DAN McCALL
THE EXAMPLE OF RICHARD WRIGHT
Publisher: Paperback edition, A Harvest Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York
Back Cover
Richard Wright was the first black writer in American literature to reach a mass audience—with his best sellers, Black Boy and Native Son—and the first to confront that audience with what it really means to be black. Born in Mississippi in 1908, he went to Chicago in his teens, part of the first great migration of Southern Negroes to the North. In his work he explored the rural heritage and urban trauma involved in his being a black man in the brutal confusions of 20th Century America. His protest was urgent, his art complex, and his social analysis exact. They are expressed in poetry, essays, stories, autobiography, and novels.
In The Example of Richard Wright, Dan McCall appraises Wright’s major and most representative achievements, his position as a left-wing polemicist and black spokesman (“Black Power” is Wright’s phrase), and his influence on subsequent black writers and the continuing importance of his work.
Praise
“…. well-researched, well-written and consistently interesting…gives proper emphasis to Wright’s extraordinary perception and to his hard-driving literary power… — New York Times Book Review
“… an excellent, popular book about a difficult man… a believable history of the Black Boy’s ups and downs.” — Book World
Excerpt - Opening Chapter
How does one write about such a world, and how is it to be “interpreted” in literary art? Wright’s first book, Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of four novellas about race and violence in the South, was published in 1938; all his major work was done by 1945. He was writing before the Civil Rights Movement, writing to an audience that had little sense of “the Negro” in America other than what could be acquired in small talk with the maid or chauffeur or a Saturday night in “Darktown”—little sense of “the Problem” other than the clichés that made hot copy for the Chicago Tribune in the Nixon case. Without any Movement to bring the black man’s dilemma to our attention, Richard Wright often felt he was going it alone. That solitary journey took an immense toll of his resources, and in 1946 he sought release from the pain by choosing exile in France. He stayed there until his death, fourteen years later.
He cannot be considered without a sense of uneasy desperation. His voice is a single one, that of a lonely, furious, proud black man from the South, telling us that our culture is crazy. And the more he cries White Man, Listen! (the title of one of his nonfiction books) the clearer it becomes to him that the White Man will not listen and does not want to. You can see it getting to Wright—the sense of exhaustion, futility in protest, the utter abject weariness; he cannot hold his hands up but he reels with his conviction that the country must be punched awake, must be guided through the sewers of its racial sickness.