Richard Wright

Anthony Pinn invokes Richard Wright as a voice of uncompromising African-American atheistic humanism and he is doubtless correct in doing so. I knew nothing of Wright's work beyond a couple of titles (Native Son and Black Boy) until the summer of 1992 when I read Louis Menand's thoughtful review of the Library of America's two-volume re-issue of five Wright novels (Louis Menand, "The Hammer and the Nail," The New Yorker, July 20, 1992, 79-84). That review prompted me to purchase the first volume of the pair (Wright's early work) and to marvel at the blunt manner with which the novelist confronts the reader with Black suffering. Many White Americans have some inkling of the cruelties visited upon Black Americans in the Jim Crow south but, until one reads Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, it is difficult, if not impossible, to grasp the level of unmitigated terrorism Blacks were forced to endure. This may be one reason that Wright's reception continues to be attended by ambivalence and his place in the canon of American letters--though assured--is never quite what it ought to be.

Of course, critics can (and do) take cover behind aesthetic considerations, as Menand acknowledges: "It's true that Wright's convictions flatten out the 'literary' qualities of his fiction, and lead him to sacrifice complexity for force. His novels tend to be prolix and didactic, and his style is often dogged" ("Hammer and Nail," 80). But Menand's next remark is equally important: "But force is a literary quality, too--and one that can make other limitations seem irrelevant" (ibid). One must weigh the potential socio-political import of Wright's novels in the balance of their total artistic impact--as one should do with the later Tolstoy--and then adjust the critical estimate accordingly.

Pinn's turn towards Wright is much like James Cone's turn towards Malcolm X: a refreshing exercise in candor. An exercise that White America continues to find difficult to contemplate, much less put into practice, when it comes to the history of race relations in this country (and many other matters of consequence in our national life).