398 Davis, Benjamin, Jr., 93–94, 152, 378 Davis, Frank Marshall, 77, 80, 94–96 Davis, George, 96–97 Death, 10 Deep South. See South Demby, William, 426 Detective fiction, 97–98, 136–37 Deux Magots, 98 Dime novels, 98–99, 136 Diop, Alioune, 99–101, 344 Diop, Thomas, 300 Disenfranchisement, 3, 41 Disinherited, The (Conroy), 83, 84 Dodson, Owen, 101–102 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 4, 52, 97–98, 102–3, 152, 160, 250, 258, 310, 339 Double consciousness, 224 ‘‘Double victory,’’ 103, 418 Douglass, Frederick, 1 ‘‘Down by the Riverside’’ (Wright), 40, 103–5, 206, 261, 381, 382 Dozens, the, 105–6 Drake, St. Clair, 45–46, 68, 78, 106–7, 197, 378 Dreiser, Theodore, 4, 19, 46, 52, 75, 107–8, 197, 226, 258, 277 Du Bois, W. E. B., 44, 80, 108– 10, 224, 238, 298, 378 Dumas, Alexander, 238 Dumas, Le´on Gautian, 69–70

Ebony (magazine), 61, 349 Education: Jim Hill Primary School, 21, 47–48, 53, 59–60, 124–25, 203, 208–9, 213, 227, 352, 392–93, 405; segregated, 2, 29, 352–53; Smith Robertson Junior High School, 21, 38, 48, 53, 59–60, 124–25, 203, 213, 227, 302, 352–53, 389, 392–93, 405 e. e. cummings, 30 Eight Men (Wright), 10, 111–13, 154, 261; publishing history of, 313; reviews of, 184; South in, 355–56; translations of, 207. See also specific stories by name Elaine, Arkansas, 25, 113–15, 257, 316 Eliot, T. S., 30, 72, 115–16 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, 22, 49, 116–17, 186, 193, 204, 207, 238, 251, 256, 281, 292, 316, 378 Elmer Gantry (Lewis), 234 Emori, Moriya, 206 England, 117–18 ‘‘Ethics of Living Jim Crow, The’’ (Wright), 118–20, 316, 327, 381 Ethnography, 188 ‘‘Everywhere Burning Waters Rise’’ (Wright), 116, 120, 306 Existentialism, 7–8, 9, 34, 66–67, 120–22, 150, 174, 217–18, 284, 291–92, 334–35, 402, 420 Expatriate life, 8–10, 65–66, 82, 98, 139–40, 172, 206, 353. See also France Fabre, Michel, 14, 82, 153–54, 229, 305–6, 314, 333 Fanon, Frantz, 70, 123–24 Farish, Minnie, 124–25 Farm Security Administration (FSA), 303, 329 Farrell, James Thomas, 5, 46, 72, 75, 125–26, 197, 204, 263, 340, 347, 378, 381 Father’s Law, A (Wright), 10, 126– 27, 314 Faulkner, William, 30, 127–28, 248

‘‘FB Eye Blues, The’’ (Wright), 128 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation), 128–29, 141, 179, 192, 199, 229, 379 Fear, 217 Federal Theatre Project (FTP), 5, 75, 129–30, 178, 228, 394, 417 Federal Writers Project (FWP), 5, 17, 28, 75, 118–19, 130–31, 241, 264, 281, 362, 417 Film noir, 98, 131, 272 Financial problems, 24 ‘‘Fire and Cloud’’ (Wright), 6, 18, 26, 131–32, 186, 322, 361, 381, 382 Fire metaphor, 306, 322–23, 347– 48, 381 First American Writers’ Congress, 59, 73, 133, 340–41 First International Congress of Negro Artists and Writers, 14– 15, 70, 109, 133–34, 224, 310 Fischer, John, 134–35, 235–36, 291 Fisher, Dorothy Canfield, 19, 26, 42, 135–36 Fisher, Julius, 248, 249 Flynn’s Detective Weekly (magazine), 99, 131, 136–37, 352 Folk art, 6 Folk expressions, 105–6, 238 Ford, James W., 36, 76, 90–91, 137–38, 341 ‘‘Foreword’’ to Blues Fell This Morning, 138 Fourth American Writers Conference, 139, 287 France, 8–10, 82, 86–87, 139–40, 192, 233; Ailly, 15–16; Moulin d’ Ande´, 264–65; Paris, 65–66, 86–87, 98, 199–200, 299–300, 360 Franco-American Fellowship, 9, 81, 140–41 Frazier, E. Franklin, 78, 141–42, 385 Freedman, Jerrold, 272 Free will, 7 French Communist Party, 23 Freud, Sigmund, 142–43 Freudian themes, 336–37 Friendships, 21, 47–48, 53–54, 439

