Richard Wright (1)Reseñas

This was a difficult but important book to read. The essay at the end, entitled “How Bigger was Born,” is equal parts an exploration of Wright’s creative process and a klaxon sounding against white ignorance of the black experience. When Wright began this essay talking about the overused trumped-up charge of r*pe levied against black men in the Jim Crow era, I couldn’t help but think of the reaction of many conservative whites to #MeToo, to the effect that they were worried that their sons’ or their own lives would be ruined by false accusations of sexual misconduct. Wright would surely say something to the effect of “Now, you understand something of what we’ve been going through.” I don’t recall if there were any black commentators who made this point, but it wouldn’t surprise me. A key difference, of course, is that the vast majority of mostly powerful whites who were accused were likely guilty, whereas the vast majority of kostly powerless blacks were likely innocent.

I also recognized some parallels to Winston Smith in George Orwell’s 1984: a strong desire to rebel against an oppressive system, couched even in terms of violence, but ultimately the same fate and failure.

well DAMN.

This actually consists of a novella-length story, plus a nonfiction essay. The short story is the one of the title. It’s set in the 1940s(?) (that’s when it was originally written, anyway), and a black man, Fred, leaving work, just having been paid in cash, is “arrested” by the police and “questioned”/tortured. Initially not knowing even what they police were talking about, it turns out the neighbours of the people Fred worked for had been murdered in their home earlier in the day. Fred manages to escape and moves underground via the sewers from building to building for a few days.

The essay talked about how the author grew up with his very religious Grandmother and how some things from that experience related to this story.

Overall, I’m rating it ok. The essay got pretty philosophical, so wasn’t all that interesting to me. The story itself was better, but also a little bit odd while Fred was underground. I definitely did not see the end coming (but maybe I should have?).

A young sociopath kills a white woman he barely knows, by accident, dismembers her and burns her body, then rapes and kills his own girlfriend. He is hunted down and captured, pleads guilty and goes to trial for the murder of the white woman. The man's race is used as a convenient explanation for his crimes, while his case is picked up by various people with their own agendas as a tool for their use. The fact that Wright is drawing on his own experiences as a Black man during the depression makes this book stronger, but the trial and justice system stuff in the third part is tedious and needed more editing. It seems pretty obvious that the boy Bigger is supposed to be assumed to have been pushed by racism to become a violent criminal, even though he has friends and family who are not killers and rapists despite living in the same environment. He seems to feel no remorse for his crimes. While the fact that his rape and murder of his girlfriend seems less important to the white people involved in the case, Bigger doesn't even seem to think about Bessie as a human being, just something that got in the way and needed to be discarded.
As far as social commentary, though, this book does show a good argument for the importance of education and economic equity. The fact that Bigger and his friends and family are so poorly educated makes them more vulnerable to mistreatment by people with more education, and their lack of education makes it harder for them to make good decisions that improve their lives. Another interesting argument from this story would be the importance of purpose in men's lives. The poor women in this story, with the responsibilities on their shoulders to keep themselves and their households functional, seem less inclined to resort to stupid criminal acts with high risks. The one truly irresponsible woman in this book, Mary, is living a pampered life similar to Bigger's, in that any mistakes she makes are dealt with by her parents or other responsible adults. Both Mary and Bigger can continue to act immature and irresponsible, at least until Bigger murders Mary and thus creates consequences even his mother and Bessie can't rescue him from.

56. The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright
afterward Malcolm Wright (2021)
OPD: 2021 (written 1941-1942, with a shortened version published in 1944)
format: 228-page Kindle ebook
acquired: October 3 read: Oct 4-15 time reading: 5:44, 1.5 mpp
rating: 4
genre/style: Novel theme: Richard Wright
locations: unknown American city, probably southern
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation, 1908-1960

This for me was a curiosity, part powerful, part quirky. Wright takes a close look at police brutality against African Americans (a point noted in his publisher's rejection documentation) and then an almost surreal look at a refugee living in American sewers. Fred Daniels, a good church-going upstanding person and expectant father, is arrested for a murder he knows nothing about. He's not questioned, but beat-up by an all-white police force demanding a confession. It's not clear where his mind was before this happens, but he gets rattled, and it seems his mind is never able to settle down. Instead, in the sewers he tunnels, and he stumbles across apparent odd truths about the basics in life - religion, death, money, entertainment, etc.

