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Richard Wright: Early Works
Native Son and Black Boy are classics of twentieth-century American literature—and yet the novel and memoir known to millions of readers are in fact revised and abbreviated versions of the books Richard Wright wrote. This two-volume Library of America edition presents for the first time Wright’s major works in the form in which he intended them to be read. The authoritative new texts, based on Wright’s original typescripts and proofs, reveal the full range and power of his achievement as an experimental stylist and as a fiery prophet of the tragic consequences of racism in American society.
Native Son exploded onto the American literary and cultural scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago’s South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts—including the replacement of an entire scene—that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about his own controversial protagonist. As he wrote in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” which accompanies the novel: “I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, I’d be acting out of fear.”
This volume also contains Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today!, published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—Lincoln’s birthday, February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal clerk. The text for this edition reinstates Wright’s stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination.
Uncle Tom’s Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks “what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity.” All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”
This volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s texts and a detailed chronology of his life.
Native Son exploded onto the American literary and cultural scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago’s South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts—including the replacement of an entire scene—that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. The unexpurgated version of Wright’s electrifying novel shows his determination to write honestly about his own controversial protagonist. As he wrote in the essay “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” which accompanies the novel: “I became convinced that if I did not write of Bigger as I saw and felt him, I’d be acting out of fear.”
This volume also contains Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today!, published posthumously in 1963, and his collection of stories, Uncle Tom’s Children, which appeared in 1938. Lawd Today! interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day—Lincoln’s birthday, February 12—in the life of a black Chicago postal clerk. The text for this edition reinstates Wright’s stylistic experiments, and the novel emerges as a far livelier work of the imagination.
Uncle Tom’s Children first brought Wright to national attention when it received the Story prize for the best work submitted to the Federal Writers’ Project. The characters in these tales struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks “what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity.” All five stories Wright included in the 1940 second edition are published in this volume, along with his sardonic autobiographical essay “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow.”
This volume includes notes on significant changes in Wright’s texts and a detailed chronology of his life.
936 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1991
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206 people want to read
About the author
Richard Wright
352 books2,249 followersRichard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerned racial themes. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
February 12, 2022
Richard Wright was a master of describing the tragedy of the historical Black American experience in stark and uncompromising terms. His early works are not light reading, but some exposure to his writing should be required of all Americans, especially younger ones. It might do something to remedy the legacy of American racism that we can’t seem to escape. This is the twentieth volume of the Library of America series I have read until now and it may well be the most profound.
Native Son, the final entry in this collection, is Wright’s masterpiece. This is the fifth or sixth time I have read it, the first being in my junior year of high school. The story is set in Chicago in the late 1920 or early 1930s. The attitudes and behaviors of the various characters reveal many timeless truths, including an almost biblical sense of America’s original sin—all told through the experiences of Bigger Thomas, one of the enduring characters of American literature. The narrative is divided into three books. Taken together, the first and second books make up a fast paced crime novel that could easily be considered a complete novel. It is the third book, however, that Wright elevates this story into a literary morality tale, causing the reader to question every impression made in the first two books. Racism remains at the center of the story throughout. It touches on other themes of white privilege and philanthropy, black culture, communism, popular journalism, the legal system, the complex nature of prejudice, and, most importantly, the meaning of redemption.
The eternal theme of Native Son can be encapsulated, I believe, in one of attorney Boris Max’s observations that “The hunt for Bigger Thomas served as an excuse to terrorize the entire Negro population, to arrest hundreds of Communists, to raid labor unions headquarters and workers’ organizations. Indeed the tone of the press, the silence of the church, the attitude of the prosecution and the stimulated temper of the people are of such a nature as to indicate that more than revenge is being sought upon a man who has committed a crime.” Consider how often and in how many cultures this theme holds true. Consider how the events of September 11th have created and unleashed, on one side, an irrational phobia of Islam in the west, and, on the other, how the response to it created a blind hatred among many young Muslims around the world. Or how the consequence-free murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner—or even the popular election of a Black man as president of the United States—have given rise and a certain social and political legitimacy to a legacy of racism. Anyone in the world can point to similar analogies in their lives and societies. Richard Wright understood and articulated this when he wrote Native Son.
Uncle Tom’s Children begins with a personal reflection on the Jim Crow era and is followed by five kick-in-the-gut short stories. Each is punctuated by extreme, tragic violence that usually hinges on moments of chance. But the underlying racism amplifies Wright’s views that the occurrence of those moments is more a matter of “when,” not “if.” Many of the protagonists live in states of quiet frustration, unable to determine their own fates. Every story is gripping and illuminating about the black American experience during Jim Crow—and to some extent, today. It might be worth adding a story or two of this collection to a curriculum that requires reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I only wish I had read this earlier in my life.
Lawd Today! is Wright’s first novel but was published posthumously in 1963. It is a Joyce-like, day-in-the-life story of a black male postal worker in Chicago between the World Wars. His character traits run the gamut from villain to victim and everything in between. The inconsistencies and indignities of his day reveal a complex experience that reveal a greater reality of black Americans in Chicago who were part of the migration from the South.