Index 59–60, 124–25, 157, 171–72, 203, 213–14, 288, 393. See also specific individuals by name Garvey, Marcus, 14, 145–47, 278, 384–85 Gayle, Addison, 129 Ghana (Gold Coast), 14, 15, 46– 47, 62–63, 86, 100–101, 107, 147–48, 165, 260–61, 285–86, 296–97, 299 Gibson, Richard, 148–49 Gide, Andre´, 149–51 God That Failed, The (Crossman), 85, 150, 222, 351, 352 Gold, Michael, 5, 75, 151–52, 209, 340, 372 Gold Coast. See Ghana (Gold Coast) Gorky, Maxim, 152–53 Gothic (literary style), 153–56, 254 Gourfain, Ed, 156 Gourfain, Joyce, 156–57, 205 Grapes of Wrath, The (Steinbeck), 361 Great Depression, 20, 48, 72, 74, 75, 129, 157–58, 329, 360, 361–62, 376 Great Flood (1927), 261–62 Great Migration, 4, 28, 74, 158– 59, 193, 342 Green, Paul, 7, 159–61, 180–81, 274–76, 396–97 Greenwich Village, 151, 161–62, 281, 282 Greenwood, Mississippi, 162–63 Hagglund, Ben, 22 Haiku, 10, 165–67, 208, 305, 307 Haiku: The Other World (Wright), 314 Hammond, John, 167–68 Handlin, Oscar, 403 Hansberry, Lorraine, 9 Harlem, 6, 168–70, 223, 316 Harlem Renaissance, 20, 50, 72, 85–86, 100, 168–69, 185, 187, 211, 240, 400 Harper and Brothers, 19, 26 Harper’s Magazine, 27, 135–36, 170–71 Harrington, Ollie, 102, 129, 140, 440

148, 171–72, 200, 299, 299– 300 Harris, Frank, 277 Harsh, Vivian G., 78 Hayden, Robert, 238 ‘‘Hearst Headline Blues’’ (Wright), 172–73 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 173 Heidegger, Martin, 121, 173–74 Hemingway, Ernest, 174–75, 297, 341, 360 Herndon, Angelo, 21–22, 93 Hill, Herbert, 175–76 Himes, Chester, 200, 299, 426 Hollywood Ten, 178 Homes, Chester Bomar, 176, 186 Horton, George Moses, 238 Hoskins, Silas, 3, 25, 38, 114, 176–78, 202, 246, 345, 407–8, 419 Houseman, John, 130, 160, 179– 81, 274–76, 396 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 65, 80, 94, 130, 178–79, 187, 192, 229, 253–54, 326 ‘‘How ‘Bigger’ Was Born’’ (Wright), 24, 74, 154–55, 181– 82, 333 Howe, Irving, 6–7, 117, 183–84, 269 Howe Institute, 182–83 Hughes, Langston, 5, 51, 62, 75, 80, 86, 184–87, 211, 227, 238, 263, 269, 392 Hunger, 2 Hurston, Zora Neale, 37–38, 187–89, 382–83, 387, 400 Husserl, Edmund, 173 ‘‘I Am a Red Slogan’’ (Wright), 191 Ibsen, Henrik, 4, 258 ‘‘I Choose Exile’’ (Wright), 61, 192 ‘‘I Have Seen Black Hands’’ (Wright), 39, 192–93, 210, 317, 333, 355, 404 Illinois Writers Project, 5, 75, 195, 237, 377, 392, 412, 413 Imperialism, 14 India, 278 Individualism, 45

Indonesia, 195–96 Inferno (Dante), 323 International Literature (magazine), 15, 191, 196–97 Interracial marriage, 8, 332 In the Castle of My Skin (Lamming), 198–99, 224 ‘‘Introduction’’: to Black Metropolis, 197–98; to In the Castle of My Skin, 198–99 Invisible Man (Ellison), 117, 184, 251, 292, 316 Ironies, 323–24 Irony, 381 ‘‘Island of Hallucinations’’ (Wright), 10, 65–66, 90, 149, 199–200, 265 ‘‘I Tried to Be a Communist’’ (Wright), 19, 27–28, 76, 109– 10, 186–87, 193–95, 252, 308, 318, 351 Jackal, The (Wright), 201–2, 324, 398 Jackson, Mississippi, 25, 202–3 James, C. L. R., 100, 203–4, 296, 377, 395 James, Henry, 154, 156, 204–6 Japan, 206–8 Jazz, 169 Jim Crow laws, 2–3, 80, 119–20, 304, 315, 342 Jim Hill Primary School, 21, 47– 48, 53, 59–60, 124–25, 203, 208–9, 213, 227, 352, 392–93, 405 John Reed Club, 5, 17, 20, 30, 44, 59, 73, 75, 76, 133, 157, 192, 194, 209–11, 212, 227, 229– 30, 318, 320, 355, 394, 413 Johnson, Charles S., 78, 385 Johnson, Fenton, 77, 211–12, 238 Johnson, John H., 192 Jordan, Bill, 212, 413 Jordan, Dick, 213–14 Journalism career, 6 Joyce, James, 30, 72, 214–15, 347 Juvenile delinquency, 324–25 Kenyatta, Jomo, 14 Kierkegaard, Soren, 7, 9, 121, 217–18, 291 King, Martin Luther, 219–20

