Adaptations of Richard Wright’s Works

Abstract

Adaptations of Richard Wright’s Works Tara T. Green (bio) and Charles I. Nero (bio) Not surprisingly, we begin at a hotel bar. On the evening before sessions at the 2019 College Language Association (CLA) conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, began, several of us gravitated toward one another to enjoy conversations that only we could at such an event. The “How have you been?” eventually shifted to “but have you seen the HBO adaptation of Richard Wright’s Native Son?” It was an inevitable subject, as part of this cluster of African American literature scholars included Jerry Ward, Tara T. Green, and Charles Nero. This was only the beginning. The following year, Green organized a panel discussion to present at CLA’s virtual gathering. Our panel, “Richard Wright’s Native Son: From Page to Screen,” was well attended and was followed by a lively discussion about the impact, influence, and value of adaptations of literature in general and African American literature in particular. Nero and Green would later agree that more scholarly attention should be given to the adaptations of Wright’s work, that of a writer of international acclaim whose most famous novel cannot or will not be forgotten. Native Son in the American Canon Wright’s popularity began to emerge with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Children. In fact, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship endorsed by Eleanor Roosevelt as a result of this work. Yet, Wright was not pleased with reviews of the work: “I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about.” The result was to produce the protagonist, Bigger Thomas, of his novel Native Son (1940). [End Page 1] Reviewers of the novel beckoned to readers, advancing the intrigue that emerged within the pages of the novel. Clifton Fadiman, in a rather lengthy review for The New Yorker, wrote in his opening line, “Richard Wright’s Native Son is the most powerful American novel to appear since The Grapes of Wrath.” To refute any statements that may have marginalized Wright from the American canon, Fadiman ends the first paragraph with a response to another critic, “True enough, and it is a remarkable novel no matter how much or how little melanin its author happens to have in his skin.”1 Malcolm Cowley of The New Republic would agree with Fadiman, but Cowley would touch on the level of discomfort that Wright not so gingerly probed and liberally explored in the novel. According to Cowley, unlike Steinbeck who “pitied” his characters, “Richard Wright, a Negro, was moved by wrongs he had suffered in his own person, and what he had to fear was a blind anger that might destroy the pity in him, making him hate any character whose skin was whiter that his own.”2 Whatever Wright’s inspiration, his was a novel that represented an experience that was intensely American, as noted by Ralph Ellison, who lauded the “‘artistic and social achievement of Native Son’ and the ‘Negro writer’s ability to create the consciousness of his oppressed nation.’” Debates about the novel’s merit and the author’s purpose continue. As a “Negro writer,” Wright would be compared to other Black writers who had come before him. Wright himself would not deny his place among this distinguished class and the long tradition of Black writing, but he would see himself as a kind of rebel. Years before, Wright had issued a call: in his “Blueprint for Negro Literature,” the budding writer berated earlier Black writers for becoming “the voice of the educated Negro pleading with white America for justice.”3 Instead, Wright proposed that Black writers have a “serious responsibility . . . to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships.”4 Wright would seek to do this in Uncle Tom’s Children and even more so in Native Son. Alain Locke would engage the novel as part of a larger debate about the authenticity of Black art. About Native Son, in particular, Locke wrote, “Its vivid and vital revelations should be a considerable factor in awakening a social sense.”5 Locke and Ellison saw...