This edition concludes with Wright’s essay How “Bigger” Was Born, written in 1940. It is interesting how Wright created Bigger out of an amalgamation of various, seemingly unconnected influences. He describes five “types” of Biggers he knew when growing up in Mississippi. Other disparate influences included his emerging understanding of the commonalities of the American Black experience and trade unions, communism, and the rise of fascism (indeed, the way police and press treat communists in Native Son is not at all dissimilar to the German perception of them following the Nazi seizure of power). The thing that linked them all into the character of Bigger Thomas was that “…he was a product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives among the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.” He writes about the various individual and personal influences, the writing process, how the novel was constructed, and how the critical response to Uncle Tom’s Children when, in his view, “I realized that 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. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” He closes with a reflection on the state of American literature; how Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Edgar Allan Poe might have fared as his contemporaries. They would fit in as he concluded poetically, “And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.” Wright could have been referring to himself.
Native Son, the final entry in this collection, is Wright’s masterpiece. This is the fifth or sixth time I have read it, the first being in my junior year of high school. The story is set in Chicago in the late 1920 or early 1930s. The attitudes and behaviors of the various characters reveal many timeless truths, including an almost biblical sense of America’s original sin—all told through the experiences of Bigger Thomas, one of the enduring characters of American literature. The narrative is divided into three books. Taken together, the first and second books make up a fast paced crime novel that could easily be considered a complete novel. It is the third book, however, that Wright elevates this story into a literary morality tale, causing the reader to question every impression made in the first two books. Racism remains at the center of the story throughout. It touches on other themes of white privilege and philanthropy, black culture, communism, popular journalism, the legal system, the complex nature of prejudice, and, most importantly, the meaning of redemption.
The eternal theme of Native Son can be encapsulated, I believe, in one of attorney Boris Max’s observations that “The hunt for Bigger Thomas served as an excuse to terrorize the entire Negro population, to arrest hundreds of Communists, to raid labor unions headquarters and workers’ organizations. Indeed the tone of the press, the silence of the church, the attitude of the prosecution and the stimulated temper of the people are of such a nature as to indicate that more than revenge is being sought upon a man who has committed a crime.” Consider how often and in how many cultures this theme holds true. Consider how the events of September 11th have created and unleashed, on one side, an irrational phobia of Islam in the west, and, on the other, how the response to it created a blind hatred among many young Muslims around the world. Or how the consequence-free murders of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, or Eric Garner—or even the popular election of a Black man as president of the United States—have given rise and a certain social and political legitimacy to a legacy of racism. Anyone in the world can point to similar analogies in their lives and societies. Richard Wright understood and articulated this when he wrote Native Son.
Uncle Tom’s Children begins with a personal reflection on the Jim Crow era and is followed by five kick-in-the-gut short stories. Each is punctuated by extreme, tragic violence that usually hinges on moments of chance. But the underlying racism amplifies Wright’s views that the occurrence of those moments is more a matter of “when,” not “if.” Many of the protagonists live in states of quiet frustration, unable to determine their own fates. Every story is gripping and illuminating about the black American experience during Jim Crow—and to some extent, today. It might be worth adding a story or two of this collection to a curriculum that requires reading of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I only wish I had read this earlier in my life.
Lawd Today! is Wright’s first novel but was published posthumously in 1963. It is a Joyce-like, day-in-the-life story of a black male postal worker in Chicago between the World Wars. His character traits run the gamut from villain to victim and everything in between. The inconsistencies and indignities of his day reveal a complex experience that reveal a greater reality of black Americans in Chicago who were part of the migration from the South.
This edition concludes with Wright’s essay How “Bigger” Was Born, written in 1940. It is interesting how Wright created Bigger out of an amalgamation of various, seemingly unconnected influences. He describes five “types” of Biggers he knew when growing up in Mississippi. Other disparate influences included his emerging understanding of the commonalities of the American Black experience and trade unions, communism, and the rise of fascism (indeed, the way police and press treat communists in Native Son is not at all dissimilar to the German perception of them following the Nazi seizure of power). The thing that linked them all into the character of Bigger Thomas was that “…he was a product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives among the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.” He writes about the various individual and personal influences, the writing process, how the novel was constructed, and how the critical response to Uncle Tom’s Children when, in his view, “I realized that 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. I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears.” He closes with a reflection on the state of American literature; how Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, or Edgar Allan Poe might have fared as his contemporaries. They would fit in as he concluded poetically, “And if Poe were alive, he would not have to invent horror; horror would invent him.” Wright could have been referring to himself.
May 20, 2013
Pulp fiction with an agenda from a master stylist.
June 17, 2020
This book contains three works from Richard Wright's early years, together with an essay by the author discussing these works.
Native Son is the strongest and by far the best known of the the three It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a feckless 20 year-old black man who lives with his mother and siblings in a one-room apartment paid for by welfare (called "relief" in the 1930s when the book was written) and spends his days hanging out at a local pool hall and carrying out minor crimes with his friends.
Bigger is afflicted by a sense of ennui. He is frustrated with his circumstances and knows vaguely that he wants to do something with his life, but does not know what that something is or have the energy and ambition to do anything about it.
