As boy in the segregated South, author Richard Wright was determined to borrow books from the public library. His story illustrates the power of determination in turning a dream into reality. Full color.
African-American writer Richard Wright (1908-1960) was celebrated during the early 1940s for his searing autobiography (Black Boy) and fiction (Native Son). By 1947 he felt so unwelcome in his homeland that he exiled himself and his family in Paris. But his writings changed American culture forever, and today they are mainstays of literature and composition classes. He and his works are also the subjects of numerous critical essays and commentaries by contemporary writers. This volume presents a comprehensive annotated bibliography of those essays, books, and articles from 1983 through 2003. Arranged alphabetically by author within years are some 8,320 entries ranging from unpublished dissertations to book-length studies of African American literature and literary criticism. Also included as an appendix are addenda to the author's earlier bibliography covering the years from 1934 through 1982. This is the exhaustive reference for serious students of Richard Wright and his critics.
In New Orleans in the 1930s, young Sonny Comeaux has to work before school to help his mother make ends meet. When Mama loses her job, Sonny is worried. Rent day is coming soon, and if they miss paying by just one day, the landlord will put them out on the street and sell off their belongings. Sonny wanders sadly through Jackson Square after school one day. His attention is caught by Smilin' Jack, a popular jazz musician. Sonny returns day after day, and soon finds himself explaining his problem to Smilin' Jack. What Smilin' Jack offers Sonny then--how to raise money for the rent while having the world's best party--changes both their lives forever.
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.
Yoshinobu Hakutani traces the development of African American modernism, which initially gathered momentum with Richard Wright's literary manifesto "Blueprint for Negro Writing" in 1937. Hakutani dissects and discusses the cross-cultural influences on the then-burgeoning discipline in three stages: American dialogues, European and African cultural visions, and Asian and African American cross-cultural visions. In writing Black Boy, the centerpiece of the Chicago Renaissance, Wright was inspired by Theodore Dreiser. Because the European and African cultural visions that Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison acquired were buttressed by the universal humanism that is common to all cultures, this ideology is shown to transcend the problems of society. Fascinated by Eastern thought and art, Wright, Walker, Sonia Sanchez, and James Emanuel wrote highly accomplished poetry and prose. Like Ezra Pound, Wright was drawn to classic haiku, as reflected in the 4,000 haiku he wrote at the end of his life. As W. B. Yeats's symbolism was influenced by his cross-cultural visions of noh theatre and Irish folklore, so is James Emanuel's jazz haiku energized by his cross-cultural rhythms of Japanese poetry and African American music. The book demonstrates some of the most visible cultural exchanges in modern and postmodern African American literature. Such a study can be extended to other contemporary African American writers whose works also thrive on their cross-cultural visions, such as Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Charles Johnson, and haiku poet Lenard Moore.
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.
In an updated new edition of this classic work, a team of highly respected sociologists, political scientists, economists, criminologists, and legal scholars scrutinize the resilience of racial inequality in twenty-first-century America. Whitewashing Race argues that contemporary racism manifests as discrimination in nearly every realm of American life, and is further perpetuated by failures to address the compounding effects of generations of disinvestment. Police violence, mass incarceration of Black people, employment and housing discrimination, economic deprivation, and gross inequities in health care combine to deeply embed racial inequality in American society and economy. Updated to include the most recent evidence, including contemporary research on the racially disparate effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, this edition of Whitewashing Race analyzes the consequential and ongoing legacy of "disaccumulation" for Black communities and lives. While some progress has been made, the authors argue that real racial justice can be achieved only if we actively attack and undo pervasive structural racism and its legacies.
This volume presents selections from the highly-respected Cosby collection of African American art. Their introductions elaborate on their strong belief that African American families should themselves seek to preserve their cultural history and not rely on the mainstream. They also provide interesting background about how they began their collection and what owning the art has meant to them. The essay by Driskell (curator, author, and scholar) places each artist within the context of his or her era from the late 1700s to the present, and explores the historical, biographical, social, and political background of each period. Also contains biographies of the artists. Beautifully illustrated with 91 color plates and several other illustrations. Oversize: 10.25x13.25". Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
Frank Marshall Davis was a prominent poet, journalist, jazz critic, and civil rights activist on the Chicago and Atlanta scene from the 1920s through 1940s. He was an intimate of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright and an influential editor at the Chicago Evening Bulletin, the Chicago Whip, the Chicago Star, and the Atlanta World. He renounced his writing career in 1948 and moved to Hawaii, forgotten until the Black Arts Movement rediscovered him in the 1960s. Because of his early self-exile from the literary limelight, Davis's life and work have been shrouded in mystery. Livin' the Blues offers us a chance to rediscover this talented poet and writer and stands as an important example of black autobiography, similar in form, style, and message to those of Langston Hughes and Richard Wright. "Both a social commentary and intellectual exploration into African American life in the twentieth century."—Charles Vincent, Atlanta History
This collection of fifteen new essays explores the impact of the organized Left and Leftist theory on American literature and culture from the 1920s to the present. In particular, the contributors explore the participation of writers and intellectuals on the Left in the development of African American, Chicano/Chicana, and Asian American literature and culture. By placing the Left at the center of their examination, the authors reposition the interpretive framework of American cultural studies. Tracing the development of the Left over the course of the last century, the essays connect the Old Left of the pre-World War II era to the New Left and Third World nationalist Left of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to the multicultural Left that has emerged since the 1970s. Individual essays explore the Left in relation to the work of such key figures as Ralph Ellison, T. S. Eliot, Chester Himes, Harry Belafonte, Americo Paredes, and Alice Childress. The collection also reconsiders the role of the Left in such critical cultural and historical moments as the Harlem Renaissance, the Cold War, and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The contributors are Anthony Dawahare, Barbara Foley, Marcial Gonzalez, Fred Ho, William J. Maxwell, Bill V. Mullen, Cary Nelson, B. V. Olguin, Rachel Rubin, Eric Schocket, James Smethurst, Michelle Stephens, Alan Wald, and Mary Helen Washington.