Maybe think Plato's cave. It's a combination of Wright's creativity and what I see has his semi-super-aware, semi-blind romantic mindset. It makes an odd combination of strange guy in a strange place doing strange things that don't quite make sense. In a long afterward, which Wright intended to be published with the novel, he explained the novel as a response to the stubborn illogical religious faith his grandmother followed and depended on, a source of conflict between he and his grandmother, his main parent during his older childhood.

This is a lost novel. Wright wrote it written during WW2, in 1942, but it was rejected for publication by his publisher. A shorter version was published in a journal, and later in a posthumous collection. Wright moved on, composing [Black Boy], his classic published in 1945. There he goes directly into his grandmother's religion and state of mind, and its impacts on him. The full version of this novel was first published in 2021, after Wright's grandson, Malcolm Wright, pushed for it.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/354226#8263418

I read this to go along with a free online course (The American Novel since 1945). With that in mind, I guess the most immediate question I had was "What does an autobiography have to do with novels?" Well, it turns out that Wright wrote dramatic scenes with sharply written dialogue. While events do follow his own life, he apparently used incidents that happened to people he knew as readily as he used those that happened to himself. We can see from the end of the book, when he was involved with the Communist Party, that he was growing more concerned with expressing the feeling of being a black southerner. The first half of Black Boy succeeded in that.

The second part was quite different. Based on other books I have read, I thought his view of the North was a bit idealistic. Maybe the silly and grating inter-politics of the Communist Party's artist clubs made a more poignant and less-expected comparison to the racism and religion that kept him down in the South and became the focus for that reason.

Boxed set with later works

Boxed set with early works

I think this book will sit with me forever. Wright has such intuitive self-awareness. He brings you right down to the raw experience of his life and doesn’t spare himself or others. He is unflinchingly honest.

I read this for this year's Book Riot Read Harder Challenge.
This was my entry for "Read a classic by an author of color." I highly recommend it. I'm also studying the performance of justice in fiction and how it's skewed along color lines. Native Son definitely digs deep into that.

I don't have any qualms calling this a masterpiece, despite the rough start I had with it.

Honestly, this book is reminiscent of so many books that I absolutely love. It's similar to Dostoyevksi and Kafka in the sense of wallowing in anxious misery and self loathing (I'm a sucker for a good story about anxious misery and self loathing). Similar to Invisible Man for it's examination of the racial divide and themes of black identity. Similar to to The Stranger, for it's plot and structure.

It is a brilliant critique on the racial divide in America. Excellently paced. Despite the dense themes, and unsympathetic protagonist, this book was an engaging page turner, and kept me on the edge of my seat. I'm not ashamed to admit I lost sleep over it a few nights, with empathetic anxiety.

I'd recommend it to anyone, with the caveat that the first 30 or so pages are a bit rough, but push through.

Richard Wright earned his political extremism. It is no wonder that, after leaving the violence and racial kabuki theater of Jim Crow South, he finds the comfort in the supposedly egalitarian arms of the communist party in Chicago. Wright would eventually disavow the party for its unthinking dogma, its distrust of intellectuals, and its suppression of factions and disagreement.

These issues are also explored in Wright's great work of fiction, Native Son. There is something uncomfortable about Wright's prose, not just for its exposure of shocking racial injustice that is one of the great ironies of the American experience. You also get the sense that Wright is a man who will never truly find his place in society, and that this is the curse of the true intellectual. It is no wonder that Wright was drawn to French existentialist writers Camus and Sartre, and that he tried to write his own existentialist work titled The Outsider. The thinking man grows to understand his isolation from others, and that any union or community is illusory, built on a foundation of lies and self-deception.

