Content area
Full Text
Since 1970, Wright criticism has prompted over half a dozen collections, three of them on Native Son alone. At least four more are well under way. Amidst this flourishing writing and rewriting on Wright, Gates's and Appiah's volume may be the longest. Unlike others, this one has reprinted a number of reviews, at least one for each of the fourteen books except Savage Holiday (including four for Native Son). These reviews, representing mainstream as well as progressive opinions, include those by Wright's distinguished contemporaries Zora Neale Hurston, James Farrell, Ralph Ellison, Sinclair Lewis, and Joyce Cary, and those by well-known critics such as Malcolm Cowley, Lionel Trilling, Nick Aaron Ford, Saunders Redding, Irvin Howe, and Granville Hicks.
The collection is headed by a succinct, thought-provoking preface by Gates, who says that Wright's major phase as a naturalist is reminiscent of the work of Crane, Dreiser, and Lewis. Few critics question such an association, for Wright acknowledges in Black Boy that he was deeply influenced by "the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel," by such novels as Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie. It may, however, be time to re-examine the tradition of American naturalism in relation to Wright. For one thing, he was not himself overly concerned with the usefulness of such a term as naturalism, as his phrase quoted above implies. Moreover, the advent of deconstructionist, new historicist, feminist, and cultural criticisms will surely rewrite American literary history with respect to naturalism and Wright. In any event, Gates is eminently right in maintaining that African-American modernism, represented by Ellison and Baldwin, emerged in reaction to Wright's version of naturalism. The tension between Wright's naturalism and Ellison's and Baldwin's modernism, Gates suggests, has been resolved by the rise of contemporary African-American women writers, and by Toni Morrison in particular.
The preface provides a brief but helpful comment on each of the essays selected. The contributions range from thematic studies on a book or two, such as Edward Margolies's seminal essay on the short stories, to recent work on Wright's narrative technique, such as Valerie Smith's "Alienation and Creativity in the Fiction of Richard Wright," an enlightening essay about self-creation through language. The volume also includes studies of the seldom-analyzed 12 Million Black Voices and...