Index ‘‘King Joe’’ (Wright), 218–19, 245, 287, 307, 317, 327 Kinnamon, Keneth, 2, 56 Kitchenettes, 220–21 Kline, Herbert, 256 Knock on Any Door (Motley), 264 Koestler, Arthur, 221–22, 263 Ku Klux Klan, 3 Lafargue Clinic, 201, 223, 324, 398 Lamming, George, 198–99, 223– 24 La Nef (journal), 239–40 Lanier, W. H., 29, 352, 353 Law, Oliver, 225 Lawd Today! (Wright), 6, 10, 30, 115–16, 225–27, 235, 313, 322; criticism of, 32; naturalistic reading of, 226; as satire, 226; treatment of women in, 154 Lawson, John Howard, 340 League of American Writers, 5, 185 League of Struggle for Negro Rights, 227 Leaner, Arthur, 227–28 Lee, Canada, 228–29, 276 Left Front (journal), 44, 133, 209, 212, 229–30 Lenin, Vladimir, 44 Leopold and Loeb case, 71, 91, 92, 230–32, 248 Les Deux Magots, 65, 299 LeSueur, Meridel, 232 Let Me Breathe Thunder (Attaway), 28 Levi, Carlo, 232–33 Levin, Meyer, 301 Le´vi-Strauss, Claude, 233–34 Lewis, Sinclair, 4, 19, 234, 258 Library of America, 27, 29, 42, 53, 135, 234–36, 314 ‘‘Lines of Winter Rain’’ (Wright), 167 Lipton, Lawrence, 236–37 Literary history, 312 Literary influences, 3–4, 72, 82, 84–85, 102–3, 107–8, 115–16, 152–53, 205–6, 214–15, 234, 257–58, 305, 309–10, 429–30. See also specific writers by name ‘‘Literature of the Negro in the

United States’’ (Wright), 237– 39, 402 Little Rock, Arkansas, 239–40 Locke, Alain, 86, 240–41, 268, 400 Loeb, Richard. See Leopold and Loeb case ‘‘Long Black Song’’ (Wright), 38, 114, 177, 241, 241–42, 356, 381, 382 Long Dream, The (Wright), 10, 18, 38, 105–6, 178, 184, 187, 199, 242–44, 268, 313, 323, 328 Lost generation, 174–75, 214, 359–60 Louis, Joe, 90, 168, 218–19, 244– 45, 287, 307, 327 Lovett, Robert Morss, 5, 75 Lynchings, 3, 38–39, 177–78, 193, 245–46, 289, 307, 327– 28, 342, 382 Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Crane), 84, 85 Malraux, Andre´, 247–48 ‘‘Man, God Ain’t Like That’’ (Wright), 113 Mann, Thomas, 372 Mannoni, Octave, 251 ‘‘Man of All Work’’ (Wright), 113 Man’s Hope (Malraux), 247–48 ‘‘Man Who Killed a Shadow, The’’ (Wright), 154, 248–50, 415 ‘‘Man Who Lived Underground, The’’ (Wright), 7, 16, 112, 136–37, 178, 194, 250–51, 277, 321, 413 ‘‘Man Who Saw the Flood, The’’ (Wright), 112–13, 261–62 ‘‘Man Who Was Almost a Man, The’’ (Wright), 112, 356 March on Washington, 194, 252 Martinsville Seven, 140 Marxism, 7, 76, 143, 194, 238, 251–53, 279, 323, 358–59, 376–77; appeal of, 343; Black Marxism, 44–45; Hegel and, 173; Popular Front and, 308–9; Stalinism, 359, 377. See also Communism Masses, The (journal), 280 Masters, Edgar Lee, 75

