Richard Wright: The Life and Times; Richard Wright: In a Class by Himself

HOW COULD RICHARD Wright, the first black American literary superstar, be so misconstrued by so many people over the course of decades? Wright's rootless cosmopolitanism, militant individualism, secularism, and iconoclasm have rendered him, in whole or part, unacceptable to many people across the racial and political spectrum for over six decades. Were it not for the totalitarianism of skin color, perhaps more people might approach Wright as an intellectual first (albeit an outsider), instead of effacing his intellectual identity and reducing him to a racial representative.

Hazel Rowley's Richard Wright: The Life and Times, the most thoroughly researched biography to date, is now the indispensable foundation for all future scholarship on Wright's life.

Rowley's biography is not a work of literary criticism, though her own prose, including her summaries of several of Wright's works, possesses considerable literary quality. We learn about the course of composition and publication of Wright's works: his intentions, work processes, literary associates, influences, revisions, editorial interventions by others and even censorship. Indispensable as this information is, one cannot gain an adequate thematic understanding of Wright's works from Rowley's descriptions of them, and must mm to the works themselves and to the critical literature. As a biographer, Rowley does not subject Wright's work or ideas to sustained literary or conceptual analysis.

Nor does she offer speculation on his inner frame of mind beyond the empirical evidence she adduces: autobiographical and biographical sources, interviews, etc. The burden is on us to construct a composite portrait of Wright as man and writer. We are then faced with a series of difficulties, chief among them, understanding the relationships connecting Wright's imaginative life and writerly persona, his total personality, and his social being. So much perplexity: how to account for the discrepancy between Wright as a social being -- charming and convivial -- and the brutality pervading his fiction and autobiography?

Richard Wright's early life was brutal. Born in Jim Crow rural Mississippi in 1908, and living in various locales in the Deep South, Wright endured the oppression of poverty and racial terror, compounded by the religious fanaticism of his family. He was viscerally rebellious but at the same time developed remarkable literary and intellectual proclivities. He was a good student, but he never made it...