Bigger's prospects take a decided turn for the better when a wealthy white businessman hires him as a chauffer for his family. Bigger's new employer is of a type which has become a stock figure in Amerian books, film, and tv since the 1960s but probably was not so hackneyed in the 1930s: a wealthy white liberal who means well but is utterly naive regarding society's problems and how to deal with them.
Shortly after Bigger assumes his position and moves into his new chauffer's quarters, he is directed to drive his employer's daughter to an evening lecture at the local university (probably Northwestern, since the story takes place in Chicago and the employer lives on the wealthier north side, though the book does not specifiy this). The daughter is of another type which has become familiar in American literature and entertainment - the frivolous rich girl - and her actual plan is to spend the evening riding around. and drinking with her boyfriend, an Communist Party organizer.
Bigger is uncomfortable with the escapade or even conversing with these white people from another world, but goes along with them. He goes so far as to show them a black restaurant on the south side at their request, and then goes in and sits with them, once again at their request, even though he is starkly uncomfortable at being seen with white people and harbors more than a little racial anomisity in his soul.
The evening ends with the boyfriend leaving and Bigger forced to help the young lady up the stairs in her home because she is too drunk to manage them herself. Bigger understandably is nervous about being caught upstairs, and disaster strikes when the girl's blind mother wakes up, hears a sound, and goes to check on her daughter. Bigger, who still is in her room, claps a hand over mouth to prevent her from saying anthing or making a sound that would alert the mother to her presence, and through a combination of nerves, adrenaline, fear of being discovered, visceral discomfort at being so close to a white person, and general racism and anger at the world, presses too hard and inadvertently suffocates her.
From this point on, Bigger's actions are a string of ill-considered mistakes that continually push him farther into the morass. Bigger drags the body down the stairs and pushes her into the furnace in the hope the flames will entirely consume the evidence of his crime. Although Bigger understandably fears being caught, he also decides to send the family an anonymous ransom note, claiming their daughter has been kidnapped and will be killed unless they pay $10,000. He also lets his black girlfriend, who he does not really care for, in on the plan because he needs someone to help him retrieve the money when it is paid. Throughout these evens Bigger seems to be drifting forward in a mental fog, acting from a conflicting welter of motives - anger, frustration, racism, his vague desire to achieve something in life, which he thinks wil be accomplished by taking the $10,000, and who knows what else - and propelled forward more by the momentum of the events he has set in motion than by any conscious thought.
Disaster strikes when the furnace fills with ashes that need to be removed, and the detectives working on the case discover the charred remnants of the victim's bones and jewelry in those ashes. Bigger goes on the run, and shows his truest colors when he rapes and murders his black girlfriend because he fears she will betray him. After remaining at large for several days, Bigger is caught after a nighttime chase across the rooftops of Chicago tenements, and put on trial for murder.
Up through this point, the book has carried a menacing, noirish tone, as the world gradually closes in on Bigger due as much to his own mistakes as anything else. After he is arrested, however, the tone changes, and his trial consists largely of his Communist Party-supplied attorney of lecturing the court on how a young man from Bigger's deprived background should not be held responsible for his crimes. This sort of "argument" would not be allowed in a real court, and the trial seems to be nothng more than a literary device to enable Wright to lecture to the reader. Although this lecture probably did not sound as trite and hackneyed in the 1930s as it does today, it remains by far the weakest part of the book, and brings the story to a limping conclusion.
Uncle Tom's Children is a collection of short stories which show none of the complexities of character included in the first two-thirds of Native Son. The stories all take place in the South, white are vicious murdering thug, and blacks are the helpless victims of those thugs. Shades of grey are absent, and the two races neither know nor interact with each other despite living very close for centuries.
In the essay at the end of the volume ("How Bigger Was Born"), Wright described Uncle Tom's Children as a book that society ladies could read and weep over the injustices it portrays. It actually is a book that shows the author's soul curdled by hatred and racism (his own and that of the Jim Crow society that still existed in the South at that time). Being utterly devoid of nuance, the book also is devoid of value.
Lawd Today! describes one day in the life of Jake Jackson, a postal clerk with a growing middle-aged spread living in Chicago. Jake spends most of his free time engaging in various hijinks with a mall group of friends, and finds himself in constant trouble because of debts and wife-beating charges. He is utterly incapable of processing what is happening in his life or making changes, and not surprisingly makes his wife miserable. (The story ends with her weeping and wishing she was dead after yet another beating.) All in all, a rather depressing slice of black life in the Chicago of the late 1930s.
Native Son is the strongest and by far the best known of the the three It tells the story of Bigger Thomas, a feckless 20 year-old black man who lives with his mother and siblings in a one-room apartment paid for by welfare (called "relief" in the 1930s when the book was written) and spends his days hanging out at a local pool hall and carrying out minor crimes with his friends.
Bigger is afflicted by a sense of ennui. He is frustrated with his circumstances and knows vaguely that he wants to do something with his life, but does not know what that something is or have the energy and ambition to do anything about it.
Bigger's prospects take a decided turn for the better when a wealthy white businessman hires him as a chauffer for his family. Bigger's new employer is of a type which has become a stock figure in Amerian books, film, and tv since the 1960s but probably was not so hackneyed in the 1930s: a wealthy white liberal who means well but is utterly naive regarding society's problems and how to deal with them.