McAulife, Tom, 77 McCarthyism, 44, 80, 229, 253– 54, 326 McCullers, Carson, 254–55, 281 McGee, Willie, 140, 255 Meadman, Dhimah Rose, 57, 116, 203, 255–56, 281, 332, 361 Memphis, Tennessee, 2, 3–4, 32– 33, 114, 183, 256–58 Mencken, H. L., 3–4, 19, 20, 51– 53, 83, 257–58, 258–59, 284, 309–10 Mercury Theatre, 179 Mexico, 256 Michael Reese Hospital, 259, 401, 412 Minus, Marian, 48, 72, 102, 259– 60, 279, 281, 400, 401 ‘‘Miracle of Nationalism on the African Gold Coast, The’’ (Wright), 260–61, 402 Mississippi, 41–42, 388–89; Greenwood, 162–63; Jackson, 25, 202–3; Natchez, 267–68, 322–23, 408–10 Mississippi River flood (1927), 261–62 Modes of transmission, 312 Moore, George, 277 Moscow show trails, 262–63 Motley, Willard, 263–64, 353, 426 Moulin d’Ande´, France, 264–65 Myrdal, Alva, 357 Myrdal, Gunnar, 265–66, 357 Natchez, Mississippi, 267–68, 322–23, 408–10 Nathan, George Jean, 20 National Negro Congress, 93, 95, 227, 268–69, 392 Native Son (Wright), 6, 269–72; blues and, 49; as book-of-the-month, 134, 271, 313; documentary sources in, 284–85; film version, 24, 74, 178–79, 229, 272–74; imagery in, 395; influence of, 6–7, 269; ironic humor in, 105; kitchenettes in, 220–21, 343; Leopold and Loeb case and, 231; Library of America edition, 235, 236; as parody, 16–17; plot summary, 441

Index 269–70; publishing history of, 312–13; reaction to, 270–71; reviews of, 36, 91, 95, 151–52, 184, 241, 271, 350–51; sales of, 53; stage versions, 160–61, 179–81, 228–29, 274–76, 397; themes in, 306, 321, 398–99; translations of, 206; treatment of women in, 154–55; urban life presented in, 158–59 Naturalism, 1, 126, 206, 258, 264, 276–77, 378, 429 Ne´gritude, 14, 69–70, 100, 124, 134, 277–78, 343–45 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 278, 311–12 New Anvil (journal), 22, 83, 186, 278–79 New Caravan (Mumford ed.), 39, 279 New Challenge, The (journal), 48, 72–73, 102, 259–60, 279, 281, 400–401 New Criticism, 183 New Masses (journal), 172, 185, 193, 209, 227, 229, 280 ‘‘New Negro,’’ 85 Newton, Herbert, 250, 281, 282– 283, 421 Newton, Jane, 56–57, 256, 281, 283, 421 New York, 6, 8, 280–282; Brooklyn, 56–57; Greenwich Village, 151, 161–62, 281, 282; Harlem, 6, 168–70, 223, 316 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 52, 283–84 Nixon, Robert, 248, 284–85, 392 Nkrumah, Kwame, 14, 46, 62, 86, 100, 107, 147, 186, 260, 285– 86, 296, 298, 311–12 Norman, Dorothy, 174, 217, 233, 286, 379, 398 Norris, Frank, 277 North, discrimination in, 4, 8, 342–43, 418. See also Chicago; New York ‘‘Note on Jim Crow Blues,’’ 287, ‘‘Not My People’s War’’ (Wright), 103, 286–87, 309, 358, 418 Nurse, Malcolm. See Padmore, George Nutt, Howard, 288 ‘‘Obsession’’ (Wright), 289–90, 306, 307 442

‘‘Old Habit and New Love’’ (Wright), 290 Oliver, Paul, 138, 290–91 Outsider, The (Wright), 9, 23–24, 118, 135, 235, 291–93; existentialist philosophy in, 66– 67, 174; plot summary, 291– 92; publishing history of, 313; reviews of, 36 Padmore, Dorothy, 118, 285, 295 Padmore, George, 14, 36, 100, 117, 147, 199, 253, 265, 285, 295, 296–97, 298, 354, 377 Pagan Spain (Wright), 10, 24, 188, 266, 297–98, 303, 313, 357 Pan-Africanism, 14, 110, 117, 123, 147, 204, 224, 253, 295, 296–297, 298–99, 310–11, 343, 355 Papa Bon Dieu (Sapin), 89 Paris, 65–66, 86–87, 98, 199– 200, 224, 299–300, 360 Park, Robert, 1, 78, 265, 300 Partisan Review (journal), 22, 83, 300–301 Passos, John Dos, 378 Pe`re Lachaise Cemetery, 299, 300, 301, 354 Peron, Juan, 24 ‘‘Personalism’’ (Wright), 21, 301–2 Pessimism, 338–39 Peterson, William, 302 Petry, Ann, 426 Photography of Richard Wright, 302–3, 348 Plessy v. Ferguson, 303–4 PM (newspaper), 304–5 Poe, Edgar Allan, 52, 98, 154, 305, 366 Poetry, 5, 10, 15, 30, 78–79, 116, 165–67, 208, 305–7, 395. See also specific poems by name Poindexter, David, 307–8, 377 Poplar, Ellen. See Wright, Ellen ‘‘Popular Front,’’ 58–59, 225, 227, 308–9 Postal work. See Chicago Post Office ‘‘Post Office Nights’’ (Wright), 22 Prejudices (Mencken), 3, 309–10 Prescott, Orville, 292