(34) My zeal for classic fiction has waned, but I still endeavor to be well-read and tackle several works of literature deemed to be influential, and/or highly regarded every year. My social justice lens has become cracked and soiled as of late so I am doing my best to read or re-read work by black authors. I realize that while I have read many novels by Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, I have virtually read nothing by black male writers. So, 'Native Son,' a gripping tale of a poor black boy from the the Deep South transplanted to the slums of South Side Chicago - Bigger Thomas. He gets a job as a chauffeur for a do-good rich white family... and let's just say, it doesn't end well.

The beginning of the book is horrifying and burned in my brain. Aah! The furnace. The hatchet. Why? Oh God.. it is tragic. The scene with he and Bessie in the abandoned tenement and the raging blizzard outside was equally as dramatic. His icy travails over the rooftops of Chicago. I couldn't put the novel down for quite sometime. But after Bigger got arrested the book went downhill. I feel that Wright then began to explain ad nauseam using unrealistic scenes such as having everyone he ever knew in his life visit him in jail at the same time; and loong speeches by his lawyer Max. The book became a chore and less convincing. I could feel why Bigger behaved as he did, not sure I needed to be told. His writing for the first half of the novel spoke for itself.

I hated it for Bigger. He never had a chance. And I get that plenty of people grow up with even worse adversity and make something of their lives. Not everyone would choose to do what he did. But still. You can see it in the eyes of inner city black boys and rural white ones that get a shitty education surrounded by embittered adults who live shitty little lives - boredom, hopelessness, rage. A worthy read that is one half gripping, one half slog.½

A native of poverty and having learned to survive on the streets gets a job for a rich family, has his luck changed? Native Son by Richard Wright tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a black youth living in a poor area of 1930s Chicago South Side.

Even with an introductory warning, this novel begins in a harsh mood with unlikeable characters and doesn’t improve as the narrative continues and more characters appear. Bigger is a thug other thugs look down on, which while Wright’s intention doesn’t take away the fact the reader has to deal with this character for roughly 430 pages even with a few near misses of sympathy. Of Bigger’s two victims, his girlfriend Bessie is frankly the better character than Mary Dalton as the latter is a foolish white knight that talks in “code” believing every black person would know said code. The only character that is anyway decent is Bigger’s lawyer Boris Max that is the primary character in the third part of the book, even though he’s idealistic he’s smart enough to face reality by knowing Bigger has only 0.001% of staying alive and does everything he can against the odds to do so. Personally Max comes off as a surrogate for the author than Bigger does, which is why that particular character comes off as the best one in the book.

Native Son is a controversial yet well-known novel and is Richard Wright’s best fictional work, but as soon as I started reading it, I hated everyone in it.

Moving account of growing up under Jim Crow and being unable and unwilling to buckle under. Two things particularly struck me: (1) Southern whites would take offense at Wright without him doing anything overt, merely because he carried himself with a dignity they could sense, and hate; (2) Wright could not get books critiquing social issues out of the library without forging a white person's request for him to pick them up. He's says he'd rather be a feudal peasant than black in that place and time. You really get a feeling of race as indelible caste here: the elemental Jim Crow crime was to think you had equal human status with whites.

If I look at Native Son simply as a novel, it is a good one, inspired by Crime and Punishment, but set in the context of racial segregation in Depression-era Chicago. The crux of the plot is a murder committed involuntarily by a young African American, Bigger Thomas, out of fear of being found with a young white woman, Mary, in her bedroom, and the prevailing psychological mood of resentment at racial injustice, segregation, hostility, and contempt is compelling. But if I look at the novel as a message, I do not know quite how to take it. Richard Wright wrote with the intention of telling readers "what had made [Bigger] and what he meant." His explanation would have been easier to grasp had he written a straightforward protest novel about an innocent victim. The trouble is that Bigger is so malicious, and therefore the suggestion that racism made him what he was is so much harder to accept. He sexually assaults Mary; he feels sexualized misogynism towards Bessie, and rapes and murders her; he plots to get ransom money for the woman he has already killed and hidden; he experiences having murdered a white woman as catharsis for the racism the white world has shown towards him (e.g. "It was not Mary he was reacting to when he felt that fear and shame. Mary had served to set off his emotions, emotions conditioned by many Marys. And now that he had killed Mary he felt a lessening of tension in his muscles; he had shed an invisible burden he had long carried"; e.g. "He looked ... round at the white faces near him. He wanted suddenly to stand up and shout, telling them that he had killed a rich white girl..."; e.g. "In all of his life these two murders were the most meaningful thing that had ever happened to him. He was living, truly and deeply ... never had his will been so free.") Wright seems to be saying that racial segregation could make a person not just depressed, bitter, angry, rebellious, militant, or despondent... but evil. "He had been so conditioned in a cramped environment that hard words or knocks alone knocked him upright or made him capable of action--action that was futile because the world was too much for him. It was then that he closed his eyes and struck out blindly, hitting what or whom he could, not looking or caring what or who hit back."