Shortly after Bigger assumes his position and moves into his new chauffer's quarters, he is directed to drive his employer's daughter to an evening lecture at the local university (probably Northwestern, since the story takes place in Chicago and the employer lives on the wealthier north side, though the book does not specifiy this). The daughter is of another type which has become familiar in American literature and entertainment - the frivolous rich girl - and her actual plan is to spend the evening riding around. and drinking with her boyfriend, an Communist Party organizer.
Bigger is uncomfortable with the escapade or even conversing with these white people from another world, but goes along with them. He goes so far as to show them a black restaurant on the south side at their request, and then goes in and sits with them, once again at their request, even though he is starkly uncomfortable at being seen with white people and harbors more than a little racial anomisity in his soul.
The evening ends with the boyfriend leaving and Bigger forced to help the young lady up the stairs in her home because she is too drunk to manage them herself. Bigger understandably is nervous about being caught upstairs, and disaster strikes when the girl's blind mother wakes up, hears a sound, and goes to check on her daughter. Bigger, who still is in her room, claps a hand over mouth to prevent her from saying anthing or making a sound that would alert the mother to her presence, and through a combination of nerves, adrenaline, fear of being discovered, visceral discomfort at being so close to a white person, and general racism and anger at the world, presses too hard and inadvertently suffocates her.
From this point on, Bigger's actions are a string of ill-considered mistakes that continually push him farther into the morass. Bigger drags the body down the stairs and pushes her into the furnace in the hope the flames will entirely consume the evidence of his crime. Although Bigger understandably fears being caught, he also decides to send the family an anonymous ransom note, claiming their daughter has been kidnapped and will be killed unless they pay $10,000. He also lets his black girlfriend, who he does not really care for, in on the plan because he needs someone to help him retrieve the money when it is paid. Throughout these evens Bigger seems to be drifting forward in a mental fog, acting from a conflicting welter of motives - anger, frustration, racism, his vague desire to achieve something in life, which he thinks wil be accomplished by taking the $10,000, and who knows what else - and propelled forward more by the momentum of the events he has set in motion than by any conscious thought.
Disaster strikes when the furnace fills with ashes that need to be removed, and the detectives working on the case discover the charred remnants of the victim's bones and jewelry in those ashes. Bigger goes on the run, and shows his truest colors when he rapes and murders his black girlfriend because he fears she will betray him. After remaining at large for several days, Bigger is caught after a nighttime chase across the rooftops of Chicago tenements, and put on trial for murder.
Up through this point, the book has carried a menacing, noirish tone, as the world gradually closes in on Bigger due as much to his own mistakes as anything else. After he is arrested, however, the tone changes, and his trial consists largely of his Communist Party-supplied attorney of lecturing the court on how a young man from Bigger's deprived background should not be held responsible for his crimes. This sort of "argument" would not be allowed in a real court, and the trial seems to be nothng more than a literary device to enable Wright to lecture to the reader. Although this lecture probably did not sound as trite and hackneyed in the 1930s as it does today, it remains by far the weakest part of the book, and brings the story to a limping conclusion.
Uncle Tom's Children is a collection of short stories which show none of the complexities of character included in the first two-thirds of Native Son. The stories all take place in the South, white are vicious murdering thug, and blacks are the helpless victims of those thugs. Shades of grey are absent, and the two races neither know nor interact with each other despite living very close for centuries.
In the essay at the end of the volume ("How Bigger Was Born"), Wright described Uncle Tom's Children as a book that society ladies could read and weep over the injustices it portrays. It actually is a book that shows the author's soul curdled by hatred and racism (his own and that of the Jim Crow society that still existed in the South at that time). Being utterly devoid of nuance, the book also is devoid of value.
Lawd Today! describes one day in the life of Jake Jackson, a postal clerk with a growing middle-aged spread living in Chicago. Jake spends most of his free time engaging in various hijinks with a mall group of friends, and finds himself in constant trouble because of debts and wife-beating charges. He is utterly incapable of processing what is happening in his life or making changes, and not surprisingly makes his wife miserable. (The story ends with her weeping and wishing she was dead after yet another beating.) All in all, a rather depressing slice of black life in the Chicago of the late 1930s.
July 7, 2023
If I were a black youth raised under the influence of Wright, I’d shoot every white person I saw before that honky killed me. The mood created by this author is dangerous to society. The way he depicts humanity, is plain misanthropic.
Uncle Tom's Children (1938)
I don’t think I have ever read a more racist work. The depiction of every white person as a horrendous, vile species of animal without one ounce of humanity. The blacks are depicted as poverty-stricken, ignorant fools who blame circumstances for their unthinking behavior. Wright must have had such a poor opinion of people that only a terribly bitter man would claim this diatribe.
Native Son (1940)
Another over-the-top racist work. Both races are depicted in stereotypical forms: brutal, inhumane, unthinking, yet one has privilege and wealth while the other thrives in decrepitude. The atmosphere and setting are depressing, the sense of justice elusive and the conclusion is to be expected: The Man executes The Brother.