Pre´sence Africaine (journal), 14, 58, 70, 100, 101, 124, 150, 277–78, 300, 310–11, 402–3 Prizes. See Awards and prizes Proust, Marcel, 30 Psychic wounds, 25, 38, 114, 176–77, 290, 311–12, 399 ‘‘Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People, The’’ (Wright), 311–12, 402 Publishing history, 312–14 Pushkin, Alexander, 238 Quebec, 67–68 Race riots, 114–15, 169, 315–16 Racial violence, 3, 38–39, 114– 15, 119–20, 177–78, 203, 217, 245–46, 327–28, 342, 381, 382–83 Racism, 2–3, 8, 40, 282. See also Segregation Rags to riches myth, 16–17 Rahv, Phillip, 22, 300–301 Rampersad, Arnold, 1, 10–11, 324 Randolph, A. Phillip, 137, 252, 268 Rassemblement De´mocratique Re´volutionnaire (RDR), 9, 81, 233, 316–17, 335, 355 Realism, 258 Rebel Poet (journal), 22 Rebel Poets, 83 Red Badge of Courage (Crane), 84– 85 ‘‘Red Clay Blues’’ (Wright and Hughes), 317 Reddick, Lawrence, 219, 319–20 Redding, J. Saunders, 9 ‘‘Red Front’’ (Aragon), 23 ‘‘Red Leaves of Books’’ (Wright), 317–18 ‘‘Red Love Note, A’’ (Wright), 192, 230, 306, 318–19, 333 Red scare, 138 Red Summer, 315 Reed, John, 209 Religion, 250, 306, 346–48, 346–48 Religious motifs, 306 ‘‘Rest for the Weary’’ (Wright), 192, 230, 318, 320–21

Index Restlessness motif, 18 Reynolds, Paul, 19, 271, 281, 291, 297, 321–22, 402 Rhythm Club fire (1940), 268, 322–23 ‘‘Rise and Live’’ (Wright), 306, 323–24 Rite of Passage (Wright), 10, 18, 178, 201, 314, 324–25 Robeson, Paul, 44, 80, 168, 180, 203, 229, 287, 325–27 Robinson, Ray, 3, 38, 115, 177, 203, 327–28 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 6, 328–29 Rosskam, Edwin, 7, 69, 329–30, 377 Rowley, Hazel, 3, 5, 319, 323 Rutherford, William, 140 Sablonie`re, Margrit de, 331–32, 339–40, 373 ‘‘Sacrifice’’ (Wright), 332 Sandburg, Carl, 30, 75, 211, 332– 33 Sapin, Louis, 89 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 7, 9, 33, 34, 35, 66, 120–21, 299, 316, 334–35, 379 Savage Holiday (Wright), 9–10, 18, 55, 91, 178, 313, 321, 335–38 Schmeling, Max, 90 School desegregation, 79, 239 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 338–39 Schuyler, George S., 332 Schuyler, Josephine, 332 Schwartzman, Victor, 339–40 Scottsboro Trial, 21, 93, 185, 340 Seaver, Edwin, 237, 250, 340–41 Second American Writers’ Congress, 73, 341 Second Chicago Renaissance, 75 Segregation, 1–2, 2–3, 29, 41, 76, 119–20, 265, 303–4, 342–43, 349–50, 367, 418 Senghor, Le´opold, 14, 69–70, 123, 277, 285, 343–45 Settlement House (Memphis), 183, 345–46 Seventh Day Adventism, 25, 202– 3, 306, 346–48, 389, 399, 404– 5, 409 ‘‘Shame of Chicago, The’’ (Wright), 61, 348–50

