Richard Wright Literature

Eight men: stories
With an introduction by Paul Gilroy

Author: Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

Tells the stories of a young farm worker deep in debt, a flood, murder, a fugitive, exile, and a railroad porter

Contents:
Man who was almost a man. -Man who lived underground. -Big black good man. -Man who saw the flood. -man of all work. -Man, God ain't like that. -man who killed a shadow. -Man who went to Chicago.

Reviews for this Title:
Kirkus Reviews A haunting book in which Richard Wright tells the stories of eight Negroes, caught in the web of white civilization. There was small Dave to whom owning a gun meant manhood- and who learned, the hard way, that the gun could be master...The Man Who Lived Underground was escaping from the police who held him for a crime he had not committed; but the time spent hiding in the sewers, building himself a dream world from the opportunities for crime thrust upon him, turned him into the criminal he need not have been. An unforgettable story this...Another story is indirect in its implications. It is the elderly Dane who is tricked by racial concepts into thinking that size plus blackness cannot add up to any good...A poignant glimpse of a different kind of slavery is given in the aftermath of a flood that wiped out a struggling black family's potential livelihood...A dangerous situation, packed with implications of what might have happened, is presented in Man of All Work, when a trained Negro cook dons his sick wife's clothes in order to get a job that may help save their home...The jungle Africans' striving to bring their tribal gods into agreement with the white man's God, results in a wholly unpredictable tragedy...The murder of a librarian becomes a taut expose of the impact of the shadow white world on a Negro struggling to find his own place...The final chapter is a segment of Wright's own Chicago experiences. One wonders how he survived and surmounted it. A powerful and disturbing book.
(Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 1960)

Author Web Sites:
1. Books and Writers-Richard Wright : Features a biography of the author.

Other Contributors:
Gilroy, Roy

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0060976810
0938410393 : Paperback

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 063663

Lawd today!
With a foreword by Arnold Rampersad

Author: Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

Northeastern University Press, 1993, copyright 1963, 219p.
Notes:
Unexpurgated version based on the author's original manuscript, first published 1991 by Library of America

Author Web Sites:
1. Books and Writers-Richard Wright : Features a biography of the author.

Other Contributors:
Rampersad, Arnold

Other titles associated with this book:
Lord today!

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 063664

Native son
With an introduction, 'How 'Bigger' was born,' by the author

Author: Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

Traces the fall of a young Black man in 1930s Chicago as his life loses all hope of redemption after he kills a white woman

Magill Book Review: Bigger Thomas, a 20-year-old black man, lives in Chicago's South Side ghetto with his long-suffering mother, his younger sister Vera, and his younger brother Buddy. Unemployed, Bigger hangs out with his pals; they occasionally commit petty crimes to get spending money and prove their manhood. Bigger expresses his pent-up feelings mainly through violence.

Bigger gets a chance for a better life when the Daltons, a family of rich white liberals, hire him as a chauffeur. Disaster strikes on his first night on the job. He carries the Daltons' drunken daughter, Mary, to her bedroom, where, to prevent being caught, he accidentally smothers her with a pillow. He burns Mary's body in the furnace, then conceives a kidnap scheme for which he recruits the help of his alcoholic girlfriend, Bessie. When Mary's bones are discovered, Bigger kills Bessie to keep her quiet.

Bigger is soon apprehended and put on trial for his crimes. His white, communist lawyer, Boris Max, battles a racist prosecutor, Buckley. Connecting Mary's death with Dalton ownership of the slums that bred Bigger, Max projects Bigger's case as a paradigm of black revolution, with future armies of Biggers swarming out of the ghettos. Bigger, however, makes a pathetic revolutionary model, and Max himself is no more convincing than the other stereotyped whites. What does persuade is the novel's depiction of black frustration: Wright's portrayal of Bigger has a gripping intensity that recalls Dostoevski's CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

Kirkus Reviews Uncle Tom's Children was a collection of novelettes; this is a full length novel by perhaps the outstanding of the young Negro fiction writers. He writes with violence, with passion, with force. This new book is a powerful study of fear and hatred, of social forces in America today which have instilled these elements into the Negro. A convincing story of Bigger Thomas, a Chicago slum product, resentful, rebellious, ignorant, storing up fear and hatred that he must stifle daily. When he gets a job as chauffeur to some "emancipated "capitalists, his antagonism breaks out. He kills, by accident; and fear forces him to shift the blame. Another death is made necessary, he is caught and sentenced to death. A violent story, but a convincing one.
(Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 1939)

Other related features:

1. Annotated Book List - The Roots of Modern African American Fiction

2. Annotated Book List - Twelve Great Books for Reading Men

3. Awards (Best Fiction) - Young Adult -> Best Fiction -> Literary -> YALSA Outstanding Books for the College Bound -> 1999

4. Book Discussion Guide - A Gathering of Old Men

5. Book Discussion Guide - Go Tell it on the Mountain

6. Book Discussion Guide - Philadelphia Fire

7. Book Discussion Guide - Song of Solomon

Author Web Sites:
1. Books and Writers-Richard Wright : Features a biography of the author.