Lawd Today! (1963)
A day in the life of a vain and brutal man is depicted in a way that would add fuel to white racists everywhere: a custom of abusing women, violence, laziness, loud and pretentious clothing, spending money you do not have, blaming others for your position and poverty, disrespect for fellow men, stupidity, bare ability to do simple math, accepting messiness while meticulous about appearance, misuse of or mispronouncing words … Lawd, this is a recruitment work for neo-Nazis and the KKK!
Uncle Tom's Children (1938)
I don’t think I have ever read a more racist work. The depiction of every white person as a horrendous, vile species of animal without one ounce of humanity. The blacks are depicted as poverty-stricken, ignorant fools who blame circumstances for their unthinking behavior. Wright must have had such a poor opinion of people that only a terribly bitter man would claim this diatribe.
Native Son (1940)
Another over-the-top racist work. Both races are depicted in stereotypical forms: brutal, inhumane, unthinking, yet one has privilege and wealth while the other thrives in decrepitude. The atmosphere and setting are depressing, the sense of justice elusive and the conclusion is to be expected: The Man executes The Brother.
Lawd Today! (1963)
A day in the life of a vain and brutal man is depicted in a way that would add fuel to white racists everywhere: a custom of abusing women, violence, laziness, loud and pretentious clothing, spending money you do not have, blaming others for your position and poverty, disrespect for fellow men, stupidity, bare ability to do simple math, accepting messiness while meticulous about appearance, misuse of or mispronouncing words … Lawd, this is a recruitment work for neo-Nazis and the KKK!
October 9, 2012
The one thing that you must be aware of before you embark on any of Wright’s work is that it is violent. I don’t mean a little bit of vague reference to a lynching, but gruesome, uncomfortable, detailed descriptions of the most horrible things you can imagine happened to southern black people. There were moments where the language alone made me want to throw up, so be warned.
That being said, he’s one of the MOST important black writers of the 20th century. He doesn’t pander to a white audience, he doesn’t pander to the black middle-class. His work is 100% honest, if not a little over the top at times. Though he’s been criticized for the form of dialect he uses, I think it’s smart how he uses it. Each story in this book is beautifully crafted, even with its disturbing nature.
I’m in a class about Richard Wright at the moment, which is why there will be so many of his works. But I can honestly say I’m glad I’m taking it, because he’s an author I think gets overlooked a lot because of the brutal nature of his work. Personally I respect him more for his refusal to cater to others, even if that means learning things about human nature I’d rather not know.
That being said, he’s one of the MOST important black writers of the 20th century. He doesn’t pander to a white audience, he doesn’t pander to the black middle-class. His work is 100% honest, if not a little over the top at times. Though he’s been criticized for the form of dialect he uses, I think it’s smart how he uses it. Each story in this book is beautifully crafted, even with its disturbing nature.
I’m in a class about Richard Wright at the moment, which is why there will be so many of his works. But I can honestly say I’m glad I’m taking it, because he’s an author I think gets overlooked a lot because of the brutal nature of his work. Personally I respect him more for his refusal to cater to others, even if that means learning things about human nature I’d rather not know.
February 11, 2025
I only read Native Son. Goodreads won't let me post the individual works in these anthologies and I wanted to read unexpurgated texts. Native Son is incredibly powerful. He says all the things about American racism that white people refuse to acknowledge, because they are fearful of the implications. 84 years after its initial publication we have Donald Trump because white people continue to be fearful of a world where they are not on top.
April 23, 2025
This is the first of a two-volume anthology I received from the Library of America a decade or two ago when I could afford to have publishers send me books they picked out on my behalf on a monthly basis. It has sat on my shelf this past decade or two, and with my stack of unread books slightly winnowed due to the recent market downturn, I finally got around to picking it up. I had no idea what I was getting into.
It begins with Lawd Above, Wright's first novel. A few pages pages in, it's pretty evident why it remained unpublished during his lifetime; it ranks among the most unpleasant reads I've ever forced myself to get through. The central character, Jake Johnson, has absolutely nothing redeeming about him. He's misogynistic, narcissistic, violent and stupid, and the point of the story was lost on me. But I hate not finishing a book, especially if the author can actually write, and Wright obviously could, so I kept going.
"The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," introduces the next work, Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of novellas full of violence, tragedy and rage, all but one of which involve or end in a murder or murders at the hands of whites. Take the following quote from Silas in "Long Black Song" and you get the general idea: "The white folks ain never gimme a chance! They ain nothing in yo whole life you kin keep from em! They take you freedom! They take yo women! N then they take yo life!"
So by now I've got a pretty good grasp of Wright's quite justifiable anger, but I'm struggling to understand where Wright is coming from. I get it that the racism of the the Jim Crow South was shameful and the soft bigotry of the supposedly more enlightened North was only less so, but Wright's black characters are in their own ways every bit as flawed as the bigoted whites they encounter. I can't for the life of me figure out why Wright has them do the things they do. Every action they take is the exact wrong one, and I'm finding it hard to sympathize with characters who are this dumb.
Next comes Native Son, the only one of Wright's works I'd actually heard of, and one which, in the beginning, seems similar to everything that comes before it in that it invokes feelings of "What in the hell is wrong with this guy?" as the central character, Bigger Thomas, makes one inexplicable move after another. I don't want to give the plot away (though you can get the gist from the title of the novel's three "books": "Fear," "Flight" and "Fate"), so I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that "shocking" would be the most apt modifier. I found myself unable to put the book down as I struggled with the issue of what could compel this guy to do the things he does and wondering what he would do next.