Sharecropping, 349–50 Silencing motif, 29, 289–90, 307 Sillen, Samuel, 280, 350–51 Silone, Ignazio, 233, 351–52, 379 Slave narratives, 131 Slave trade, 47 Smith, William Gardner, 200, 291, 299, 353–54 Smith Robertson Junior High School, 21, 38, 48, 53, 59–60, 124–25, 203, 213, 227, 302, 352–53, 389, 392–93, 405 Socialism, 6, 76, 326, 327, 351, 354–55, 363 Socialist Party of America, 44 Souls of Black Folks, The (Du Bois), 109 South: legal system in, 2–3, 21– 22, 80, 119–20, 304, 315, 342; as portrayed in Wright’s works, 355–56, 381–83; segregated, 1–2, 2–3, 29, 41, 76, 119–20, 304, 342–43, 349–50, 418; sharecropping in, 349–50; social environment of, 1–3; traumatic experiences in, 25, 38–39 Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 219 Southern Exposure (White), 287 Southside Writers’ Group, 5, 20, 75, 212, 392, 394 South Street (Smith), 353–54 Soviet Union, 150, 262–63, 296 Spain, 297–98, 356–57 Spanish Civil War, 357 Spingarn Medal, 186, 252, 271, 287, 309, 326, 358, 418, 425 ‘‘Spread Your Sunrise’’ (Wright), 355, 358–59 Stalin, Josef, 262–63, 341, 359, 376–77 Stalinism, 359, 377 Stein, Gertrude, 30, 61, 86, 122, 233, 357, 359–60, 387 Steinbeck, John, 256, 360–61 Stock market crash (1929), 75, 157, 361, 361–62 Stone Face (Smith), 354 Story (magazine), 17–18, 26, 132, 281, 362–63 Strachey, John, 118, 363–64 Stranger, The (Camus), 66–67

‘‘Strength’’ (Wright), 22, 78, 83, 364–65 Strong, Anna Louise, 365–66 Suffering, 289–90, 307 ‘‘Superstition’’ (Wright), 366–67 Tarbaby’s Dawn (Wright), 369–70 Tar Baby (Wright), 244 Targ, William, 370–72 Tenant farming, 349–50 Tennessee, 2–5, 32–33, 114, 256– 58 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 37, 188, 382–83 These Low Grounds (Turpin), 37 Third American Writers Congress, 372, 392 This Other World (Wright), 10 Till, Emmett, 79–80, 163, 219, 246, 372–73 Toomer, Jean, 382 Town Meeting of the Air (radio show), 373–74 Trachtenburg, Alexander, 133 Trade union movement, 137, 252, 326 ‘‘Tradition and Industrialization’’ (Wright), 14–15, 224, 374–75, 402 ‘‘Transcontinental’’ (Wright), 23, 30, 172, 196, 333, 375–76, 404 Translations, 206, 207, 208 Trinidad, 203–4 Trotsky, Leon, 376–77 Tulsa, Oklahoma, 316 Turpin, Waters, 37 12 Million Black Voices (Wright and Rosskam), 4, 7, 69, 74, 95, 103, 128, 129, 159, 177–78, 220, 241, 302, 314, 329–30, 377–79, 418 Twice a Year (journal), 379 Ulysses (Joyce), 72, 215 Uncle Tom’s Children (Wright), 6, 26, 381–83; ‘‘Big Boy Leaves Home,’’ 18, 38, 39–41, 54, 105, 240–241, 246, 279, 308, 328, 355, 381, 382; ‘‘Bright and Morning Star,’’ 26, 55–56, 170, 206, 381, 382, 400; ‘‘Down by the Riverside,’’ 40, 103–5, 206, 261, 381, 382; ‘‘Ethics of Living Jim Crow, 443

Index The,’’ 118–20, 316, 327, 381; ‘‘Fire and Cloud,’’ 6, 18, 26, 131–32, 186, 322, 361, 381, 382; fire imagery in, 347, 381; ‘‘Long Black Song,’’ 38, 114, 177, 241, 356, 381, 382; publishing history of, 312; reviews of, 37–38, 95, 188, 240–41; themes in, 306; treatment of racial injustice in, 381–83 Union movement, 137, 252, 326 Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), 145, 384–85 University of Chicago, 45, 46, 68– 69, 75, 78, 106, 197, 210, 300, 385–86 Van Vechten, Carl, 185, 387–88 Vardaman, James K., 41, 388–89 Violence: racial, 3, 38–39, 114– 15, 119–20, 177–78, 203, 217, 245–46, 315–16, 327–28, 342, 382–83; against women, 153–55 Violence motif, 18, 38–39 ‘‘Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre, The’’ (Wright), 305, 352, 389–90, 411 Walker, David, 1 Walker, Margaret, 5, 14, 15, 25, 38, 56, 75, 77, 120, 129, 176, 186, 203, 238, 249, 290, 307, 319, 321, 381, 391–92 Ward, Essie Lee, 392–93 Ward, Theodore, 77, 130, 180, 281, 392, 393–94 Washington, Booker T., 238 Waste Land, The (Eliot), 72 Webb, Constance, 40, 135, 204, 282, 395–96, 413–14, 422 Welles, Orson, 7, 130, 160, 179, 274, 275, 396–98