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0060929804 : Paperback
006083756X : Paperback
006053348X : Paperback
0898459168 : Cassette - Audio
0808519808 : Glued Binding
156849694X : Hardcover
0940450666 : Hardcover
0606011285 : DEMCO Turtleback - Juvenile
0065023668 : Paperback
0848825772 : Hardcover
0812416260 : Glued Binding
0613998642 : Glued Binding
0788721127 : Cassette - Audio
0756909074 : Glued Binding
0816157871 : Hardcover - Large Print
0606345159 : DEMCO Turtleback
1417686081 : Glued Binding
1417664266 : Glued Binding
0060147628 : Hardcover
0060812532 : Paperback

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• MetaMetrics, Inc.
• Magill Book Reviews, published by Salem Press
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Novelist/EBSCO Publishing
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 063665

Outsider, The
With an introduction by Maryemma Graham

Author: Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

Cross Damon, trapped within his own blackness, flees from Chicago's South Side to Harlem, where he joins the Communist Party

Kirkus Reviews A horrifying and disturbing story, completely unrelieved and so violent in its expression, so muted in its emotions, that it leaves the reader shocked- but unmoved. Cross Chicago Negro, disillusioned with the futility of his life and the mess he has made of it, is gives a chance to drop his identity and escape- he thinks- when a subway crash victim is identified as Cross. Then the vicious spiral begins; death again and again the answer Cross supplies, with scarcely a flicker of feeling. New York proves a false dream of security; two chance meetings on the train supply their own nets; and Communism reaches out its tentacles to draw him in. He gets trapped by a somewhat phoney gesture on the part of a white couple seeking in him the symbol of their racial tolerance- then falls in love with the woman, and she with him. And in the end, he is trapped by the very understanding of another "outsider" -- and by the ruthlessness of the Party.
(Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1953)

Author Web Sites:
1. Books and Writers-Richard Wright : Features a biography of the author.

Other Contributors:
Graham, Maryemma

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0060812486
0060539259 : Paperback
0606042911 : DEMCO Turtleback
0809590697 : Hardcover

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 063666

Rite of passage
Afterword by Arnold Rampersad

Author: Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

When fifteen-year-old Johnny Gibbs is told that he is really a foster child, he runs off into the streets of Harlem and meets up with a gang that wants him to participate in a mugging. Includes criticism of Wright's fiction.

Booklist Review: Books for Youth, Older Readers: Gr. 7-12. A newly discovered novella written by Wright in the 1940s evokes today's urban violence and also the "cold wet shelterless midnight streets" of Dickens' Oliver Twist. Johnny, a gifted 15-year-old student, runs away from his loving Harlem home when he discovers that he's really a foster child and that the faceless city bureaucracy is moving him to a new family. Suddenly alone on the streets, hungry, and lost, he survives with a brutal gang, fights the leader for dominance, and helps mug a man in the park. As the title suggests, this is an archetypal story of the loss of identity and the search for manhood. There's some overwriting at times, with far too many adverbs ("guiltily," "bawlingly," "dreadfully," etc.); a few minor characters are stereotyped; and the symbolism about crossing the barrier of childhood is overexplained. But the story is taut and terrible, and the account of Johnny trapped in a bleak, hostile city will hold teens fast. They'll also recognize the ironic truth of Johnny's friend who envies him the chance to break free of family. Opposed to the corrupt adults (including the police) who pay the kids to steal is the figure of an African American woman who calls out to Johnny in moral outrage for the crime of mugging an innocent person. Real or imaginary, she haunts Johnny. He wishes she would find him and bring him home. The eminent critic Arnold Rampersad, in a long, insightful afterword, shows how this story integrates many themes of Wright's work, including the relationship between racism, poverty, and violent crime. ((Reviewed Jan. 1, 1994)) -- Hazel Rochman

School Library Journal Review: Gr 8 Up-Published posthumously, Wright's novel reverberates with despair and alienation. Johnny Gibbs, 15, arrives home jubilantly one day with his straight "A" report card to find his belongings packed and his mother and sister distraught. Devastated when they tell him that he is not their blood relative and that he is being sent to a new foster home, he runs away. His secure world quickly shatters into a nightmare of subways, dark alleys, theft, and street warfare. His feelings of estrangement, helplessness, and resentment explode into a physical battle with the head of The Moochers, and Johnny becomes the gang's leader. The boy's "rite of passage" is a bleak, heartrending awakening to a harsh world. Like the author's other books, this one illuminates and personalizes the effects of racial oppression. Although it is unlikely that today's welfare system would disrupt a positive foster care situation after 15 years, Johnny's victimization by society and his lack of resources still ring true. Striking characters, vivid dialogue, dramatic descriptions, and enduring themes introduce a new generation of readers to Wright's powerful voice.-Gerry Larson, Chewning Middle School, Durham, NC

