The Richard Wright Encyclopedia

The Richard Wright Encyclopedia PDF Author: Jerry W. Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313355193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works.

The Richard Wright Encyclopedia

The Richard Wright Encyclopedia PDF Author: Jerry W. Ward
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313355193
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 472

Get Book Here

Book Description
Richard Wright is one of the most important African American writers. He is also one of the most prolific. Best known as the author of Native Son, he wrote 7 novels; 2 collections of short fiction; an autobiography; more than 250 newspaper articles, book reviews, and occasional essays; some 4,000 verses; a photo-documentary; and 3 travel books. By attacking the taboos and hypocrisy that other writers had failed to address, he revolutionized American literature and created a disturbing and realistic portrait of the African American experience. This encyclopedia is a guide to his vast and influential body of works.

American Hunger

American Hunger PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041509
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 137

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Book Description
The compelling continuation of Richard Wright's great autobiographical work, Black Boy Anyone who has read Richard Wright's Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright's early life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North. American Hunger (first published more than thirty years after the appearance of Black Boy) is the continuation of that story. A vital, richly anecdotal work, American Hunger treats with feeling and often with wry humor Wright's struggle to make his way in the North—in Chicago—as a store clerk, dishwasher, and eventually as a writer. He deals movingly with his early days in the Communist Party and with his attempts to keep his integrity in the face of Party demands that he subordinate his artistic goals to its needs. And he recounts with a mixture of pain and irony his break with the Party and the tortured period of ostracism that followed. There is an unsettling and totally frank personal story here, and a lot of raw social history as well.

Richard Wright Reader

Richard Wright Reader PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Da Capo Press, Incorporated
ISBN:
Category : African Americans
Languages : en
Pages : 918

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Book Description
"Richard Wright" (1908-1960) was one of the landmark authors of twentieth-century American literature as well as one of the most formidable and eloquent black voices of his day. In nearly 900 pages the editors have collected his most essential and evocative writing: essays like "Black Power" and "Pagan Spain"; selections from his autobiography Black Boy; most of the photographs and the complete text of Wright's folk history of the African-American experience 12 Million Black Voices; representative criticism, articles, letters, and poetry; the complete novellas "The Man Who Lived Underground" and "Big Black Good Man"; and generous excerpts from novels like Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, The Outsider, The Long Dream, Savage Holiday, and Lawd Today. The result is a beautifully wrought miniature panorama of the career of a writer whose immense talent was matched only by his humanity.

Eight Men

Eight Men PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061450189
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Here, in these powerful stories, Richard Wright takes readers into this landscape once again. Each of the eight stories in Eight Men focuses on a black man at violent odds with a white world, reflecting Wright's views about racism in our society and his fascination with what he called "the struggle of the individual in America." These poignant, gripping stories will captivate all those who loved Black Boy and Native Son.

Black Boy

Black Boy PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061935484
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 506

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Book Description
Richard Wright's powerful account of his journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. It is at once an unashamed confession and a profound indictment--a poignant and disturbing record of social injustice and human suffering. When Black Boy exploded onto the literary scene in 1945, it caused a sensation. Orville Prescott of the New York Times wrote that “if enough such books are written, if enough millions of people read them maybe, someday, in the fullness of time, there will be a greater understanding and a more true democracy.” Opposing forces felt compelled to comment: addressing Congress, Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi argued that the purpose of this book “was to plant seeds of hate and devilment in the minds of every American.” From 1975 to 1978, Black Boy was banned in schools throughout the United States for “obscenity” and “instigating hatred between the races.” The once controversial, now classic American autobiography measures the brutality and rawness of the Jim Crow South against the sheer desperate will it took to survive. Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those about him; at six he was a “drunkard,” hanging about in taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was surrounded on one side by whites who were either indifferent to him, pitying, or cruel, and on the other by blacks who resented anyone trying to rise above the common lot. At the end of Black Boy, Wright sits poised with pencil in hand, determined to "hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo."

