Richard Wright: The Life and Times

I came across this book while basically just browsing many different topics. I had read "Black Boy" and "Native Son" many, many years ago, and had kind of lumped them in with books by other black authors like "Invisible Man" and "Go Tell It on the Mountain". However, having fortunately had my consciousness raised significantly since the late 60's, I decided to read this biography - there was another biography by Margaret Walker, a former friend of Wright's, but it seemed a little bitter and so possibly not as objective. I noted right away this was what I call a "two bookmark" book - one for the text and one for the footnotes at the back (I much prefer footnotes at the bottom of the page but realize this is sometimes too awkward and voluminous). The story evolved of a man whose life somewhat overlapped with my own, beginning with his wretched and impoverished childhood in Mississippi, spent mostly with his mother and brother after his father left and started another family. Richard's family was incredibly poor, in a poor black section of a poor town in the poor state of Mississippi. Other adjectives for Mississippi at that time, and for years to come, spring to mind, like "brutal", "racist to the nth degree", "lynching addicted", "determined to maintain a questionable (and certainly not enviable) "white way of life" by harsh infliction of Jim Crow laws. However, the young Richard Wright had great artistic intelligence, as well as an exceptionally mind, and a dream for his life from which he would not waver. He could no longer live in a State where his inferiors were seen to be his superiors. He moved to Chicago ("up North") with an aunt while in his teens and was disappointed and horrified by many of the conditions he found there. There were minimally more opportunities for Negroes (as they were called at that time, also "coloreds") and "race-mixing", while widely frowned upon, was accepted in certain circles. Richard was introduced into the Communist Party, and thus began a decades old love-hate relationship with communism. Yes, he got many good opportunities to exercise his writing abilities through the Party's many literary outlets, but he resented its stifling nature and in-fighting. Eventually, he felt he had been duped by the Party and he also felt he could no longer tolerate the obvious infiltration by the FBI and CIA, who were beginning their paroxysms of anti-Communist hysteria at that time, wasting millions of tax-payer dollars scrutinizing and harassing ordinary and innocent citizens, particularly those involved in the arts and in civil rights. This hysteria, of course, culminated in the insanely megalomaniacal frenzy known as "The McCarthy Era", after the fixated, parapolitical, ranting Senator who gave this era its name. He also progressed through work he did under the auspices of the WPA. He had some close writer friends and developed close friendships with his agent and his publisher, and lived a fairly social life (

Why has it taken a half-century for a really good writer to produce a biography of Richard Wright? It had not seemed "natural" until Hazel Rowley's new book.Far beyond crippling "racial," political, and professional cliches, Rowley has crafted easily the most comprehensive, insightful and balanced life of Wright. Her prose and understanding are unaffectedly live and clear. Her feel for Wright's accomplishment, the range of the man's life and times is superb! Her book is an enriching pleasure that ought finally to compel honest recognition of this unique American genius.

Many biographies have been written about Richard Wright but this remarkable book gives you a fresh perspective on this man who turned the publishing world upside down with his book Native Son. Unlike the other books written about him, The Life and Times focuses on the personal life of Wright and how over the years he developed as a writer. Rowley takes us to his home state of Mississippi where we meet Richard Wright as a boy. Raised in a fundamentalist religious family in the midst of poverty, Wright was a true outsider who was not understood by his family or friends. His migration to the north (Chicago) unfolds a new world for him where his writing abilities are recognized and nurtured. You see a Richard Wright who embraces individualism and won't allow the Communist Party or any other organization to dictate to him how to write. As time goes on Wright takes the step of permanently leaving the United States by going to France. It is there that he finds a freedom never felt before in America. I enjoyed this book and was surprised about many facts concerning his personal life and writing career. Wright's psychological development and philosophical stances are intriguing. At times he is an outspoken voice against racism but ends up making compromises in his work and personal life. Towards the end of his life, Wright becomes suspicious of those around him. He alienates himself from his family and friends. Rowley shows us the complexities and humanity of a man who went from poverty to fame and then on a downward spiral into spiritual poverty. What was it that made this man tick? The author does an outstanding job in answering that question and putting him in perspective of his day and time. This is an outstanding book that deserves to be in the libraries of every reader.

Richard Wright is a major American author and, as such, deserves a major biography. Up until now, this has not happened.Sure, there have been previous attempts. Friends (Constance Webb), enemies (Margaret Walker), and scholars (Michel Fabre) have all had their turn, but only Hazel Rowley's account, RICHARD WRIGHT: THE LIFE AND TIMES, can be considered definitive.The fact that Wright is the subject of a major book in the 21st century is in itself marvelous. Too often, Wright has been dismissed since his death in 1960 by critics, readers, and other writers. That a major publishing house (Henry Holt and Company) would even put out Rowley's work is a testament to the revival of Wright in literary circles.And Rowley has provided us with a wonderfully balanced account. She recaps the triumphs (NATIVE SON, BLACK BOY), and is not afraid to include the faults (Wright's weakness for casual affairs and his indulgence in psychological babble in later works). What emerges is a portrait of a gifted outsider who managed success in spite of an almost crippling self-doubt.In chapter after chapter, Rowley describes not only Wright's experience; she manages to incorporate the context of the experience as well. This journalistic tactic is especially rewarding in the passages describing Wright's travels to Spain and Africa in later life (his reactions *to* those travels make sense in the narrative as well). In fact, the book's only flaw is the quick wrap-up; I would have liked to read a summary of Wright's influence, and a few lines about his family today, in the closing.But this is a small problem compared to what Rowley has achieved. Here, at last, is a clean, readable account of a neglected but nevertheless important figure in American literature. It is to be hoped that the book spurs renewed interest in the actual works of its subject.

Hazel Rowley is not happy to merely stand on biographical ground covered by notable Wright scholar Michel Fabre (great) and others (less great), and therefore succeeds in giving us the most captivatingly fresh take on one of America's most important writers. At the risk of sounding packaged, I will add my voice to the drove of reviewers who have called this book "engrossing" because it is, above all else, engrossing. I fancy myself an amateur scholar of Wright-era Paris, and can therefore assure the reader that Rowley delivers an astonishingly well researched book interspersed with delicious insights. Most notable is the very thorough and entertaining work she provides on Wright's Mississippi up-bringing and tumultuous relationshiop to all things political (notably his flirtation with American Communism which would prompt his life-long surveillance by the US government). Previous biographies relied heavily on characterizations of Wright through interviews of fellow Parisian expatriates like James Baldwin and Chester Himes who, some might suggest - never really "got" Wright. Rowley brings those relationships into sharper focus and then very astutely introduces us to a much different Wright seen through the prism of his far more revealing relationships with the women in his life - a tragic mother, domineering grandmother and aunt, wives, lovers and daughters. Rowley's unprecedented access to Wright's widow Ellen Wright reveals a certain tenderness between she and Richard Wright that I was frankly suprised to learn about. That same access lays bare some of the more treacherous acquaintances that fanned the flames of Wright's famously suspicious nature (Nelson Algren, James Baldwin). I found myself savoring this book like a dessert!