Welcome to Pass Christian Books -
Your Bookstore at the Harbor in Pass Christian!

Pass Christian, MS 39571
Telephone: (228) 452-7399
E-Mail: info@passchristianbooks.com

Uncle Tom's Children (1938)
Native Son (1940)
12 Million Black Voices (1941)
The Outsider (1953)
Savage Holiday (1954)
Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (1954)
The Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference (1956)
Pagan Spain (1957)
White Man, Listen! (1957)
The Long Dream (1958)
Eight Men (1961)

Recommended Biographies

Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius by Margaret Walker
Richard Wright: The Life and Times by Hazel Rowley

For some who read what Richard Wright wrote, and read about his life, it may seem as if he was running from something - prejudice, unfairness, hatred, unfortunate twists of fate - as he moved from Mississippi to Chicago to New York and finally to Paris. But Richard Wright was too smart to think that he could outdistance the ubiquitous frailties and limiting illogic of others. Rather, Wright was on a search for a place that his intelligence told him could exist, if he could just demonstrate and convince others of the possibilities.

Born in 1908 on a plantation near Natchez, Wright's early years were overshadowed by frequent moves necessitated by his father's abandonment of the family and his mother's crippling stroke while in her thirties. He lived almost entirely within himself, unreceiving of almost any affection and uncertain of what heartbreak or humiliation the next month would bring. Perceived as shy, in actuality he was forging an iron will and piercing intellect.

Wright was bold and refused to fit a stereotype. His writing reflected reality as he saw it. His fiction was too raw for the sensibilities of the late 1930's. Wright's manuscripts were repeatedly rejected as biographer Hazel Rowley notes, "He knew the rejections had more to do with the subject matter than with the quality of the writing. It was quite clear to him that readers were more comfortable when he portrayed black characters as victims and martyrs."

The short story "Long Black Song" from Wright's collection "Uncle Tom's Children," published in 1938, portrays a proud and silently defiant black man, Silas, willing to work hard and honestly to escape the persistent oppression of Jim Crow. Silas leaves his wife Sarah for several days to take the cotton crop from their small farm into town. With some of the proceeds, he buys her "that red cloth yuh wanted" and "Ah bought ten mo acres o land."

During Silas' absence, the ever present and unstoppable white man violates his home and wife. He rages; violence and killing result. As Sarah flees into the woods after a white man, her violator, is killed, she thinks what Wright must have thought as the world mistreated him, "Yes, killing of white men by black men and killing of black men by white men went on in spite of the hope of white bright days and the desire of dark black nights and the long gladness of green cornfields in summer and the deep dream of sleepy grey skies in winter."

The Northern white publishers that brought Wright to print could not fully accept the truth of the entire message concerning race that he put on the page. His autobiography, "Black Boy," published in 1945, ends with Wright leaving the South for Chicago. Ending the story here leaves a reader with the impression that Wright was to enjoy an enlightened and freer life in the North.

It was not until 1977, long after Wright's 1961 death in France, that the final section of his autobiography debuted as "American Hunger." Expurgated by his editors in 1945, Wright chronicled the racism surrounding him in the North that eventually caused him to leave America for Europe. Wright's truth, again against stereotype, was uncomfortable for the Northern elite - the North, as well as the South, had unresolved issues with race. Finally, in 1991, Wright's entire autobiography, "Black Boy (American Hunger)," was brought out by The Library of America in the completely restored version as Wright originally envisioned. Sadly, Wright's entire text brings us to the understanding that the Land of the Free was not quite.

Wright was always an outsider, distrustful and uncomfortable with the status quo, a man who sought through his writing the imagined ideal of equality on the other side of the bamboo jungle of human deceit and weakness.