Richard Wright

The story of Richard Wright’s career, perhaps more than that of any other black American writer, not only illustrates the high and low points such an author can reach, in terms of his work and how it is received, but also dramatizes sharply the general problems of an independent career in writing. I will examine here the activities of Wright’s writing career and some aspects of his personal life and the works he produced, and touch on correlations among these aspects in the hope of achieving not only a better understanding of his life as a writer but also with the suggestion of what such a life means for a black writer in a culture that is largely white....