Richard Wright in Context
Literature in Context Series

Richard Wright was one of the most influential and complex African American writers of the twentieth century. Best known as the trailblazing, bestselling author of Native Son and Black Boy, he established himself as an experimental literary intellectual in France who creatively drew on some of the leading ideas of his time - Marxism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonialism - to explore the sources and meaning of racism both in the United States and worldwide. Richard Wright in Context gathers thirty-three new essays by leading scholars relating Wright's writings to biographical, regional, social, literary, and intellectual contexts essential to understanding them. It explores the places that shaped his life and enabled his literary destiny, the social and cultural contexts he both observed and immersed himself in, and the literary and intellectual contexts that made him one the most famous Black writers in the world at mid-century.

Introduction: Richard Wright's Luck Michael Nowlin; Part I. Life and Career, Times and Places: 1. The Jim Crow South Thadious Davis; 2. Chicago Liesl Olson; 3. New York and Brooklyn Ayesha Hardison; 4. Paris and Ailly William E. Dow; 5. Globetrotting, 1949–1960 John Lowe; Part II. Social and Cultural Contexts: 6. Black Masculinity: Boyhood and Manhood Denied in Jim Crow America Joseph G. Ramsey; 7. Wright and African American Women Shana A. Russell; 8. He Tried to Be a Communist: Wright and the Black Literary Left Alan M. Wald; 9. Liberalism and the Color Line John K. Young; 10. 'The Same Stuff': Native Son and Press Coverage of the Robert Nixon Trial Jeannine Marie DeLombard; 11. Moviegoer and Cinematic Seers Alice Mikal Craven; 12. Fashion: Un/dressing Wright Paula Rabinowitz; 13. 'Defeat Measured in the Jumping Cadences of Triumph': Wright's Engagement with Blues and Jazz Tim A. Ryan; 14. Wright and Religion Jamall A. Calloway; 15. Bandung and Third World Liberation Brian Russell Roberts; 16. Black Paris, Hard-Boiled Paranoia, and the Cultural Cold War William J. Maxwell; Part III. Literary and Intellectual Contexts: 17. Chicago Sociology Christopher Douglas; 18. 1930s Proletarian Fiction Anthony Dawahare; 19. The Blues in Print: Wright's 'Blueprint for Negro Writing' Reconsidered Jesse McCarthy; 20. Realism and Modernism, Solipsism and Solidarity Anne MacMaster and Anita DeRouen; 21. The Literary Mainstream: Story and the Book-of-the-Month Club Laurence Cossu-Beaumont; 22. Wright, Psychoanalysis, and Fredric Wertham's Reading of Hamlet Stephan Kuhl; 23. Wright's Black Boy in Context Robert B. Stepto; 24. Wright and Women Authors Noelle Morrissette; 25. Existentialism Stephanie Li; 26. Wright and Les Temps Modernes Michael Nowlin; 27. Wright and Postcolonial Thought Joseph Keith; 28. Modern Poetry and Haiku Anita Patterson; Part IV. Reputation and Critical Reception: 29. Wright's Many Lives and the Travails of Literary Biography Claudine Raynaud; 30. Contemporary Reception Ian Afflerbach; 31. Native Son on Stage and Screen Anna Shechtman; 32. Wright's Critical Reputation, 1960–2019 Robert J. Butler; 33. Richard Wright in the Era of #BlackLivesMatter: Two Views Barbara Foley and Jerry W. Ward, Jr.

Michael Nowlin is Professor and Chair of the English department at the University of Victoria in Canada. He is the author of Literary Ambition and the African American Novel (2019) and F. Scott Fitzgerald's Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness (2007).