Richard Wright Writing America at Home and from Abroad

Richard Wright Writing America at Home and from Abroad PDF Author: Virginia Whatley Smith
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 1496807227
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Contributions by Robert J. Butler, Ginevra Geraci, Yoshinobu Hakutani, Floyd W. Hayes III, Joseph Keith, Toru Kiuchi, John Lowe, Sachi Nakachi, Virginia Whatley Smith, and John Zheng Critics in this volume reassess the prescient nature of Richard Wright's mind as well as his life and body of writings, especially those directly concerned with America and its racial dynamics. This edited collection offers new readings and understandings of the particular America that became Wright's focus at the beginning of his career and was still prominent in his mind at the end. Virginia Whatley Smith's edited collection examines Wright's fixation with America at home and from abroad: his oppression by, rejection of, conflict with, revolts against, and flight from America. Other people have written on Wright's revolutionary heroes, his difficulties with the FBI, and his works as a postcolonial provocateur; but none have focused singly on his treatment of America. Wherever Wright traveled, he always positioned himself as an African American as he compared his experiences to those at hand. However, as his domestic settlements changed to international residences, Wright's craftsmanship changed as well. To convey his cultural message, Wright created characters, themes, and plots that would expose arbitrary and whimsical American policies, oppressive rules which would invariably ensnare Wright's protagonists and sink them more deeply into the quagmire of racial subjugation as they grasped for a fleeting moment of freedom. Smith's collection brings to the fore new ways of looking at Wright, particularly his post-Native Son international writings. Indeed, no critical interrogations have considered the full significance of Wright's masterful crime fictions. In addition, the author's haiku poetry complements the fictional pieces addressed here, reflecting Wright's attitude toward America as he, near the end of his life, searched for nirvana—his antidote to American racism.

The Outsider

The Outsider PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0060539259
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 676

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Book Description
Wright presents a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself, a man who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes. As Maryemma Graham writes in her Introduction to this edition, with its restored text established by the Library of America, "The Outsider is Richard Wright's second installment in a story of epic proportions, a complex master narrative designed to show American racism in raw and ugly terms ... The stories of Bigger Thomas ... and Cross Damon bear an uncanny resemblance to many contemporary cases of street crime and violence. There is also a prophetic note in Wright's construction of the criminal mind as intelligent, introspective, and transformative." In addition to the Introduction by Maryemma Graham, this edition includes a notes section by Arnold Rampersad.

Conversations with Richard Wright

Conversations with Richard Wright PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
ISBN: 9780878056330
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
Collection of interviews revealing Wright's racial experience and the themes and techniques of his own work.

Richard Wright

Richard Wright PDF Author: Toru Kiuchi
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786465670
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 455

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Book Description
In this minutely detailed, comprehensive chronology, Toru Kiuchi and Yoshinobu Hakutani document the life in letters of the greatest African American writer of the twentieth century. The author of Black Boy and Native Son, among other works, Wright wrote unflinchingly about the black experience in the United States, where his books still influence discussions of race and social justice. Entries are documented by Wright's journals, articles, and other works published and unpublished, as well as his letters to and from friends, associates, writers and public figures. Part One covers Wright's life through the year 1946, the period in which he published his best-known work. Part Two covers the final fifteen years of his life in exile, a prolific period in which he wrote two novels, four works of nonfiction, and four thousand haiku. Each part begins with a historical and critical introduction.

Savage Holiday

Savage Holiday PDF Author: Richard Wright
Publisher: Pickle Partners Publishing
ISBN: 1789129885
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
Savage Holiday, first published in 1954 by noted American author Richard Wright, is a tense, well-written psychological thriller about Erskine Fowler, an insurance executive forced into early retirement, who, over the course of a bizarre weekend, is responsible for the accidental death of his neighbor’s young son. Tragic consequences follow as Fowler attempts to redeem himself and is forced to question his own life, as events spiral out-of-control to their inevitable conclusion.