For a useful gloss on Wright's apprentice novel [Lawd Today] with its theme of the brutalization of Black life in the urban North, one may turn to his important theoretical essay "Blueprint for Negro Writing," published soon after he moved to New York. The essay seems a clear statement of the novel's intention if not its achievement. Rejecting the exotic bohemianism of the Harlem Renaissance, Wright urges the assimilation of Black folklore into a sophisticated sensibility steeped in modern literature and guided by a Marxist analysis of society. So equipped the Black writer can bring a sharpened class and social consciousness to the problems of his people, utilizing the rich folk tradition but at the same time attempting to transcend the Black nationalism, imposed by a segregated society, out of which this tradition grew. For a novel with such a purpose, Lawd Today contains remarkably little overt propagandizing; certainly this is the case when one compares it to other radical novels of the time, including Wright's own Native Son. For the most part, Wright was content in his first novel to let the implications of his protagonist's blighted and futile existence speak for themselves….
The simple but neat structure of Lawd Today was implicit in Wright's choice of a subject—one sordid but typical day in the life of Jake Jackson, a Chicago postal clerk who hates his job, his wife, his race, and himself, from the time he awakes until he sinks into a drunken sleep some twenty hours later, bleeding from cuts suffered in a vicious brawl with his wife. (p. 16)
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