This bibliography of Richard Wright's library and reading serves as a key to understanding the development, philosophies, and aesthetics of this great writer and provides accurate information for the study of intertextuality in his works. Richard Wright, born in Mississippi in 1908, was largely self-taught. His only formal schooling was high school. As he recounts in Black Boy, he used a white friend's library card at the Memphis Public Library, where blacks were not allowed. That books were almost "living companions" for Wright is easily understandable. Through books and, later, through relationships with writers, he broadened his perspectives, his understanding of society, and the very craft of writing. In the history of Richard Wright, perhaps more than with other writers, a knowledge of what he actually read, and of what authors he preferred, is essential in explaining his intellectual development. Michel Fabre, Wright's biographer and foremost Wright scholar, details the volumes in Wright's library and the facts of Wright's reading habits. This listing of books that formed and influenced him includes second-hand books he bought while living in extreme poverty in Chicago, some borrowed books never returned, books purchased in New York and Paris, books Wright deemed required reading for a growing novelist, gift books, and others in a comprehensive list on such subjects as contemporary American literature, classic European works, criminology, psychiatry, and social sciences. In compiling this listing Fabre goes beyond the actual contents of Wright's library, for he includes also titles drawn from references in Wright's works and from accounts of people who knew him and his reading habits. Included also is an appendix that collects for the first time reviews written by Wright, his prefaces, forewords, and blurbs. They show his appreciation of diverse genres and styles, although his ideological commitment remained the same. In them one sees Wright as an author ready to help younger writers, black and white, American and French.

Skillfully interweaving quotations from Wright's writings, Rowley portrays a man who transcended the times in which he lived and sought to reconcile opposing cultures in his work. In this lively, finely crafted narrative, Wright--passionate, complex, courageous, and flawed--comes vibrantly to life. Two 8-page photo inserts.

Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book “was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American.” From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."

Any future biographical work on Richard Wright will find this bibliography a necessity; academic or public libraries supporting a program of black culture will find it invaluable; and it belongs in any library supporting American literature studies. Richard Wright has truly been well served. Choice The most comprehensive bibliography ever compiled for an American writer, this book contains 13,117 annotated items pertaining to Richard Wright. It includes almost all published mentions of the author or his work in every language in which those mentions appear. Sources listed include books, articles, reviews, notes, news items, publishers' catalogs, promotional materials, book jackets, dissertations and theses, encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, handbooks and study guides, library reports, best seller charts, the Index Translationum, playbills and advertisements, editorials, radio transcripts, and published letters and interviews. The bibliography is arranged chronologically by year. Each entry includes bibliographical information, an annotation by the authors, and information about all reprintings, partial or full. The index is unusually complete and contains the titles of Wright's works, real and fictional characters in the works, entries relating to significant places and events in the author's life, important literary terminology, and much additional information.

Any future biographical work on Richard Wright will find this bibliography a necessity; academic or public libraries supporting a program of black culture will find it invaluable; and it belongs in any library supporting American literature studies. Richard Wright has truly been well served. Choice The most comprehensive bibliography ever compiled for an American writer, this book contains 13,117 annotated items pertaining to Richard Wright. It includes almost all published mentions of the author or his work in every language in which those mentions appear. Sources listed include books, articles, reviews, notes, news items, publishers' catalogs, promotional materials, book jackets, dissertations and theses, encyclopedias, biographical dictionaries, handbooks and study guides, library reports, best seller charts, the Index Translationum, playbills and advertisements, editorials, radio transcripts, and published letters and interviews. The bibliography is arranged chronologically by year. Each entry includes bibliographical information, an annotation by the authors, and information about all reprintings, partial or full. The index is unusually complete and contains the titles of Wright's works, real and fictional characters in the works, entries relating to significant places and events in the author's life, important literary terminology, and much additional information.

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.