It seems to me that Wright also struggled with the issue of why people, both black and white but mostly black, do what they did (or at least did what they did circa 1940). The motivation of Southern whites, particularly poor Southern whites, is pretty easily explained. The motivation of blacks is a lot more complex, and this is the ground that Wright mines. He explains as best he can in both "Fate" and the afterward, "How Bigger Was Born," and one can understand the rage that drew him to Communism.
I've spent my entire life being mystified by racism. I grew up in an affluent, all-white Southern California community in the 1950s and 60s. My exposure to black people was limited to our maid Ora whom I loved. I remember being both dumbfounded and heartbroken when my mother informed me that Ora could not miss her 5 o'clock bus back to central L.A. or she could be picked up by police for being on our white suburban streets after dark. That was my one and only window into racism until 1967, when I was sent an all-white military school in Virginia. There was where I first witnessed overt racism. Despite the fact that there were no blacks on campus at that time, they were quite literally an obsession among the Southern white cadets. The "N" word was thrown around constantly; it was the worst pejorative one could use against another. Blacks were shiftless, lazy, amoral, dishonest; they'd steal you blind if ever given the chance. The peer pressure was relentless and overwhelming. I could "but Ora" all day long, but it was hard to resist the notion that black people were somehow inferior.
It wasn't until I left the South, moved to the Bay Area of California and actually befriended a few blacks and other non-whites that I came to fully understand that the problem here – or at least the root of it – was whites, not blacks.
That was 50 years ago, and obviously my views on race and racism have evolved since then. Yes, there's been both occasional progress and regression, but there's still a lot of ugliness, and the preponderance of the ugliness I see in the news and online these days is coming from non-whites, not whites. Racism is equal opportunity; it appears to be baked into human nature. Wright struggled with it during his lifetime. We struggle with it today in ways both different and the same. Wright wrote with an eloquence I'll never achieve, and he provides valuable insights into the root causes of the black/white divide that persists to this day. I find myself wondering what he would have to say were he still alive today.
It begins with Lawd Above, Wright's first novel. A few pages pages in, it's pretty evident why it remained unpublished during his lifetime; it ranks among the most unpleasant reads I've ever forced myself to get through. The central character, Jake Johnson, has absolutely nothing redeeming about him. He's misogynistic, narcissistic, violent and stupid, and the point of the story was lost on me. But I hate not finishing a book, especially if the author can actually write, and Wright obviously could, so I kept going.
"The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," introduces the next work, Uncle Tom's Children, a collection of novellas full of violence, tragedy and rage, all but one of which involve or end in a murder or murders at the hands of whites. Take the following quote from Silas in "Long Black Song" and you get the general idea: "The white folks ain never gimme a chance! They ain nothing in yo whole life you kin keep from em! They take you freedom! They take yo women! N then they take yo life!"
So by now I've got a pretty good grasp of Wright's quite justifiable anger, but I'm struggling to understand where Wright is coming from. I get it that the racism of the the Jim Crow South was shameful and the soft bigotry of the supposedly more enlightened North was only less so, but Wright's black characters are in their own ways every bit as flawed as the bigoted whites they encounter. I can't for the life of me figure out why Wright has them do the things they do. Every action they take is the exact wrong one, and I'm finding it hard to sympathize with characters who are this dumb.
Next comes Native Son, the only one of Wright's works I'd actually heard of, and one which, in the beginning, seems similar to everything that comes before it in that it invokes feelings of "What in the hell is wrong with this guy?" as the central character, Bigger Thomas, makes one inexplicable move after another. I don't want to give the plot away (though you can get the gist from the title of the novel's three "books": "Fear," "Flight" and "Fate"), so I won't go into detail. Suffice it to say that "shocking" would be the most apt modifier. I found myself unable to put the book down as I struggled with the issue of what could compel this guy to do the things he does and wondering what he would do next.
It seems to me that Wright also struggled with the issue of why people, both black and white but mostly black, do what they did (or at least did what they did circa 1940). The motivation of Southern whites, particularly poor Southern whites, is pretty easily explained. The motivation of blacks is a lot more complex, and this is the ground that Wright mines. He explains as best he can in both "Fate" and the afterward, "How Bigger Was Born," and one can understand the rage that drew him to Communism.
I've spent my entire life being mystified by racism. I grew up in an affluent, all-white Southern California community in the 1950s and 60s. My exposure to black people was limited to our maid Ora whom I loved. I remember being both dumbfounded and heartbroken when my mother informed me that Ora could not miss her 5 o'clock bus back to central L.A. or she could be picked up by police for being on our white suburban streets after dark. That was my one and only window into racism until 1967, when I was sent an all-white military school in Virginia. There was where I first witnessed overt racism. Despite the fact that there were no blacks on campus at that time, they were quite literally an obsession among the Southern white cadets. The "N" word was thrown around constantly; it was the worst pejorative one could use against another. Blacks were shiftless, lazy, amoral, dishonest; they'd steal you blind if ever given the chance. The peer pressure was relentless and overwhelming. I could "but Ora" all day long, but it was hard to resist the notion that black people were somehow inferior.
