Reviews for Richard Wright

The average rating for Richard Wright based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-02-18 00:00:00 Gurjit Johal Excellent and engrossing biography of the controversial writer. A true autodidact with only an 8th grade education, Wright had virtually no support for learning from his stifling and dysfunctional home-life. His life-changing moment came when he pestered one of his grandmother's boarders into telling him the story of a novel she was reading. When his grandmother found out she denounced fiction as the devil's work, but it was too late to turn off his brilliant and inquisitive brain. Growing up in the South, he was part of the Great Black Migration north, and both experiences shaped him. His writing career began while living and working at odd jobs in Chicago, bolstered primarily through friends and fellow-writers he met in the Communist Party. Although later disillusioned with the Party, it was his first opportunity to be an equal with whites and for his writing to be taken seriously by other writers. Moving to New York he married, left the Party and began to make a living as a writer. Both of his major works, Native Son and Black Boy, were Book-of-the-Month Club selections. According to this biographer. the heavy editing and re-writing required by the Club's judges actually improved both books and served the author well, in spite of the fact that some themes were deemed too sensitive at the time and were left-out in the early editions. Wright, as a realist writer, was not universally lauded and came into conflict with some other black writers who felt he presented too unpleasant an aspect of black life. How sad that these talented people had to be ever-mindful of how they would be received by even the most enlightened white people. Tired of the daily affronts to his dignity due to racial prejudice in the US, Wright moved his family to France and continued to live there and in England for the rest of his life. Wright felt more free in France than he ever did in the US, but was always the outsider. Sadly, even the freedom he at first enjoyed in Europe was soon curtailed due to the influx of Americans who brought their discriminatory practices and racist attitudes with them. He was curious about many other cultures and countries and traveled widely in Spain and Africa, writing about his many experiences in those difficult places. Wright and the other ex-patriot artists were continually followed and spied upon by the CIA while abroad, to an astounding extent well-documented in the pages of this book. Wright's position was always tenuous due to his citizenship status and his political activities, and his ability to live and travel freely was made difficult by the authorities. Wright was no saint and his womanizing and negligence as a husband and father are not over-looked by this author. He was a complicated man in a dangerous time for a thinking and writing person of color.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-11-20 00:00:00 Billy Robinett I was always curious about Richard Wright's emergence from such humble circumstances in Mississippi to becoming one of great writers of the 20th century. An impressive journey and a complicated man. And it was indeed a journey both figuratively and literally, as Mr. Wright moved around a lot. He was more impressive as an author and as a spokesman against racism than as a husband and father.