SOURCE: Hakutani, Yoshinobu. “Richard Wright's Experiment in Naturalism and Satire: Lawd Today.” Studies in American Fiction 14, no. 2 (autumn 1986): 165-78.

In the following essay, Hakutani offers a stylistic analysis of Lawd Today and compares it to James Joyce's Ulysses.

Lawd Today, completed by 1935 and released posthumously in 1963, is an anomaly in Richard Wright's canon since it was written first but published last. Not only has it puzzled critics since its publication, but it has elicited a variety of responses. Granville Hicks, in a review entitled “Dreiser to Farrell to Wright,” affectionately defended Lawd Today, calling it less powerful than Native Son or Black Boy but uniquely interesting.¹ What interested Hicks in this novel is that, though Wright was an avowed communist at the time of composition, he did not make a communist out of Jake Jackson, its protagonist. Jake even despises communism, but he also refuses to become a...