It wasn't until I left the South, moved to the Bay Area of California and actually befriended a few blacks and other non-whites that I came to fully understand that the problem here – or at least the root of it – was whites, not blacks.
That was 50 years ago, and obviously my views on race and racism have evolved since then. Yes, there's been both occasional progress and regression, but there's still a lot of ugliness, and the preponderance of the ugliness I see in the news and online these days is coming from non-whites, not whites. Racism is equal opportunity; it appears to be baked into human nature. Wright struggled with it during his lifetime. We struggle with it today in ways both different and the same. Wright wrote with an eloquence I'll never achieve, and he provides valuable insights into the root causes of the black/white divide that persists to this day. I find myself wondering what he would have to say were he still alive today.
February 14, 2019
Lawd Today! is a day in the life of Jake Jackson, with fits of rage bookending a festive workday filled with close shaves and debauchery, optimism and bitterness, all set against a Presidents Day recap of the later life of Abraham Lincoln. Wright’s first published novel bears themes and ideas repeated and expanded upon in his more popular Native Son, but under a less trying circumstance. Lawd Today! is a bold and daring—for the times in which it was written—look at the struggles of the black man in America.
Uncle Tom’s Children is a collection of several shorter stories, all with the repeated theme of the plight of black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Hope and defiance inevitably end up in tragedy for individuals and families denied basic human rights, in different types of situations.
Native Son I reviewed separately and do not repeat here.
How Bigger Was Born is an autobiographical lecture Wright gave in 1937, and provides a thorough dissection of the many sources that brought Bigger to life on the pages of Native Son.
Chronology is a mini-biography, in timeline form, of Wright himself, revealing the personal influences in his life in general. It mentions the many authors, philosophers, and world travels that filled his short life. His participation in American communist organizations is also highlighted, and reflected in several of the stories.
I do not recommend reading this collection cover-to-cover, as the dialect in which all the works are consistently written becomes cumbersome, and the repetitious brutality and inhumanity (including verbal abuse, lynching, and domestic violence) can be very depressing. But I must acknowledge that the real lives of people which this fiction reflects is certainly much worse than the discomfort one might experience in taking on this whole book.
Uncle Tom’s Children is a collection of several shorter stories, all with the repeated theme of the plight of black Americans in the Jim Crow South. Hope and defiance inevitably end up in tragedy for individuals and families denied basic human rights, in different types of situations.
Native Son I reviewed separately and do not repeat here.
How Bigger Was Born is an autobiographical lecture Wright gave in 1937, and provides a thorough dissection of the many sources that brought Bigger to life on the pages of Native Son.
Chronology is a mini-biography, in timeline form, of Wright himself, revealing the personal influences in his life in general. It mentions the many authors, philosophers, and world travels that filled his short life. His participation in American communist organizations is also highlighted, and reflected in several of the stories.
I do not recommend reading this collection cover-to-cover, as the dialect in which all the works are consistently written becomes cumbersome, and the repetitious brutality and inhumanity (including verbal abuse, lynching, and domestic violence) can be very depressing. But I must acknowledge that the real lives of people which this fiction reflects is certainly much worse than the discomfort one might experience in taking on this whole book.
October 17, 2024
It's been a long time coming, but I finally read some Richard Wright and it seemed only appropriate to start with his early works—especially since my girlfriend got me the two-volume Library of America collection.
Lawd Today! feels like a writer drunk on Ulysses. That's not to imply it's bad by any means, in fact there are some well-rendered moments of life, such as Jake at his post office job, but in the end it feels more like Wright was interested in playing with the devices and techniques Joyce employed than in crafting a work of his own. (2.5/5)
Uncle Tom's Children again feels more like an author finding his way to what he wants to write, and these short stories display his ability to compress events, yet still give breathing room for "moments of being." (3/5)
Wright hits his stride with the masterful Native Son. While Jake in his earlier work felt a bit thin, Wright brings Bigger Thomas to life. Bigger has dreams and desires beyond his articulation, he wants to be a part of the world, yet because he is black he is denied that right.
“[T]he pigeon rose swiftly through the air on wings stretched so taut and sheer that Bigger could see the gold of the sun through their translucent tips…
‘Now, if only I could do that,’ Bigger said.”
Wright feels so on point here, and sadly the unjust society he depicts is still the one we live in. Bigger's attorney, a member of the Communist Party, gives a good rundown of dialectical materialism in his end defense. So much of his description of a life of fear applies still to the masses of America. (4.5/5)
Giving this a 4/5 total because Native Son and the great essay "How Bigger Was Born" make up the bulk of the book.
Lawd Today! feels like a writer drunk on Ulysses. That's not to imply it's bad by any means, in fact there are some well-rendered moments of life, such as Jake at his post office job, but in the end it feels more like Wright was interested in playing with the devices and techniques Joyce employed than in crafting a work of his own. (2.5/5)
Uncle Tom's Children again feels more like an author finding his way to what he wants to write, and these short stories display his ability to compress events, yet still give breathing room for "moments of being." (3/5)
Wright hits his stride with the masterful Native Son. While Jake in his earlier work felt a bit thin, Wright brings Bigger Thomas to life. Bigger has dreams and desires beyond his articulation, he wants to be a part of the world, yet because he is black he is denied that right.
