The principal value of any reader is that it can present in a single volume a broad sampling of a master's work. The publication of the "Richard Wright Reader" is to be applauded on this account, because the range of subject matter and technique Mr. Wright commanded have been lost to the audience that knows him only as the "angry" author of "Native Son" and "Black Boy." Without disparaging either novel, one can acknowledge that they offer a limited portrait of the artist at a distinct time and place in his career; the selections in this book remind us that Mr. Wright's career spanned 22 productive years.
It is not difficult to find reasons for the fascination Mr. Wright's life and work continue to have for black writers. As Mr. Fabre [the co-editor] often indicates in his notes, Mr. Wright was a conscious artist, a writer who learned from his reading of other masters, who employed inventive literary techniques to dramatize his knowledge of black language and culture. The pattern of Mr. Wright's early life mirrored the mass migration of blacks from South to North, from rural areas to the cities, from communal folk life to urban alienation. In "Black Boy," "Lawd Today" and "Native Son" the promise and bitter disappointment of these historic movements are captured. Mr. Wright's later years reflect the intellectual odyssey of black people in the second half of the 20th century. He examined the legacy of the African past; he documented the rise of the emerging nations and analyzed the political consequences of this redistribution of power for all oppressed people. Although Mr. Wright temporarily embraced various isms—communism, black nationalism, existentialism—he regarded each system as valid only so long as it freed him to grapple on his own terms with the vast, unclassifiable welter of experience. Always at the center of Mr. Wright's work is his insistence on the sanctity of the individual imagination, but this insistence is tempered by his vision of black people's collective destiny. In "Blueprint for Negro Writing" he has left us his example, his challenge: "The Negro writer … has a serious responsibility. In order to do justice to his subject matter, in order to depict Negro life in all of its manifold and intricate relationships, a deep, informed, and complex consciousness is necessary: a consciousness which draws for its strength upon the fluid lore of a great people, and molds this lore with the concepts that move and direct the forces of history today." (p. 32)
John Wideman, "Native Son," in The New York Times Book Review (© 1978 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), March 5, 1978, pp. 11, 32.
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