JOYCE ANN JOYCE

IN HIS ESSAY “The Literature of the Negro in the United States,” Richard Wright makes a comment that clearly exemplifies his own life and illuminates the progression of his physical movements as well as the development of his intellect: “For the development of Negro expression—as well as the whole of Negro life in America—hovers always somewhere between the rise of man from his ancient, rural way of life to the complex, industrial life of our time.” Born on 4 September 1908, in an impoverished, rural environment in Natchez, Mississippi, Wright developed from an uneducated, lonely Southerner to become one of the most cosmopolitan, Continental, well-read, and politically active writers in American literary history. Poet, novelist, essayist, journalist, playwright, Communist, agnostic, and existentialist, he is now well known as the father of African American literature.

This recognition comes in response to the diversity of his talents, but primarily because his courage and honesty in challenging the literary stereotypes attributed to African American letters changed the entire course of African American fiction. In Wright’s essay “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” originally published in New Challenge in 1937, he outlines his criteria for the role of African American literature and the responsibility of the black artist. He says that white America failed to offer the black writer serious criticism because it was astonished that a black person could write at all. Thus white America had no interest in the role African American writing could play in shaping American culture. He adds, “At best, Negro writing has been something external to the lives of educated Negroes themselves. That the productions of their [Negro] writers should have been something of a guide in their daily living is a matter which seems never to have been raised seriously.” The publication of Native Son on 1 March 1940 demanded that white America look at African American fiction more seriously than it had previously done since the publication of the first black novel by William Wells Brown in 1853. The fact that Harper Brothers sold 200,000 copies of Native Son in thirty days was a sign of the indefatigable interest white America would have in Wright’s works in the years to come. On the surface, the central issue of Wright’s oeuvre is the relationship between blacks and whites. Yet a deeper reading goes beyond this sensationalized approach and explains why Wright’s works have become essential representations of the American literary canon.

Voluminous studies treat the influence of Marxist ideology and existential philosophy on Wright’s fiction and fail to detect those qualities in his art which make it peculiarly American and human. From his home environment to his experiences in Memphis, Chicago, New York, and Paris, Wright’s position as an outsider instilled in him the ability and courage to analyze human behavior objectively and perspicaciously. This is reflected in a scene that Wright relates in American Hunger (1977), the second volume of his autobiography, concerning his ultimate break with the Communist party. Wright was...