“[T]he pigeon rose swiftly through the air on wings stretched so taut and sheer that Bigger could see the gold of the sun through their translucent tips…
‘Now, if only I could do that,’ Bigger said.”
Wright feels so on point here, and sadly the unjust society he depicts is still the one we live in. Bigger's attorney, a member of the Communist Party, gives a good rundown of dialectical materialism in his end defense. So much of his description of a life of fear applies still to the masses of America. (4.5/5)
Giving this a 4/5 total because Native Son and the great essay "How Bigger Was Born" make up the bulk of the book.
February 26, 2018
I have already read Lawd Today and Native Son but I bought this Trio book for "Uncle Tom's Children". I began reading and was instantly in the moment. The dialect put me there at the scene. I couldn't wait to see what was going to happen and then he gets in the truck, falls asleep and that's it. That's IT? At this moment I realized it was 4 short stories in "Uncle Tom's Children". I was hoping the first story would continue. After the first story the others really didn't keep my attention. I attempted to read the stories many times and found myself choosing another book after a few pages.
February 26, 2011
Years ago I read Wright's Uncle Tom's Children, Native Son, Black Boy and The Outsider, and even waded through a long biography of him - but I never could find a copy of Lawd Today, his first work, which remained unpublished until after his death.
What a pleasant surprise, then, to find it here. And even more pleasant, and frankly, surprising, was how good it was. Yes, there are places where it drags (I'm thinking of the play-by-play description of the Bridge game in part one for example - I don't play Bridge, so I have no idea what's going on here), and yes there are places where it feels like Wright is placing his words into his characters' mouths (some of the free-form conversation in the post office in part two feels a little forced) - but these are sins that young writers often commit. And they are more than compensated for elsewhere.
For example, if all Wright did here was pull back the covers on what the urban work experience was like in the 30s, the book would be worth reading. Seeing how, for example, the Post Office functioned - from the view point of a day laborer - is as fascinating (and well done) here as Steinbeck's use and description of rural work in the thirties. But Wright also experiments with form - you can clearly see the influence of Dos Passos - which adds energy and perspective to his tale in a way that his later works might have benefited from.
Clearly this was a book that should have been published in its time, and yet, one can see why it wasn't - the portraits of blacks are far more complicated than any one on the right or left, or anyone in power who was black or white wanted to admit. As a result, the description of race relations similarly does not fit into neat pigeonholes. And while one finds this in almost all of Wright's work, it was probably easier for northern liberals to tolerate when he was writing about southern atrocities (Uncle Tom's Children) or creating isolated case studies (Native Son) or even relating his own biography (Black Boy) than to see that the story in their own backyard was more nuanced and contradictory than they had time to parse out.
Lawd Today is definitely worth reading - especially if you're interested in Wright, black lit, lit of the thirties, or urban lit.
What a pleasant surprise, then, to find it here. And even more pleasant, and frankly, surprising, was how good it was. Yes, there are places where it drags (I'm thinking of the play-by-play description of the Bridge game in part one for example - I don't play Bridge, so I have no idea what's going on here), and yes there are places where it feels like Wright is placing his words into his characters' mouths (some of the free-form conversation in the post office in part two feels a little forced) - but these are sins that young writers often commit. And they are more than compensated for elsewhere.
For example, if all Wright did here was pull back the covers on what the urban work experience was like in the 30s, the book would be worth reading. Seeing how, for example, the Post Office functioned - from the view point of a day laborer - is as fascinating (and well done) here as Steinbeck's use and description of rural work in the thirties. But Wright also experiments with form - you can clearly see the influence of Dos Passos - which adds energy and perspective to his tale in a way that his later works might have benefited from.
Clearly this was a book that should have been published in its time, and yet, one can see why it wasn't - the portraits of blacks are far more complicated than any one on the right or left, or anyone in power who was black or white wanted to admit. As a result, the description of race relations similarly does not fit into neat pigeonholes. And while one finds this in almost all of Wright's work, it was probably easier for northern liberals to tolerate when he was writing about southern atrocities (Uncle Tom's Children) or creating isolated case studies (Native Son) or even relating his own biography (Black Boy) than to see that the story in their own backyard was more nuanced and contradictory than they had time to parse out.
Lawd Today is definitely worth reading - especially if you're interested in Wright, black lit, lit of the thirties, or urban lit.
August 1, 2011
It is a compilation of Wright's earliest works, including Native Son which I skipped over, having recently read it as a stand-alone book. The remainder of this volume contained the truest versions which could be found of his novel Lawd Today! and his anthology Uncle Tom's Children. Uncle Tom's Children was thoroughly depressing and aggravating — Lawd Today! provided a little more hope in its northern Chicago setting, but was still quite dismal. Wonderfully written descriptions of the African-American experience in the first half of the 20th century, though almost too much to take in a single read. This book was added to my reading list with all the author's works after reading his Native Son in October 2005.
January 13, 2010
I read Uncle toms Children and Native son. In Uncle Toms Children the book started off slow then picked up a bit, but for the most part these books really didn't catch my interest.
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