60. Richard Wright: From Black Boy to World Citizen by Jennifer Jensen Wallach
published: 2010
format: 189-page hardcover
acquired: library read: Dec 10 -13 time reading: 5:13, 1.7 mpp
rating: 3
genre/style: Biography theme: Richard Wright
locations: Mississippi, Memphis, Chicago, New York, Paris
about the author: Chair of the history department at the University of North Texas

An efficient, compressed, easy-to-read biography. (I saw a non-professional review that called it YA, which encouraged me to pick it up because that's exactly what I wanted - an easy but reliable biography. I wouldn't classify it that way, though.)

Richard Wright is the author of [Native Son] and [Black Boy] and will be a 2023 theme for me. He was an independent spirit always. He grew up in Jim Crowe Mississippi, sort of escaped and became communist in Chicago & New York, where he made connections that helped him become a writer. Depression era Communist groups actively tried to be non-racist and attracted a large African American participation. Wright wrote furiously and finally found success with [Uncle Tom's Children], a collection of stories published in 1938. He later became a financially self-sufficient author. Uncomfortable with the racism in New York (and Chicago), he moved to Paris permanently as soon as it was possible after WWII. He notably never settled down. He constantly traveled, changed philosophies, had numerous affairs despite being married with two children. Also he was constantly watched by the FBI and CIA and seems to have had some serious anxiety because that. He had some strange ideas at times. Despite living in Paris and mixing with Parisian cultural life, circulating with Simone de Beauvoir and her milieu, he was distinctly American always. He never really learned French, and, when he traveled the world, saw it always through an American cultural context. This left him very uncomfortable with foreign mindsets and traditions, which he saw as backwards. His two major works, written mainly while he was living in New York, had a profound affect on American and French readers. He was a hero of James Baldwin and other expat and black writers.

The book is clean and does what it promises. Being a sort of rush through his life has at least two negative side-effects. One is that there is no time to really analyze his work or his thinking. The other is that facts outweigh the character. From the facts, we can tell Wright had some personal problems. He had a strong sense of entitlement that both gave me the strength to survive and leave the Jim Crowe south, and that also led him to become a very selfish, abandon his family, and ultimately become an isolated character. Actually he abandoned many things in his life - not just the south, but also Communism and its community, America, and many friendships and other relationships. What is lost in this book is the charm he clearly had, and the power of what he wrote and what it did to his readers. So, it left me with a touch of a bad taste, even though I know this is just an artifact of how the book is designed. That's why I left a nicely-done brief biography with only 3 stars.

I certainly still look forward to his key books. I'm a little weary of some of his later ones, especially his 700-page experiment with existentialism, [The Outsider]. Wright published less over his 13 years in Paris but did not stop writing. He wrote furiously. He died unexpected in 1960, (probably because of a bad medical care) leaving a lot of unpublished work. A lot of that has now been published (Wallach lists six works, including an autobiography and a collection of Haiku. Her list does not include [The Man Who Lived Underground], which wasn't published until 2021.). I'm not sure how much of all these works I will try to read.

Side note: I recognized many of his childhood stories in Mississippi. So I think I must have read all or part of [Black Boy] in high school.

2022
https://www.librarything.com/topic/345047#8001623 ( )