Richard Wright - Free Library Land Online - Biography

Native Son

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300

Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.

Black Boy

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300

Black Boy is a classic of American autobiography, a subtly crafted narrative of Richard Wright's journey from innocence to experience in the Jim Crow South. An enduring story of one young man's coming of age during a particular time and place, Black Boy remains a seminal text in our history about what it means to be a man, black, and Southern in America.

The Man Who Was Almost a Man

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300

A Father's Law

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 01:02:54 +0300

Never before published, the final work of one of America's greatest writers

A Father's Law is the novel Richard Wright, acclaimed author of Black Boy and Native Son, never completed. Written during a six-week period near the end of his life, it appears in print for the first time, an important addition to this American master's body of work, submitted by his daughter and literary executor, Julia, who writes: It comes from his guts and ends at the hero's "breaking point." It explores many themes favored by my father like guilt and innocence, the difficult relationship between the generations, the difficulty of being a black policeman and father, the difficulty of being both those things and suspecting that your own son is the murderer. It intertwines astonishingly modern themes for a novel written in 1960. Prescient, raw, powerful, and fascinating, A Father's Law is the final gift from a literary giant.

The Outsider

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300

Cross Damon is a man at odds with society and with himself—a man of superior intellect who hungers for peace but who brings terror and destruction wherever he goes.From Richard Wright, one of the most powerful, acclaimed, and essential American authors of the twentieth century, comes a compelling story of a black man's attempt to escape his past and start anew in Harlem. The Outsider is an important work of fiction that depicts American racism and its devastating consequences in raw and unflinching terms. At once brilliantly imagined and frighteningly prescient, it is an epic exploration of the tragic roots of criminal behavior.

Thy Fearful Symmetry

Wed, 26 Sep 2012 01:02:54 +0300

The end of the world started in Glasgow, with a kiss. Two people - two creatures - fated to be eternal enemies downed their blazing spears and loved. To do so, they broke rules hardwired into the DNA of the universe. The universe noticed. The universe broke. Now Heaven and Hell are hunting them. Nobody on Earth can help them. Worst of all, the fabric of reality is unravelling around them, the Apocalypse has been brought forward a millennium, and it might all be their fault. On cold streets, the last tattered remnants of humanity must draw faith in a world that has no more use for them. As the masses pray and crawl on bloody knees, the few must restore the fearful symmetry between good and evil - for the sake of all. Blood will flow. Days will end. Fire will fall.

Uncle Tom's Children

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 21:47:48 +0300

The restored text established by the Library of America The Library of America has insured that most of Wright's major texts are now available as he wanted them to be read - Alfred Kazin, New York Times Book Review "We have an opportunity to assess Wright's formidable and lasting contribution to American literature. But this time we have texts intended as the author originally wished them to be read. The works that millions know are, as it turns out, expurgated and abbreviated versions of what Wright submitted for publication. By returning to typescripts, galleys, page proofs, the editors have restored deletions and changes demanded by Wright's publisher...They have returned to the 1970 second printing of Uncle Tom's Children>/i> which included one additional story, Bright and Morning Star, and The Ethics of Jim Crow, thus offering us all the selections Wright wished the collection to have." - Charles Johnson, *Chicago Tribune Cover Illustration: David Diaz*

American Hunger

Mon, 26 Sep 1977 01:02:54 +0300

Anyone who has read Richard Wright’s Black Boy knows it to be one of the great American autobiographies. Covering Wright’s early life in the South, the book concludes with his departure in 1934 for a new life in the North. American Hunger (first published more than thirty years after the appearance of Black Boy) is the continuation of that story. A vital, richly anecdotal work, American Hunger treats with feeling and often with wry humor Wright’s struggle to make his way in the North—in Chicago—as a store clerk, dishwasher, and eventually as a writer. He deals movingly with his early days in the Communist Party and with his attempts to keep his integrity in the face of Party demands that he subordinate his artistic goals to its needs. And he recounts with a mixture of pain and irony his break with the Party and the tortured period of ostracism that followed. There is an unsettling and totally frank personal story here, and a lot of raw social history as well.

The Flesh Market

Wed, 19 Nov 2014 12:02:31 +0200

"Doon the wynds an' up the streets, Where revenants sought souls tae eat, The Butcher called for twitching meat An' Burke an' Hare did answer." -anon. 1827. A year after the Cadaver Riots tore the heart from Edinburgh. Fear still chokes the Old Town, for though the revenants were driven back with shot and steel, they still lurk in the city's shadowed closes. When night falls, they strike. In dissecting rooms anatomists slice twitching flesh as they dream of cures and glory. For the greatest among them, Robert Knox, there is no price that cannot be met in the quest for knowledge. Behind closed doors he trades in walking death, dealing with devils to keep the flesh market supplied... Set between the slums of 19th Century Edinburgh and the ivory towers of its academia, The Flesh Market is an almost true story of murder, mad science, obsession, and the restless dead.

Cuckoo

Tue, 26 Sep 2000 01:02:55 +0300

The fight to survive is all in the mind.
There is nothing exceptional about Greg Summers, until the day he returns home to discover that his wife no longer recognises him and is married to a stranger using his name.
Perhaps it is an elaborate hoax, yet that wouldn't explain his vivid flashbacks to childhood, or the violent eruptions of blood that accompany them. Nor does it explain the stray memories that seem to belong to an entirely separate man called Richard Jameson.
One of these men is a lie, and neither wishes it to be he. On the run from a creature that cannot exist, his comfortable truths shattered, Greg finds his whole knowledge of the world questionable. If he does not know himself, what can he trust himself to know?
"A plot as wild as this could have easily spun out of control, but Wright holds the reins tight. His dexterity is dazzling." - Hellnotes

The Man Who Lived Underground

Sat, 23 Oct 2021 12:25:16 +0300

"The Man Who Lived Underground reminds us that any 'greatest writers of the 20th century' list that doesn't start and end with Richard Wright is laughable. It might very well be Wright's most brilliantly crafted, and ominously foretelling, book." —Kiese Laymon

A major literary event: an explosive, previously unpublished novel about race and violence in America by the legendary author of Native Son and Black Boy

Fred Daniels, a Black man, is picked up by the police after a brutal double murder and tortured until he confesses to a crime he did not commit. After signing a confession, he escapes from custody and flees into the city's sewer system.

This is the devastating premise of this scorching novel, a never-before-seen masterpiece by Richard Wright. Written between his landmark books Native Son (1940) and Black Boy (1945), at the height of his creative powers, it would see publication in Wright's lifetime only in...

Savage Holiday

Thu, 16 May 2019 21:07:18 +0300

Black Power

Wed, 14 Sep 1977 18:51:15 +0300

Originally published in 1954, Richard Wright's Black Power is an extraordinary nonfiction work by one of America's premier literary giants of the twentieth century. An impassioned chronicle of the author's trip to Africa's Gold Coast before it became the free nation of Ghana, it speaks eloquently of empowerment and possibility, and resonates loudly to this day.Also included in this omnibus edition are two nonfiction works Wright produced around the time of Black Power. White Man, Listen! is a stirring collection of his essays on race, politics, and other essential social concerns ("Deserves to be read with utmost seriousness"—New York Times). The Color Curtain is an indispensable work urging the removal of the color barrier. It remains one of the key commentaries on the question of race in the modern era. ("Truth-telling will perhaps always be unpopular and suspect, but in The Color Curtain, as in all his later nonfiction, Wright did...