How does a reader handle Wright's apparent message that racism could drive an African American man to feel murder of a white woman as a self-actualizing accomplishment? What do we do with a novel that brilliantly announces the psychological experience of racism, but then goes so far in its picture of racism's impact that it seems like a drastic indictment of its victims as teetering on the edge of psychopathy? If racism did that to a person, then what was Wright saying about African Americans? Hence reactions like this one from writer David Bradley. First his early take on the book: "Suddenly I realized that many readers of 'Native Son' had seen Bigger Thomas as a symbol; in 1940, when 'Native Son' hit the shelves, they ... had probably never come into enough contact with blacks to know better. God, I thought, they think we're all Biggers." Then his evolved take: even if the novel should not be taken as a sociological report, "[i]t reminds us of a time in this land of freedom when a man could have this bleak and frightening vision of his people, and when we had so little contact with one another that that vision could be accepted as fact." He could not accept Bigger's character or its genesis as a realistic picture of the African American experience, and thereby drew this response from Wright's daughter excoriating him as a denialist: "We all have a Bigger Thomas crouching within us, although there are those, like Mr. Bradley, who need to kill Bigger on paper rather than recognize him as part of their own darkness. Mr. Bradley segregates Bigger in the farthest corner of his mind, denies him, projects him outward and lynches him. But haven't we discovered that the outward projection of shadows within is the very foundation of segregationist thought?"

It is hard to go all the way with Wright. Bigger's advocate tells the court at his trial: "Every hope is a plan for insurrection. Every glance of the eye is a threat. His very existence is a crime against the state." Here we are in the realm of social protest. But the defense, such as it is, goes on: "He was impelled toward murder as much through the thirst for excitement, exultation, and elation as he was through fear! It was his way of living!" and "Is love possible to the life of a man I've described to this Court? . . . The circumstances of his life and [Bessie's] would not allow it." This is beyond protest; it is exposing how inhumanity has made the victim inhumane. Are we to accept Wright's picture of a man's mind under racism so far as to believe that its victims are so warped by it as to exult in murder and be incapable of love? If so, this novel may constitute the deepest of all protests against racism.

28. Black Boy by Richard Wright
contributors: Foreword by John Edgar Wideman, Afterward by Malcolm Wright, “A Tribute to my Father” by Julia Wright (all for this edition, 2020), and extracts from a 1993 introduction by Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
OPD: 1945
format: Harper Perennial Modern Classics 75th-anniversary edition paperback with restored text.
acquired: November read: Apr 16-30 time reading: 15:13, 2.0 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Classic autobiography theme: Richard Wright
locations: Jackson, MS, Memphis, TN, Arkansas & Chicago.
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation, 1908-1960

This is a special book. An eye-witness account of the 1920's Jim Crowe south from black perspective, and by a really talented writer. Wright's mind was built for this and the life story comes across so crystalline. He has this way of making himself a regular person in the deranged world. It‘s dystopian, and nonfictional. Add in his poverty, and constant hunger. His family sometimes simply didn't have food. His response, his strength, but also his tone towards those around him - expressing that shock of “What are these people thinking?!…Is this real?” - is incredibly powerful. It‘s simply an amazing window into that reality, our history.