444

‘‘We of the Streets’’ (Wright), 30, 394–95 Wertham, Frederic, 3, 54–55, 91, 142, 153, 201, 223, 246, 249, 324, 336, 398–99 West, Dorothy, 48, 72, 102, 259, 279, 281, 399–400 West Helena, Arkansas, 25–26, 400–401, 406 West Indies, 203–4 ‘‘What You Don’t Know Won’t Hurt You’’ (Wright), 401–2 Wheatley, Phyllis, 238 White, Josh, 287 White Citizen Councils, 3 White Man, Listen! (Wright), 10, 14–15, 70, 207, 253, 257, 260, 313, 322, 402–3 Whitman, Walt, 403–4 Williams, Eric, 14 Wilson, Addie (aunt), 404–6, 409 Wilson, Clark (uncle), 25, 163, 406 Wilson, Jody (aunt), 25, 406–7 Wilson, Maggie (aunt), 25, 74, 114, 163, 177, 407–8 Wilson, Margaret Bolden (grandmother), 2, 25, 202–3, 250, 267, 346, 389, 399, 404– 5, 408–10 Wilson, Richard (grandfather), 202, 408, 410–11 Wilson, Thomas Booker (uncle), 411–12 ‘‘Wilting Jonquil, A’’ (Wright), 166–67 Wirth, Louis, 5, 75, 78, 195, 259, 318, 385, 412, 413 Wirth, Mary, 195, 259, 385, 412–13 Wittenber, Jan, 413–14 Women, in Wright’s fiction, 153– 54, 242, 249, 325, 414–17 Works Progress Administration (WPA), 5, 68–69, 75, 83, 130, 212, 394, 417

World War II, 36, 103, 139, 252, 286–87, 358, 379, 417–19 WPA. See Works Progress Administration Wright, Ella (mother), 1, 2, 25, 154, 257, 289–290, 345, 406, 409, 419–20 Wright, Ellen (wife), 16, 35, 50, 57, 118, 256, 332, 420–22 Wright, Julia (daughter), 16, 118, 219–20, 282, 340, 422–23 Wright, Leon (brother), 183, 345, 409, 423–24 Wright, Nathan (father), 1, 2, 183, 257, 345, 409, 410, 414, 419, 424–25 Wright, Nathanial (grandfather), 425–26 Wright, Rachel (daughter), 426 Wright, Richard: biographical information, 1–11; childhood, 2–4, 33, 114, 141–142, 154, 177, 183, 202–3, 256–58, 267–68, 345, 346–47, 399– 400, 404–7; death of, 10; influence of, on other writers, 8, 10–11, 28, 48, 76, 176, 263, 279, 426–27; literary influences on, 3–4, 30, 52, 72, 82, 84–85, 102–3, 107–8, 115–16, 152– 53, 205–6, 214–15, 234, 257– 58, 305, 309–10, 429–30; photography of, 302–3, 348; poetry of, 5, 10, 15, 30, 78–79, 116, 165–67, 208, 305–7, 395; publishing history of, 312–14 Wright School, 8, 28, 48, 76, 176, 263, 279, 353, 426–27 Wright’s university. See John Reed Club Zen, 165, 166 Zero (magazine), 429 Zola, Emile, 4, 226, 258, 277, 310, 429–30

About the Editors and Contributors

THE EDITORS Robert J. Butler is a Professor of English at Canisius College in Buffalo, New York where he teaches American, African American, and modern literature. He is the author of Native Son: The Emergence of a New Black Hero (1995), The Critical Response to Richard Wright (1995), Contemporary African American Literature: The Open Journey (1998), and The Critical Response to Ralph Ellison (2001). He has also co-authored two books with Yoshinobu Hakutani, The City in African American Literature (1995) and The Critical Response in Japan to African American Writers (2003). His articles have appeared in journals such as African American Review, CLA Journal, American Studies, MELUS, and The Centennial Review. Jerry W. Ward, Jr. is Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English and African World Studies at Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. One of the founders of the Richard Wright Circle, he served as an editor of the Richard Wright Newsletter. He co-edited Redefining American Literary History (1990) with A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff and Black Southern Voices (1992) with John Oliver Killens and compiled Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997). His articles and poems have appeared in such journals as

Mississippi Quarterly, African American Review, Callaloo, ADE Bulletin, Konch, ChickenBones, and Drumvoices Revue.

