Volume 48, Number 17 · November 1, 2001
The Black American Tragedy
By Darryl Pinckney
Richard Wright: The Life and Times
by Hazel Rowley
Henry Holt, 626 pp., $35.00
There hadn't been anything in African-American literature to match the power of the slave narratives, it seemed, until Richard Wright published his collection of four long stories about racial violence in the South, Uncle Tom's Children (1938). In an autobiographical sketch that serves as a preface to the 1940 edition, Wright describes how in 1927, when he was eighteen years old, he found the courage to ask a white man at the place where he then worked if he could use his library card. As a Roman Catholic in the Protestant South, the man was perhaps sympathetic to a black youth wanting to visit the segregated public library. Armed with a library card, Wright penned a note that read, 'Please let this nigger boy have the following books,' and signed the white man's name. Wright had not heard of the slave narratives any more than the slaves who could read and write had likely heard of Prometheus. However, like the fugitive slaves whose literacy was their freedom, Wright dared to reenact the theft of fire.
Review, 7607 words
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