The book was originally written in two parts, but only part one was published in 1945, titled Black Boy. This was Wright's account of growing up in the Jim Crowe South early in the 20th-century, Civil Rights nowhere in sight. It's a sparkling account and unrivaled classic. The second part, later published posthumously in 1977 as [American Hunger], covers Wright's experiences in Chicago during the Great Depression, struggling to get by, and hungry enough he was unable to pass a post office weight requirement. It focuses heavily on his relationship and experiences with the Chicago Communist community, which was also his link to a white intellectual community, including artists of prominence. This part, to me, is a curiosity, but lacks the raw power of [Black Boy].

It's certainly interesting that the Communist element was edited out of the book in 1945 and not published until after Wright died, but there is no question the better part was the part published. One interesting aspect is that the reconstructed book ends softly. However, when he agreed to only publish part one, he added a conclusion that is really quite beautiful and powerful, although relegated to a footnote in this reconstructed original text edition. The 1945 edition of [Black Boy] ends on a hopeful note, with Wright looking towards his life in the North. It doesn't address the drudgery of the life. He closes:

"Yet, deep down, I knew that I could never really leave the South, for my feelings had already been formed by the South, for there had been slowly instilled into my personality and consciousness, black though I was, the culture of the South. So, in leaving, I was taking a part of the South to transplant in alien soil, to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of new and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns, and, perhaps, to bloom...And if that miracle ever happened, then I would know that there was yet hope in that southern swamp of despair and violence, that light could emerge even out of the blackest of the southern night. I would know that the South too could overcome its fear, its hate, its cowardice, its heritage of guilt and blood, its burden of anxiety and compulsive cruelty."

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8135965

Brilliant. This is what kids in high school should read.

The opening pages of this book by one of America’s greatest writers were a shock both to Richard Wright’s agent and publisher. They were so violent and painful to read that the book could not be published when first written in the early 1940s. It has taken some 80 years before the full text can finally appear. And what was the shocking bit? The book opens with the arrest of a Black man accused of a murder he did not commit, and the brutal beatings and abuse he suffers at the hands of white policemen. No wonder the book is being hailed as relevant to our time.

But anyone expecting a realistic story will be disappointed, because Wright has ambitions far beyond telling a story of racial injustice, which he had done before so successfully. As he explains in a long essay at the end of the book, this novella is an attempt to get inside the head of the author’s grandmother who raised him. A deeply religious woman, she lived in a world of her own making as does the main character in this book when he literally goes underground.

An unusual book, painful to read in parts, but intelligent and gripping as well.

17. Native Son by Richard Wright
Introduction : Caryl Phillips (2000)
published: 1940
format: 464-page paperback
acquired: February 2022 read: Feb 20 – Mar 11 time reading: 15:17, 2.0 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: classic novel theme: Richard Wright
locations: 1930’s Chicago
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation, 1908-1960

A dark classic look at American racism in fiction. Richard Wright wrote for purpose. He was determined force the reader's eye coldly on the hard fact of racism. No cushion of sympathy, or pity, he draws the reader in so we can't look away, holds us by force of the novel, looking wide-eyed and horrified.

The first 200 pages of this novel were as intense as anything I have ever read. But it wasn't fun, it was awful, painful, yet still compelling. This is his masterpiece. Bigger Thomas, like the strongest of Shakespeare's villains, is all calculation and doomed for lack of consequential foresight. We're in a tragedy, but our villain is not part of noble house maneuvering for power, he is confined in all space, physical and mental, by white American racism. He acts within and against these confines, and when he crosses a line, he thinks only how to clean it up and get away. And it's here, Fargo-like, or Parasite-like, to name a couple movies, Wright leaves us. Shocked, stunned, trapped strangely in slow motion, horrified.

Mixing a few books at a time, I put the book down there (exhausted). When I picked it back up, the worst of the intense horror was past, but the book still had another 200 awkward pages of consequences, and contemplation, mentally search for ways to come to terms, and, even more awkwardly, toying with communist concepts. Bigger enters the legal system defended, without cost, by a Jewish American communist.

There is a nothing perfect in this book. It goes from evocative to uncomfortably horrific to oddly awkward. It doesn't fail. I was able to coast through these last 200 pages, and think about all that had happened, but it's a strange way to wrap this up.

