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Books by Richard Wright
Richard Wright: Early Works /
Black Boy /
Native Son /
Uncle Tom's Children /
12 Million Black Voices /
Richard Wright: Later Works
The Outsider /
Pagan
Spain /
Black Power /
White Man Listen! /
The Color Curtain /
Savage Holiday /
The Long Dream
Eight Men: Short Stories /
Haiku /
American Hunger /
Lawd Today! /
A Father’s Law
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Richard Wright was a brilliant writer
whose collection of short stories (novellas), Uncle Tom's
Children, won a $500-prize competition in 1938. Native
Son, the March 1940 selection of the Book-of-the-Month club,
was his first full-length novel.
In 1935, Wright got on the Federal
Writers' Project in Chicago. By the time he had sold poetry,
articles and some stories to little magazines, and was working
on his first, Uncle Tom's Children.
He went to New York in 1937, lived from
hand to mouth for some months, then got on the Writers'
Project. he wrote the essay on Harlem in New York
Panorama. he also did some work on the Daily
Worker (he says he never got orders from Stalin to
cover anything) and became a contributing editor of the New
Masses.
His book of four long short stories, Uncle Tom's
Children, part of which had originally appeared in
in the New Caravan, was a success. The stories
won high critical praise; what one critic had to say of
them is characteristic: "Uncle Tom's Children has its
full share of violence and brutality; violent deaths
occur in three stories and the mob goes to work in all
four. more
Table
Ralph Ellison on Wright and
Himes
I tried my
damnedest to influence Chester Himes, but I got
nowhere with him. After all, Chester preceded me as
a writer, you know. He goes way back. Chester and I
used to argue over technique and ideas, but I don’t
know to what extent I influenced him; but, certainly
Wright influenced me, although it was not in the
simplistic way that certain pseudo-critics would
insist. I’ve recorded in writing that I sought out
Wright the day after he arrived in New York. I was
still a musician, and it was at his suggestion that
I wrote my first review and attempted my first short
story. Obviously, he influenced me to begin writing.
What gets overlooked is the fact that I was a rather
well-read young trumpeter from Oklahoma who had
studied music for most of my life, including four
years of harmony in junior high and high school. I
had tried composing marches and popular songs and
had arranged spirituals, and I had majored in music
theory and trumpet at Tuskegee. My point is that I
had been concerned with art and its creation long
before I met Wright.
I was also a
bookworm who became interested in Wright because I
had discovered Eliot, Pound and Edwin Arlington
Robinson at Tuskegee. It’s interesting that no one
says that I was influenced by Langston Hughes, whose
work was taught in my grade school and whom I knew
longer than I did Wright. I don’t think that Wright
appreciated the background that I brought to his
discussion of creative writing because frequently he
seemed to assume that I was totally ignorant of the
works under discussion. But, I didn’t argue with
him. He possessed the certainty that came from
having an organized body of ideas, and he could
write—so having confidence in my own ability to
think, I listened to him and kept my disagreements
to myself.
People are
still arguing over what I’ve said or haven’t said
about Wright as though I have no right to disagree
with him. But, they forget that I wrote some of the
most appreciative criticism of him that’s ever been
published. Wright and I were friends, but I quit
showing him any of my fiction in 1940 after I was
unable to get his reaction to a novelette. Finally,
I pressed him for an opinion and he became very
emotional about it and said, “Well, this is my
stuff.” You might say that wish that he influenced
me not to be influenced by his style of
writing. . . . he was living on 140th
Street, across from City College; I was living on
Hamilton Terrace.
Chester Himes
mentioned the incident during a television
interview … with Nikki Giovanni … I find the
assumption that no Negro can do anything unless
another Negro had done so before him rather
simple-minded, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s an
inverted form of racism. An artist can’t do a damn
thing about his relatives, but he can sure as hell
choose his artistic ancestors. I had read Mark Twain
and Hemingway, among others, long before I even
heard of Wright. . . .
He [Himes]
might have seen part of it [a first draft of
Invisible Man], but I doubt if I showed him the
whole thing. I rewrote so continuously that one
draft blended into the other. But, Chester and I
were friends. My wife and I knew him and his first
wife, Jean, rather well, but I didn’t show my
manuscript around; the 1940 incident with Wright had
made me leery. I was close to Wright, but I quit
showing him my fiction because I had no desire to
offend him. I accepted the fact that our
sensibilities were different, as were our feelings
for style. But, I held no antagonism toward him.
Questions of
style and influence aside, we still had a broad
basis for a relationship. I admired and respected
him,. And we remained friendly. During the Fifties
whenever I was in Paris, I visited him, and whenever
he returned to New York, he got in touch with me.
Source: The Essential Ellison
(Interview)—Ishmael Reed, Quincy Troupe, Steve
Cannon. Ishmael Reed’s and Al Young’s Y’Bird •
Copyright © 1977, 1978 Y’Bird Magazine
created 7 May 2007
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