Widely acclaimed for its comprehensive and sensitive picture of one of America's most renowned writers, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright received the Anisfield-Wolf Award on Race Relations when it was first published. This first paperback edition contains a new preface and bibliographic essay, updating changes in the author's approach to his subject and discussing works published on Wright since 1973.

Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works.

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.

One of America's great African-American writers, Richard Wright achieved critical and popular acclaim with the publication of Native Son, a novel, and Black Boy, an autobiography. Blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction, Black Boy vividly depicts Wright's journey from a child growing up in the South during the time of Jim Crow segregation laws through his creative and imaginative development as a writer and intellectual. Black Boy is both a unique autobiography and a racial discourse, chronicling Wright's continual fight against prejudice and racism as well as his quest for self-liberation. Against significant odds, Wright became America's first best-selling black author, and Black Boy became an American classic. Its enduring story documents what it means to be a black man, a southerner, and a writer in the United States. Book jacket.

In African American fiction, Richard Wright was one of the most significant and influential authors of the twentieth century. Richard Wright in a Post-Racial America analyses Wright's work in relation to contemporary racial and social issues, bringing voices of established and emergent Wright scholars into dialogue with each other. The essays in this volume show how Wright's best work asks central questions about national alienation as well as about international belonging and the trans-national gaze. Race is here assumed as a superimposed category, rather than a biological reality, in keeping with recent trends in African-American studies. Wright's fiction and almost all of his non-fiction lift beyond the mainstays of African-American culture to explore the potentialities and limits of black trans-nationalism. Wright's trans-native status, his perpetual "outsidedness" mixed with the "essential humanness" of his activist and literary efforts are at the core of the innovative approaches to his work included here.