Publishers Weekly Review: Very much in the vein of Wright's classic Native Son and Black Boy , this posthumously published novella provides a brutal depiction of conditions facing young African American men in 1940s Harlem. Fifteen-year-old Johnny Gibbs, a successful student and generally good kid, is suddenly confronted with the revelation that the family he has been living with is not his own, but a foster family; Johnny's biological mother has been confined to a mental institution, his father is unknown. Rather than let the "City folks" from the welfare department place him elsewhere, the boy runs away and hooks up with a gang of violent misfit teens. Johnny proves his manhood by winning a vicious fight with Baldy, the gang's leader and, soon after, by taking part in a mugging. Such events are not redeemed in a tidy ending, however, and readers, along with the protagonist, are left to ponder how a troubled society has shaped the moral codes--if they exist--of young people. Although its portrayals of crime, alienation and adolescent disillusionment remain highly relevant, contemporary readers may shy away from some of the dated situations here (for example, Johnny knows nothing about sex). And today's urban slang makes Wright's "He's a fence, see? . . ." sound like a tame Jimmy Cagney movie. A substantial afterword by Princeton professor Arnold Rampersad places Rite in the context of Wright's other writings and experiences. While significant as an addition to the author's oeuvre, this slim volume may not pack enough punch for YA readers. Ages 12-up. (Jan.)

Kirkus Reviews In a previously unpublished story, Wright shows how a Harlem teenager is suddenly and profoundly changed by misfortune. Proudly bearing a straight-A report card, Johnny Gibbs comes home to a double shock: he's told that he's a foster child and that he's to be forcibly moved away from the family where he's lived since the age of six months. Wild with rage and grief, he runs to the streets; within hours, he has broken into a store, joined a gang of muggers, and become its leader after a vicious fight. Rejecting his whole past, Johnny begins to rebuild his life around feelings of alienation and the conviction that he's entirely on his own. Wright's unusual turns of phrase and crudely drawn characters give the story an air of unreality, despite some sharply drawn themes: the faceless indifference of white society; the fragility of family ties in the ghetto; and, most especially, the deep hatred of each race for the other. In a transparent effort to get this onto college reading lists, the publishers append a long academic afterword by Arnold Rampersad, editor of the "Library of America" edition of Wright's works, analyzing these themes and showing how they recur in the author's other books. More a literary afterthought than a gateway to this still-controversial writer. Chronology; selected author bibliography. (Fiction/Criticism. YA+)
(Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 1993)

Author Web Sites:
1. Books and Writers-Richard Wright : Features a biography of the author.

Other Contributors:
Rampersad, Arnold

Other titles associated with this book:
Rites of passage
Right of passage

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0060234199
0060234202
006447111X : Paperback - Juvenile
0606085920 : DEMCO Turtleback - Juvenile
0785790543 : Glued Binding
0780770803 : Glued Binding

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• MetaMetrics, Inc.
• Booklist, published by the American Library Association
• School Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Publishers Weekly, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 063667

Uncle Tom's children

Author: Wright, Richard, 1908-1960

An autobiographical sketch and five short stories by the author, who was born on a Mississippi plantation, and focusing on the plight of his people

Notes:
A collection of five short stories and an autobiographical essay
Originally published in 1940 by Harper and Row

Reviews for this Title:
Library Journal Review: Behold the paperback edition of Library of America's restoration of Wright's classic.
— Michael Rogers (Reviewed May 1, 2004) (Library Journal, vol 129, issue 8, p146)

Kirkus Reviews Four "novellas" or long short stories, in Negro dialect, hard-clipped, dynamic, illustrating the fact of continued servitude of black to white. Lynching, flood and death, rape, "relief" -- current problems which give a certain topical value to the content of the stories from the social angle. The author won the $500 prize for the best manuscript submitted by the W. P. A. Writers' Project. He writes well, with a sparsity of detail which tells more through its very restraint. Faithful reproduction of Negro speech and thought.
(Kirkus Reviews, March 1, 1938)

Author Web Sites:
1. Books and Writers-Richard Wright : Features a biography of the author.

ISBNs Associated with this Title:
0060812516 : Paperback
0060587148 : Paperback
0606043578 : DEMCO Turtleback - Juvenile
0809590700 : Hardcover
0606299556 : DEMCO Turtleback
0060147644 : Hardcover

Credits:
• Hennepin County Public Library
• Baker & Taylor
• Library Journal, A Reed Elsevier Business Information Publication
• Copyright 2005, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
• Added to NoveList: 20010101
• TID: 063668