THE CONTRIBUTORS Warren J. Carson is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literature, and Composition at the University of South Carolina Upstate in Spartanburg. His research interests are twentieth-century African American literature and culture, and he has published numerous essays in journals such as African American Review, the Southern Literary Journal, Appalachian Heritage, and the College Language Association Journal. Caroline Garnier is Assistant Professor of English at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Georgia. Her research interest is in Literature of the American South. Her major publications include an essay on sexual subordination and trauma in William Faulkner’s Sanctuary and an essay on the French reception of Faulkner’s work. Tara T. Green is an Assistant Professor of English and Ethnic Studies at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, where she teaches African American Literature and African American Studies. She 445

About the Editors and Contributors has published articles on Richard Wright, August Wilson, and Tina McElroy Ansa. She is completing a manuscript on black father and son relationships. Yoshinobu Hakutani is Professor of English and University Distinguished Scholar at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. He is the author or editor of many books, including Cross-Cultural Visions in African American Modernism: From Spatial Narrative to Jazz Haiku, Richard Wright’s Haiku: This Other World, Richard Wright and Racial Discourse, and The City in African American Literature. Diane Long Hoeveler is Professor of English at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Her research interests are the gothic, romanticism, and women writers. Her books include Gothic Feminism (1998), Romantic Androgyny (1990), and the forthcoming ‘‘Gothic Riffs: Modernizing the Uncanny in the British Imaginary, 1780–1850.’’ Michael Janis is Assistant Professor of English at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, where he teaches literary theory, West African fiction, world literature, and writing. His recent publications include Africa after Modernism: Transitions in Literature, Media, and Philosophy (2008) and ‘‘Africa and Avant-Garde Anthropology: The Psychoanalysis of Exoticism’’ in Cahiers d’e´tudes africaines 183 (2006). Nancy Kang is a Faculty Fellow in the Humanities at Syracuse University, New York. Affiliated with the Department of English and the Native Studies Program, she researches and teaches ethnic American literatures. She has published in such journals as African American Review and Callaloo. Toru Kiuchi is Professor of English at Nihon University in Japan. His research interests include African American literature and culture. His 446

major publication includes The Critical Response in Japan to African American Writers (2003), with Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert J. Butler. Candice Love-Jackson is Assistant Professor of English and Honors Program Director at Tougaloo College in Tougaloo, Mississippi. Her research interests include African American and southern literatures, film, and popular culture. Her major publications include ‘‘The Literate Pimp: Robert Beck, Iceberg Slim, and Pimping the African American Novel’’ in New Essays on the African American Novel (Ed. Lovalerie King/ Linda Selzer, forthcoming) and ‘‘Sinners Have Soul, too: Spirituality in the Secular Text’’ (Xavier Review Winter 2007). She is currently working on a manuscript examining the work of Donald Goines and Robert Beck/Iceberg Slim. Mark Madigan is Professor of English at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York. His research interests include twentieth-century AfricanAmerican fiction and Willa Cather. He is editor of Keeping Fires Night and Day: Selected Letters of Dorothy Canfield Fisher and Youth and the Bright Medusa in the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition. Omaha, University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming. Howard Rambsy II is an Assistant Professor of English, Language, and Literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. His research interests include African American publication history, the ‘‘Black Arts’’ movement, and contemporary literature. He has published work on emergent writers Colson Whitehead and Tyehimba Jess and curated ‘‘visual-literary’’ exhibits on black poets. Roy Rosenstein is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at The American University of Paris, France. His interests lie chiefly in literary works from Europe and the Americas, from earliest times to the contemporary. He is co-author of The Poetry of Cercamon and Jaufre Rudel (1983) and of Etienne Durand: Poe´sies comple`tes (1990).

About the Editors and Contributors Virginia Whatley Smith is an Associate Professor of English, University of Alabama at Birmingham. Her research interests include African American Literature, black women writers, and author Richard Wright. She published the collection Richard Wright’s Travel Writings: New Reflections in 2001. Her current biographical project is ‘‘Richard Wright and the Absent Father Figure.’’ Maren Stange is an Associate Professor of American Studies and visual culture at the Cooper Union, New York, New York. She writes frequently on modern American culture. Recent publications include Bare Witness: Photographs by Gordon Parks, Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures, and Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890–1950. She was a Fulbright Senior Fellow in Germany and has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Yale University, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, and the American Council of Learned Societies Karl L. Stenger is Associate Professor of German at the University of South Carolina Aiken. His research interests include 19th-Century German

literature and film studies. He has published a book on Friedrich Theodor Vischer and articles on African American authors and detective fiction. John Edgar Tidwell is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas. Most recently, his research has focused on Sterling A. Brown, Langston Hughes, Frank Marshall Davis, and Gordon Parks. He is currently coediting After Winter: Selected Writings on the Art and Life of Sterling A. Brown. Regan Tyndall has an M.A. in English Literature from the University of British Columbia. He studies postwar American Literature and works as a writing instructor and editor. Steven C. Tracy is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His publications include Langston Hughes and the Blues, A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison, and Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader. A blues singer and harmonica player, he has recorded and performed extensively.

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