Wright wanted to create a look at the human cost of racism without pity - and it certainly has done something of that sort. Five yucky stars for those first uncomfortable 200 pages, but less for the work overall.

2023
https://www.librarything.com/topic/348551#8097035½

Engaging for those willing to look beneath the story

Unfamiliar with the author, I had no idea what I was about to encounter especially where a rather unique epilogue is concerned. Fred Daniels is a black man whose pregnant wife is about to give birth and gets hauled in by racist police for a murder in spite of his innocence. As luck would have it, he manages to flee underground to the city's network of sewers. What he discovers takes the reader on a journey into his mind, thoughts and innermost being. Richard engages the reader with a plot that at first seems predictable, but soon after become otherwise due to use of theme and metaphor. Eighty percent through the book, the story segues to memories of the author's grandmother which are linked to the story's creation. This is extremely rare and the shift from colloquial language to that of a highly educated author is something to behold. Having read thousands of books this is the first where this is done and well worth considering since it enlightens the reader to no end. Evidently it was originally an essay that became this short novel which demonstrates his skill in writing. I'll be reading his other books, needless to say!

note: the following review, and the above stars, are for the title story only, not the three other items added into this volume -

“He had triumphed over the world aboveground. He was free!”

A black man is accused of killing two people, and the white police officers beat him until he signs a confession he never gave. He is able to escape into the sewers below the city, and while underneath has a series of adventures that seem to change him fundamentally. He is not the same when he resurfaces, but the world around him is.

I think this is an amazing story, which says a lot about the condition of the black man in the 1940's, which is to say, is not much different than it is now. When life in a sewer line is an upgrade, that says a lot about the life that one is forced to lead. The repugnant, torturous behavior of the white police officers has been echoed over and over in the eight decades since this was written, and the fictional character of Fred Daniels in this book can easily be compared to the real-life victims of police violence now. Richard Wright knew the truth all too well, and this book is still calling us out in 2023. An important read.

Listy post - for the short review

A flawed, but incredibly powerful collection of stories.

It serves as a commentary on the Jim Crowe South…and also oddly on (the awkwardness of?) Communist idealism. It also has some beautiful use of idiomatic language, terrific characters, and insane dramatic tension.

Etchings are by John Wilson for the story Down by the Riverside.

---

Yo mamma don wear no drawers...

This provocative collection on the Jim Crowe South was immediate success, with praise coming from, among other, first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, pushing up sales. Opening with autobiographic sketches on Wright's actual Jim Crowe experience, it then follows with five longer short stories (maybe novellas) all within this same world. It put Richard Wright on the literary map and it's easy to see why.

Pulling from a variety of influences, including idiomatic writing by Gertrude Stein, aggressive writing by H. L Melnkin & social science studies, partially coming out of the University of Chicago, Wright also had read the classics and the genres and understood plot and situation. And he uses that to effect.

What comes out is idiomatically beautiful, oddly simple and incredibly powerful. Wright uses the Jim Crowe world in a variety of complex ways, creating wild dramatic situations, with an assortment of wonderful characters. These are intense situations - one character hides in a tiny hole in the night waiting, with snakes, while a worked-up murderous white crowd with dogs searches for him to lynch. And Wright leaves us there, joyfully (my take) meditating on his running thoughts, tormenting the reader. Another tries to take care of his family isolated in a flood reminiscent of the 1927 Mississippi flood where men with darker skin were forced to work on levees, and in cases were still working on them as they broke. This man, named Mann, navigates a boat stolen from a white owner in town, against the current, without landmarks, back into town to reach a hospital. Part of what makes this story interesting, other than his name and the biblical implications, is how he's treated by apparently northern white soldiers verse white southern town folk. Neither is good, but it's different. There is a rape, and man kidnapped and strapped to a tree and told to pray as he is whipped waiting to die; he's shirtless, but his suit pants are still on. There is a clear implication that your skin color meant your life was cheap and expendable.

