Richard Wright in Context

Michael Nowlin

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781108488952
• eBook ISBN: 9781108803564
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Context gathers thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them. It explores the places that shaped his life and enabled his literary destiny, the social and cultural contexts he both observed and immersed himself in, and the literary and intellectual contexts that made him one the most famous Black writers in the world at mid-century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Richard Wright’s Works: A Chronology
• Introduction Richard Wright’s Luck
• Part I Life and Career, Times and Places
• Part II Social and Cultural Contexts
• Part III Literary and Intellectual Contexts
• Part IV Reputation and Critical Reception
• Index