Why Study Richard Wright?
In the February 9, 2009 issue of The Washington Post, Jonathan Yardley called Black Boy (1945), an “essential American document.” Rereading it for the first times in decades renewed his appreciation for the book. That is what good literature does for us: it continues to have relevance and power. Our appreciation for it is renewed with each reading. But what makes Wright essential reading? How can we understand someone so driven by his own ambition and his desire to “fight with words,” that he could produce such provocative books that are more powerful today than when he first wrote them? “I wrote my guts into them,” Wright had said when asked about his first collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). He wanted to capture the terror of the Mississippi of his birth. It was his second book, however, that made him a household name. “The day Native Son [1940] appeared, American culture was forever changed,” Irving Howe wrote in 1963. “It made impossible a repetition of the ol