One thing I couldn't quite put my finger one was why this felt to me like I felt when reading classics high school, like 1984, or Farhenheit 451, or Call of the Wild. There is some simplistic aspect to the story telling, always cleanly 3rd person and maybe that is it. Novels today often confront us with voices, almost always unreliable and often uncomfortable. Here we are always safely in the narrator's hands, even if we focus on uncertain characters.

The work has some serious flaws. The Communist idealism in some stories is awkward at best. (but these stories won awards before they were collected here). The work is very sexist and manly, if you like. But the harshest criticism came from Wright, who was later wrote, "When the reviews of that book began to appear, I realized I had made an awfully naïve mistake. I found that I had written a book which even bankers' daughters could read and weep over and feel good about." In the introduction [[Richard Yarborough]] says "Wright was reacting less to particular flaws in [Uncle Tom's Children] and more to mainstream American culture's capacity to defuse the potency of harsh critique through the very act of commercial consumption and subsequent emotional release." That is to say, the cathartic nature of the work undermined its purpose, and also drove Wright to take a different approach with [Native Son], his next and most famous novel.

I can safely recommend this classic to anyone.

---

2. Uncle Tom's Children by Richard Wright
editing: introduction by Richard Yarborough (1993), notes by Arnold Rampersad
published: 1938, expanded 1940
format: 333-page paperback - Harper Perennial Olive Edition
acquired: November read: Jan 13-15 time reading: 8:12, 1.5 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Classic Short Stories theme: Richard Wright
locations: 1920’s Jim Crowe South
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation in 1908

originally published in 1938 with four stories
- Big Boy Leaves Home
- Down by the Riverside
- Long Black Song
- Fire and Cloud

Expanded edition in 1940 added two entries:
- The Ethics of Jim Crowe - autobiographical short takes - the opening entry
- Bright and Morning Star - the closing story

2023:
https://www.librarything.com/topic/347061#8038300

(book #62 from 2022):
12 Million Black Voices by Richard Wright
Photo-Direction: Edwin Rosskam (selected and edited the FSA photographs for the text)
published: 1941
format: 148-page large size paperback with photos
acquired: December 24, 2022 read: Dec 25, 2022 time reading: 2:58, 1.2 mpp
rating: 4½
genre/style: historical manifesto with photos theme: Richard Wright
locations: United States (especially Alabama, Georgia, Oklahoma, Chicago and Washington, D.C.)
about the author: American author born on a Mississippi plantation in 1908

My Litsy post:

But the photographs...

Called poetic or elegant prose, this is really a kind of historical manifesto on the crimes of America against African Americans, contextualized as an economic power struggle between the wealthiest (whites), and on the manipulation of poor white tensions by directing them towards white/black divisions. The photographs, almost all depression-era images from the FSA, are magnificent. Terrific text/photo combo.

---

Richard Wright had just published two very successful books when this came out. Born in the south, when he moved to Chicago in 1927 he became involved in the Communist party, partially because the party was actively non-racist. It allowed him access to a community of intellectuals who would help him develop as a writer and thinker. In 1937 he moved to New York, where the party was more openly racist, and where he began to drift from the party (partially because he felt he needed more time to write). In 1949 he would openly write an essay on being an ex-communist.

I mention that because his Communist thinking may lie in the subtext here. This is not a Communist work, but it is what I would call a manifesto, and is a history presented within mainly an economic context. The history of American racism is placed with the history of American economic power struggles - both the struggles between northern and southern wealth, where blacks formed the economic backbone of the south, and in the control of masses by the wealthy by redirecting white angst away from the wealthy and towards blacks instead. (That is by creating American white privilege.)

It's also interesting because even the craziest stuff is entirely accurate (as far as I could tell).

Regarding the FSA photos: The Farm Security Administration is mostly known for sponsoring famous Depression-era photographers, like Walker Evans. Edwin Rosskam poured through these highend collections to select the photographs to match this text. Almost all the photographs are FSA.

---

This is a nice book. Anyone interested should pursue a physical copy to better appreciate the photographs and the text/photo mixture.

2022
https://www.librarything.com/topic/347061#8028148½

Good novel of the black experience and injustice.