— Pagan Spain (1957)

from others . . .

Richard Wright’s outstanding characteristics are two seemingly opposite tendencies. One is an overwhelming need for association and integration with humanity at large. The other is a tragic, highly individualized loneliness. Except that he is a Negro in 20th century America he might have been a lyric poet. Whenever he describes the life he wants for mankind he rises to great heights of lyric beauty. At the same time when he doubts that a new life can ever be achieved he writes with the same beauty but in tragic despair. Wright wants a new world; men working freely together in social relationships that not only realize a complete personality but develop every potential and result in new associations and new men altogether. He wants to share a common life, not in a regimented sense but in a free interchange of ideas and experience; a relationship which will be the blending of a common belief and a solidarity of ideals. He wants a life in which basic emotions are shared; in which common memory forms a common past; in which collective hope reflects a national future. He has a vision of life where man can reveal his destiny as man by grappling with the world and getting from it the satisfactions he feels he must have. He wants a life where man’s inmost nature and emotional capacities will be used. He has a passionate longing to belong, to be identified with the world at large; he wants the "deep satisfaction of doing a good job in common with others." He doesn’t want a society where he is separate as Negro, but one where he is just another man.

— Constance Webb, "Notes preliminary to a full study of the work of Richard Wright"
(privately published, 1946)

So far only Wright has positively revealed the state of mind of a people bursting with energy, untroubled by feudal remains or a feudal past, soaked to the bone in traditions of individual freedom and free association—traditions constantly held before them as the basis of their civilization, yet utterly unrealized in the face of automation and the threat of atomic annihilation.

— Constance Webb, Richard Wright: A Biography (1968)

I knew Richard Wright very well indeed. I may have mentioned this to some of you. Dick fancied himself as a cook. He would cook rice and chicken or something in some Southern way and say, "Come over, I’m going to cook today." I used to eat it. But he was a remarkable man. One day I went to the country to spend a weekend with him. He had gone to the country to spend the summer. I came into the house and he showed me twenty-five books on a shelf. He said, "Look here, Nello, you see those books there? They are by Kierkegaard." I said, "Yes, he’s very popular these days." He says, "I am not concerned about his popularity. I want to tell you something. Everything that he writes in those books, I knew before I had them." I never spoke to him about it after. I knew what he meant to tell me.

Kierkegaard is one of the great writers of today. He is one of the men who, during the last twenty or thirty years, modern civilization has recognized as a man whose writings express the modern temperament and the modern personality. And Dick assured me that he was reading Kierkegaard because everything he read in Kierkegaard he had known before. What he was telling me was that he was a black man in the United States and that gave him an insight into what today is the universal opinion and attitude of the modern personality. I believe that is a matter that is not only black studies, but is white studies too. I believe that that is some form of study which is open to any university: Federal City College, Harvard, etc. It is not an ethnic matter. I knew Wright well enough to know that he meant it. I didn’t ask him much because I thought he meant me to understand something. And I understood it. I didn’t have to ask him about that. What there was in Dick’s life, what there was in the experience of a black man in the United States in the 1930s that made him understand everything that Kierkegaard had written before he had read it and the things that made Kierkegaard the famous writer that he is today? That is something that I believe has to be studied.

— C.L.R. James, "Black Studies and the Contemporary Student" (1969)

Richard went to Paris in 1946, when I was 22, he was 38. Now, it took me a long time; I had to get to be much older to realize something. I didn't realize it that day at all. I was not born in Mississippi; I was born in New York. And I did not leave Mississippi to go to Chicago. And endure all that. I was much too young to realize what I was looking at really. But, that's a journey. To go from Mississippi to Chicago to New York to Paris in 38 years is amazing. You might as well have walked all that distance, it's almost that remarkable.

— James Baldwin on Richard Wright (Yale University, 2 November 1983)

Wright's desire to criticise and experiment with Western philosophy can itself be read as a modernist violation of the literary codes and expectations surrounding Negro literature which his own work had helped to establish. The Outsider was condemned for these transgressive ambitions. Some critics attacked Wright’s misguided experimenting with intellectual traditions outside his actual experience and cited the text as the proof that his creative powers were in decline. Others argued that his gifts as a storyteller had been effectively smothered by his philosophical erudition. These points have been echoed by more recent critical voices. Michel Fabre, whose sympathetic biography of Wright contains a detailed summary of all the contemporary reviews of the book, criticised its didactic, "professorial" aspects and suggested that it lacked a "coherent symbolism." Charles Davis dismissed the book as "essentially an intriguing philosophical exercise, and, from a political different angle, Amiri Baraka described Wright’s "aspirant intellectualism" as his "undoing" and his political outlook in exile as "petit Bourgeois individualism." To varying degrees, these mistaken verdicts on the book endorse a view of Wright in Paris as a remote and deracinated writer. He was, this argument runs, led astray from the realistic and naturalistic styles of fiction to which his experiences in the segregated South gave rise by the heady influences of friends like Sartre and others like Blanchot, Mannoni, and Bataille, whose inappropriately cosmopolitan outlooks poured their corrosive influences on his precious and authentic Negro sensibility. For many African-American critics it seems that Wright’s most attractive face was the one James Baldwin had recognised immediately as that of a "Mississippi Picanniny." The question of why this side of Wright should be the most appealing deserves to be answered at length. There is a further suggestion, shared by both those who exalt and those who have execrated Wright as a protest writer, that he should have been content to remain confined within the intellectual ghetto to which Negro literary expression is still too frequently consigned. His desires—to escape the ideological and cultural legacies of Americanism; to learn the philosophical languages of literary and philosophical modernism even if only to demonstrate the commonplace nature of their truths; and to seek complex answers to the questions which racial and national identities could only obscure—all point to the enduring value of his radical view of modernity for the contemporary analyst of the black diaspora.

— Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993)

(compiled by Ralph Dumain, 6 November 2001)

The Richard Wright Connection